Feminist parenting won't fix our ‘boys-will-be-boys’ culture
If you go anywhere children also go, you know the tone of voice I’m talking about: Female. Sprightly but defeated. A little pleading.
When you turn to see the owner of this plaintive voice, you almost always see a mom. She’s usually speaking to a toddler, preschooler or early elementary age son, trying to make him "stop it!"
Stop crashing into the grocery shelves. Stop splashing water on the littler kid at the pool. Stop kicking the table. Stop refusing to put on a coat and get going.
And usually, the boy isn’t listening. He has her attention, but she doesn’t have his.
Progressive parenting experts and their adherents tell us that we should not, in this moment, reach for the old adage that “boys will be boys.” Clearly, the little guy in question has been taught to act like this, they say. It is our culture of so-called "toxic masculinity" that has made him disposed to rough and rowdy play and noncompliance with parental admonitions.
How right they are — but not in the way they think.
Yes, toxic masculinity and the justification that “boys will be boys” is out there among the online extreme right, excusing the inexcusable among the kinds of misogynistic adult men who idolize Andrew Tate.
But the specter of parents not in thrall to elite progressivism who weaponize the old saying “boys will be boys” to excuse the more pedestrian bad behavior of their young sons is mostly a straw man. Indeed, by their own admission, self-professed feminist mothers tend to deploy this very justification to explain away their sons’ antics.
Why is this? Because it is mothers in thrall to today’s educational and therapeutic establishments — and their nonsensical, Rousseauian misunderstanding of human nature — who are unwilling or unable to exert the necessary authority to make their boys behave.
Boys are indeed boys. Nature, not socialization, makes them less agreeable and more aggressive than girls, on average. So, they require parents and institutions willing to do the necessary work to make them into the other-regarding people we all want to see.
Thus, raising boys well requires a traditional kind of authority that is not collaborative and does not assume natural willingness to please.
I expect compliance from my sons because I am an adult and they are children — not because they are naturally disposed to compliance. Like most boys, they aren’t. Yet when I talk, they mostly listen, because they know I mean it and that obedience is a requirement, not an option.
I do not allow that weary, ingratiating tone to cross my lips that I hear so often on the playground in my deep-blue neighborhood. I am fortunate to know many similarly authoritative moms and female teachers to whom that patronizing vocal register is equally alien. Like most women throughout history, we don’t excuse and enable boys’ misbehavior.
Ironically enough, when it comes to raising sons, undue focus on women’s empowerment seems to have ushered in the exact opposite of its intent. The same women who worry most about male entitlement are the ones actively cultivating it through their own maternal weakness. Raising men who respect and listen to women begins with raising boys who respect and listen to their mothers.
If a boy over the age of two-and-a-half is in the supermarket with his mother and crashing into things despite her remonstrations, it is because he believes that he, not she, is in charge. And he believes that because it’s true. His mom is no doubt performing, when it comes to him, the very docility and meekness that she ostensibly rejects as a female norm. Perhaps she needs to find some “girl-boss” energy in relation to her own son.
Take it from those of us who know, without fanfare, that we simply are the bosses of our children — no cutesy modifier necessary. We find our kids a lot less stress and a lot more fun to be around.
And sure, boys will still be boys — but well-behaved ones.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.
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