Raising Boys

Years ago, I made a choice to restrict screen time for two reasons that are complementary: I was raised without TV and Internet and have fond memories of a play-filled childhood, whereas my husband was raised on excessive TV and video games and feels he missed out on childhood. We opted not to start down that path with our kids, aware that it is harder to claw back technology than avoid introducing it in the first place.

The biggest difference between our house and those with abundant screen-based entertainment options is the noise level. It’s always loud in our house. It started when the boys were small, shrieking with glee as they jumped off the couch into heaps of cushions, racing their Plasma cars from one end of the house to the other, and knocking over towers of wooden blocks.

It stayed loud as they grew. Now, they stampede up and down the stairs. They talk loudly, argue fiercely, blast music. They yell while playing basketball and doing backflips on the trampoline. They drop weights in the garage. They laugh uproariously at jokes. They are big, boisterous, bubbling with energy. Sometimes it feels like I’m living with three baby elephants, but I’ve grown to love the chaos.

By contrast, I have visited homes that are eerily silent, where motionless little boys are tucked into corners with iPads on their knees, headphones over their ears, and older boys are invisible, playing video games in their rooms. Parents lament that they themselves are exhausted and busy, that screens are useful babysitters, that online is “where all their friends are.” This is a very real dilemma that I’ve grappled with. My sons’ friends log onto Roblox and Fortnite after school and ask them to “meet” there, but I say no. It’s not easy, and it adds to my already overfull plate, but I feel I need to close off the online world in order for them to have higher-quality offline experiences.

Introducing screens to my kids’ lives could tame the uproar somewhat, but I don’t want to do that. It would feel like an artificial suppression of energy that needs to be released. Plus, there is growing evidence of boys’ decline in real-world engagement, much of which appears to be induced by screens.

Jonathan Haidt describes it in The Anxious Generation as a “push-pull” effect, with many boys and young men feeling “pushed” out of an inhospitable society that makes them feel useless, purposeless, and adrift, while simultaneously “pulling” them into a tantalizing virtual world that offers the agency-building activities they crave, like competing, exploring, mastering skills, and playing at war. Video games and pornography offer a temporary escape, but are often insufficient replacements for in-person social interaction and friendships.

The tech takeover extends to school. The emphasis on sedentary, screen-based learning is at odds with their need for play, movement, and their innate restlessness. Recess is short and severely restricted. Last year, my littlest son came home sobbing because he was not allowed to “pick up snow.” Johann Hari writes in Stolen Focus that “we have a school system right now that is so narrow that it makes a lot of kids (especially boys, I think) feel that they aren’t good at anything. Their experience of school is constantly being made to feel incompetent.”

The fixation on “safetyism”, where safety becomes a sacred value that trumps everything else, has hit boys a lot harder than girls. Boys tend to play more roughly than girls. They push the limits of their physical bodies in ways that horrify their mothers, to whom their actions often make no sense at all! There are exceptions, but based on my experience of raising three sons, and helping raise my two younger brothers who were born when I was a preteen, as well as working as a live-in nanny for two families with boys, I will venture to say that many boys live each day with a rough-and-tumble vigor that can be utterly baffling to girls and women.

Playing at the Edge of Comfort

How do I see my role as their mother? First, I need to protect them from the dark, hollow thrills of the Internet by curbing entertainment-based screen time. Second, I have a responsibility to acknowledge their propensity for adventure and risk-taking, and to help them find healthy outlets for those urges.

I let my sons do things that might seem shocking to some, but were normal in the past. Hari quotes writer Neale Donald Walsch, who said, “Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.” I intervene minimally in their play, striving to be a “lifeguard parent” and using the 17-second rule to determine if they truly need help. My goal is to keep them “as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible,” guided by Norwegian researcher Ellen Sandseter’s categories of risky play. These include playing at great heights, at high speeds, with dangerous tools, near dangerous elements, with the possibility of getting lost, in a rough-and-tumble way, with impact, and vicariously.

This means that my kids climb trees and jump off appallingly high cliffs into deep water. (Yes, we go to places where it’s OK to do this, and no, I don’t watch.) They go mountain biking and skiing. They spend time in, on, and around water (we live in a rural lake region) and beg their uncles to take them snowmobiling and jet-skiing. In the summer, we go camping and canoe tripping, build fires, go on hikes, and send them to a screen-free camp for one week.

These opportunities are not limited to rural life. I’ve met parents in urban areas who find opportunities for risky play at amazing adventure playgrounds, public pools with high diving boards, climbing gyms, bouldering areas, skate parks, BMX tracks, toboggan hills, trampoline parks, outdoor zip lines, and ropes courses. Even just letting a kid walk to school is a great way to get them moving outside without supervision; so is exploring parks and nature trails. I don’t think it matters where you live; opportunities for formative free play can be found almost everywhere.

My boys are allowed to use sharp kitchen knives and carry pocket knives to whittle pointy sticks. This got me in trouble when my then-four-year-old took his pocket knife to daycare, launching an investigation by the Children’s Aid Society. One of my kids is interested in survival skills, so he joined his dad and grandpa on a deer hunt last fall. He went through an archery phase, practicing on a homemade target in the backyard, and joined the Canadian Air Cadets, which takes him target shooting. (The US equivalent is the Civil Air Patrol.)

I have tried to find analog substitutes for emotions they would get from video games. That’s why I let them have Nerf guns, which I resisted initially, then relented after realizing they’re far less insidious than video games (and quite safe if the kids all wear goggles or some other kind of eye protection). Their Nerf battles are complex, involving delineation of territory, negotiation, and teamwork. They end in a state of elated exhaustion, a sign of high-quality play. Their Nerf play has not led to a fetishization of guns; if anything, their desire to stage battles has subsided with age.

The boys play Dungeons and Dragons with their father, a fantasy role-playing game that takes place in person, gathered around a table, for hours on end. It’s a wonderful opportunity for male bonding and strategizing on a shared adventure that sounds like it’s straight out of Lord of the Rings. Many larger urban schools offer official D&D clubs.

We watch movies, usually on a laptop, but sometimes driving 40 minutes to the nearest cinema. The boys love action-packed films, like Mission Impossible and Dune. Watching these is a shared activity, it exposes them to an impressive art form, and the narrative arc or character development gives them plenty to think about.

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Boys vs. Girls

Last winter, my oldest son traveled to a race with his nordic ski team. He stayed in a hotel room with several boys, and they played cards each night. At one point, a female teammate poked her head in and said, “You’re so lucky. All the girls in my room are on their phones.”

I don’t have daughters, so I will never know how different it is to raise girls than boys (I doubt my approach would change much), but other parents tell me their daughters struggle to keep off their phones, seemingly more than boys. I hear that most girls at my kids’ high school are on phones during lunch, whereas boys tend to play sports or walk downtown for pizza.

My son says it would be convenient to have Snapchat, but then he tells me about a friend who only speaks to his girlfriend on Snapchat and can’t approach her in person. “It’s the most awkward thing in the world!” he says, recognizing the crutch that phones can become. Thankfully, his friends don’t make a big deal out of the fact that he doesn’t have a phone or social media. Instead, he texts from a desktop computer and calls from our land line. He plays music on an old Wi-Fi-only phone. He has a school-issued laptop for email. I’ll buy him a basic phone this year. He’s not entirely disconnected from the world; there’s just more friction than if it lived in his pocket.

Three Takeaways

Every family with boys is different and needs to find what works for them, but I will offer some general practical advice based on years of research, conversations with other parents of sons, and my personal experience.

First, I’d generally suggest steering clear of video games. While Haidt’s research suggests that video games are less harmful for boys than social media is for girls, they can distract from other more formative experiences. It is easy for a harmless hobby to spiral quickly into a full-blown obsession that pushes everything else out of the way. (ScreenStrong’s Melanie Hempe writes compellingly about her son’s video game addiction.) There may be some cases where gaming can be supportive of a kid’s social development, but remember that it is more valuable to do it in a group, rather than on your own.

Second, try to find ways to give boys something to be proud of. Help them to discover high-quality leisure activities that, to paraphrase author Cal Newport, are active, not passive; develop skills to produce valuable things in a physical world (like cooking or baking, doing carpentry, making art, playing an instrument); and require real-world social interactions. I think often of Newport’s message that you must “fix your analog life first,” if you hope to resist the siren call of devices. This applies to kids. They need things to do, in the form of physical, loose-part toys at home, organized activities or sports outside the home, and abundant free time to play independently.

Johann Hari writes in Stolen Focus that having a sense of mastery is “a basic human psychological need.” When kids feel good at something, they can focus on it, but if they feel incompetent and useless (as many boys do), their attention will “shrivel like a salted snail.” Help your sons to find hobbies and build skills.

Third, make your home a fun place to hang out. Many boys are starved for places to socialize, which is why so many withdraw to the Internet. Richard Reeves, a Brookings scholar and author, says “bro time matters.” We must be intentional about male friendship, which is often regarded as more suspicious than female friendship: “We have to create spaces that are not going to create themselves.” I have tried to do this by installing a modest garage gym, a second-hand trampoline, a slackline, a basketball net, and a hammock. My sons’ friends come over all the time. (They also eat whatever food is lying around.)

You can guide boys to put down their phones when they’re together—and most are receptive. Many kids are thrilled to hang out with other kids who aren’t on their phones. One parent who drives four boys home from basketball practice gives them a minute to scroll before putting the devices away for the drive. Initial resistance gave way to delight, with the boys now singing songs and teasing each other good-naturedly. The parent says, “It’s been a joy to watch, and I think they look forward to it.”

Raising sons continues to challenge me every day, while filling my life with more energy, humor, and joy than I ever could have predicted. If you’re a lucky boy mom like me, hold those boys close. They seem rebellious and rambunctious, but they’re also sweet, sensitive, and vulnerable—and they need our guidance more than ever.