Seeking answers on how to raise boys, Ruth Whippman turns research into a book (2024)

NEW YORK – When Ruth Whippman decided to thaw one final embryo, she was 42 years old. She and her husband had two sons – Solly, then six, and Zephy, three. Their remaining embryos all had XY chromosomes too.

As her pregnancy became visible, most people assumed she was trying for a girl. When she told them she was having a boy, people treated her “as this object of pity”, Whippman, a British-American writer, said in a recent interview from her home in Berkeley, California.

“There was this real sense that boys were somehow disappointing.”

It was 2017. Whippman, a self-described liberal feminist, was watching the #MeToo movement explode all around her. She felt as if men had become the enemy, which made bringing another one into the world a different kind of challenge from what she already faced at home with two rumbustious little boys.

But she was conflicted. “While the feminist part of me yelled, ‘Smash the patriarchy’, the mother part of me wanted to wrap the patriarchy up in its blankie and read it a story,” she writes in her new book, BoyMom.

The title of the book borrows from the social media phenomenon known as #BoyMom, a hashtag that has become a full-blown trend in recent months.

Online, #BoyMom can be a badge of honour awarded for simply surviving the amped-up high jinks of tumbling boy-tots. Or it can be a tragedy, centring on the inevitable “break-up” that must occur between mothers and sons. It can also be a send-up of itself, a parody of the “toxic boy mum” who is dangerously, proudly enmeshed with her son.

Whippman’s book is not primarily about these memes. Part memoir – she is the “boy mum” in the title – part reportage, the book hopes to give parents, including fathers, tools and information about raising boys today.

Whippman, now 50, is hardly the first person to write about boys as if they need their own operating manual. Michael Thompson’s It’s A Boy! and How To Raise A Boy by Michael Reichert have become classics of the genre.

But the birth of her third son, Abe, had sent Whippman’s two older boys into even more of a frenzy than ever: Solly turned sullen and Zephy invented a persona he called “Dino Slash”, kicking and biting without warning.

Whippman turned to parenting books for guidance, trying every strategy to improve her life at home. But nothing answered her bigger questions.

And so, she set out to find answers by reporting on the state of what she calls “impossible masculinity”.

The greatest surprise she found in her research was how much evidence there is for the relative fragility of boys as compared with girls. Premature boys are less likely to survive than premature girls, and boys are more likely to be diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder such as autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and later schizophrenia.

In addition, she found that early adverse circ*mstances, such as poverty or maternal postpartum depression, have more negative long-term effects on boys than they do girls.

She came away convinced, largely by the work of American psychologist-researcher Allan Schore, that boy babies need more care than girls, including holding, rocking and soothing, a notion she details in the book, which many readers might find startling, if not downright wrong-headed.

Professor of neuroscience Lise Eliot at Rosalind Franklin University, who is the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, pointed out that there are quantifiable differences between boys and girls. For example, boys’ brains are bigger, on average, than girls’; boys’ brains grow at a faster rate than girls’; and girls go through puberty before boys.

But there is no consensus on the question of nurture versus nature when it comes to boys and girls and to what extent each matters, Prof Eliot said. Some researchers, including her, believe that these biological differences are overstated.

“I think our expectations for boys keep getting lower as we blame everything on their supposed brain immaturity and prenatal testosterone,” she added.

Eliot argues that parents’ expectations of how girls and boys should behave are so ingrained, the fantasies of each gender beginning well before birth, that people cannot help but mould their children in these directions.

“Brain sex differences have been overhyped,” she said. “Nature exerts a tilt, but I think we are using that as a crutch. If we want boys to be more like girls, we have to treat them more like girls.”

Mr Richard Reeves, founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think-tank devoted to policy issues related to boys and men, said when it comes to academics, especially English and literacy skills, “the broad story is that boys are falling a long way behind girls”.

And the problems boys are struggling with become exacerbated with age. According to his research, men are more likely to die from so-called deaths of despair, including suicide and drug overdose.

At Allen-Stevenson School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, one of New York’s most prestigious all-boys options, “boy-ology” is a buzzword in its lexicon, referring to the collection of strategies on how, specifically, to best “meet boys where they are”. These include flexible seating arrangements, Velcro strips on desks to help with sensory input, fidget sticks and body breaks.

“Have you heard of the Man Box?” asked Ms Samara Spielberg, head of the school’s Spanish department, as she stood in front of a large LGBTQ flag the boys made with collaged squares. “It is what society tells boys and men they can be and should be. Boys don’t cry. Boys don’t show their emotions. And anything that’s outside the Man Box, you’re penalised socially.”

Professor of developmental psychology Niobe Way at New York University has seen these patterns over decades of research, describing them in her book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships And The Crisis Of Connection.

However dated they may seem, they somehow persist. She expands on these themes in her forthcoming book, Rebels With A Cause, arguing that people are trapped in “boy culture” – a toxic value system based on stereotypes of masculinity, one that has lost sight of true human connection.

This is one of Whippman’s laments too: the awkward, stilted interactions she has observed between her son and his friends. Their conversations seemed so often to stumble into silence or revolve around video games. They seemed so unlike the deep friendships she herself had growing up.

Whippman’s sons are now 13, 10 and six. Two out of the three are prescribed stimulants – national trends show that boys are roughly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls. The level of frenzy in her household has calmed down a bit, enough that she is admittedly happier.

“The whole conversation around boys is toxic from all sides,” Whippman said. “I want to give my boys and all boys different options for how to be in the world.” NYTIMES

• BoyMom (S$53.90) is available at Books Kinokuniya (str.sg/i3wu6).