The answer to that question, I’m assuming, depends a lot of what season of life you & your boys are in:
If your boys are preschool/early elementary school age, you’re probably spending a lot of time trying to juggle work and childcare — trying to figure out how the $*%* you’re supposed to work & care for/supervise/have fun with your kids (without going broke or losing your mind.)
If your boys are a bit older & into sports — well, you’re probably spending your weekend traveling from tournament to tournament and spending a lot of time sitting on the sidelines or in the stands. (And spending a lot of money at the concession stand!)
If your boys are high school aged, they’re either self-motivated to get up early and go work out at the gym (for sports) OR they’re staying in bed ‘til far closer to noon (or past noon) than you’d like. They’re spending a lot more time with friends, video games, and their phone than with you, and you’re worrying/trying to figure out how to balance their autonomy against your need/desire to know what they’re doing (and to keep them safe.)
Whatever season of life you’re in, summer with boys can be challenging. Here are a few Building Boys resources that may help:
“There were about 1.67 times more published research papers on female puberty than male puberty between 1990 and 2016”
“Better understanding the relationship between puberty timing and disease risk in men may enhance identification and prevention of chronic illnesses.”
“More than half of American male deaths in 2023 were considered premature…The leading causes of these early deaths include heart disease, cancer, and diabetes — conditions that have been tied to the timing of puberty.”
“Expanding what is known about male puberty provides more evidence for how best to meet the needs of boys.”
“The study, conducted by Male Allies UK, surveyed 1,000 boys aged 12 to 16 and found that a hefty 85% of them have spoken to a chatbot, 20% know a peer who is ‘dating’ an AI chatbot, and over a quarter prefer the attention and connection of a bot partner to a real, human-to-human relationship.”
“AI validates, affirms, never tires, never pushes back. For an adolescent boy still assembling a sense of self, that kind of frictionless attention can feel like intimacy”
“It is not hard to understand why a young man finds comfort in a technology specifically engineered to welcome him, never judge him, and appear to understand him, especially when the human voices in his life are either demanding something impossible or dismissing him entirely”
“Reading is wonderful, of course. But it is one of many worthwhile ways to spend time, and not every intelligent, curious, capable person will choose to spend hours reading books for pleasure.”
“Millions of boys who rarely crack open a novel still grow up to be productive, thoughtful, capable men.”
“Black boys are not problems to fix. They are gifts to nurture and pour into.”
“Many Black boys enter schools already carrying labels: ‘too loud,’ ‘too difficult,’ ‘too far behind,’ or ‘unmotivated.’”
“Black boys deserve to learn in environments where they see themselves reflected positively in books, leadership, conversations, and curriculum. They have to know their history matters, their voice matters, and their identity is not something that needs to be erased to succeed.”
“We are no longer talking about boys simply feeling inadequate online. We are talking about boys beginning to view chemical enhancement as a rational solution to inadequacy.”
“The modern teenage boy is quietly being taught that his body is a project requiring constant optimization, and that failure to maximize it reflects laziness, weakness, or lack of discipline.”
“Unlike traditional eating disorders, male body-image pathology often hides behind socially celebrated behaviors: discipline, gym culture, clean eating, supplementation, self-improvement, and ‘grindset’ masculinity.”
“Teenagers are increasingly purchasing injectable research chemicals through gray-market suppliers, anonymous Telegram channels, influencer affiliate links, overseas manufacturers, and ‘research only’ websites”
Middle school is a confusing time — for boys AND their parents!
It’s a time when boys pull away & pivot their attention to their peers. A time when grades, academic achievement, and organization seem particularly important (to parents) & not-at-all interesting (or important) to most boys. A time when misunderstanding between boys & parents can spark unnecessary conflicts that can consume the whole household with fire, metaphorically-speaking.
Avoiding conflict with your son during these years is next to impossible. (And also, not desirable. Boys learn a lot via conflict.) But understanding what’s normal, what’s developmental, and what boys actually need during this stage can help parents respond with more calm, confidence, and perspective.
This is what Pexels thinks raising middle schools boys looks like. This is not what it looks like in most families, most of the time. It sure didn’t in mine!
That’s one of the reasons I was excited to connect with Jennifer & Corey, the parents behind Raising Middle School Boys, a Substack focused specifically on navigating these often-messy years. I asked them about what people misunderstand about middle school boys, what parents most need to know, and what boys themselves need most from the adults in their lives.
Here are their answers:
What do you think most people get wrong — or misunderstand — about middle school boys?
RMSB: The most common mistake is treating behavior as the story rather than reading it as information. A boy who is sullen, checked out, or picking fights is not a problem to be managed. He is communicating something for which he does not yet have the words. When adults respond to the behavior without curiosity about what is underneath it, they can miss the boy entirely.
The other thing people consistently underestimate is how much middle school boys still need the adults in their lives. They perform indifference remarkably well. But beneath the shrugs and the one-word answers is a kid who is watching closely to see who stays steady, who notices, and who keeps showing up even when he makes it challenging or downright difficult. The need for connection does not disappear at eleven. It just starts to go underground.
Help us understand what’s normal and typical for this age. What does typical 6th grade boy behavior look like at home and at school? How about 8th grade?
RMSB: A sixth-grade boy is often still straddling two worlds. He may still want to build things, roughhouse, and sit close to you on the couch, and then catch himself and reassemble into someone a bit more careful. He is beginning to feel the pull of peer approval intensely, but his identity is still porous enough that he has not fully committed to a social performance yet. At school, he is adjusting to a more complex social landscape, more teachers, more hallways, more chances to be seen or left out. At home, he may be louder, hungrier, and more emotionally reactive than he was a year ago. That is not regression. That is puberty arriving, and it is right on schedule.
By eighth grade, the performance is more polished. He has a clearer sense of where he fits socially, and he protects that position. He may be more private, quicker to shut down a conversation that feels too close, and more invested in his peer relationships than in anything happening at home. This can feel like distance, and sometimes it is. But it is also development. An eighth grader who is pulling toward independence while still gravitating toward you in unfamiliar situations is doing exactly what he is supposed to be doing. The goal at this stage is not closeness on your terms; it is staying available on his.
We know middle school is a time of transition for boys, but we don’t often talk about it as a time of transition for parents. What transitions will parents face during their boys’ middle school years?
RMSB: The hardest one, and the one parents usually seem least prepared for, is the shift from being needed to being chosen. When boys are small, your presence is simply assumed. Middle school is when they start deciding how much of you they want in the room. That recalibration is disorienting even when you know it is healthy.
Parents are also forced to grieve versions of their son that are quietly disappearing. The kid who wanted to tell you everything. The one who reached for your hand. He is not gone, but he is changing, and there is real loss in that even when the change is good. Parents who make room for that grief, rather than rushing past it, tend to handle the transition more gracefully. We will speak from our own experience here. Not long ago, we stumbled across an old video: our son at three years old, walking into Disney World, one small hand wrapped around his dad’s. Watching it stopped us both. That little voice. Those wide, completely unguarded eyes. That version of our boy is not coming back, and sitting with that truth for a moment actually hurt in a way that surprised us.
We loved him fiercely then, and we love the man he has become just as fiercely now. He is 22, a college graduate, and getting married in 45 days. By any measure, he is exactly who you hope your child becomes. And still, that little person belongs to a chapter that is finished, and there is real grief in that, even when everything is going beautifully. Perhaps especially when everything is going beautifully.
If you have felt that too, you are not being sentimental. You are being human. That grief is real, it is valid, and it takes as long as it takes.
And then there is the identity reckoning that happens in the adults themselves. Raising a boy through early adolescence has a way of surfacing your own unresolved experiences from that age: who you were in the hallway, where you fit, what you wish someone had said to you. That is not a problem. It is actually an opportunity, if you are paying attention.
In your experience, what do middle school boys most need from their parents?
RMSB: Presence that does not require a performance. Boys at this age are performing constantly, for their peers, for their teachers, sometimes even for themselves. Home should be the place where the performance is not required. That means tolerating the silence without filling it, staying in the room when things are hard, and making it clear through consistent action that your interest in him is not conditional on him being easy or impressive or okay.
They also need adults who are honest. Boys are watching to see whether the values you talk about are the ones you actually live by. They notice the gap between what you say and what you do much faster than most parents realize. Modeling accountability, including apologizing when you have gotten it wrong, teaches more than any conversation about integrity ever could.
And they need someone who is not afraid of this stage. Boys can feel when the adults around them are anxious or overwhelmed by their development. A parent who can stay curious rather than alarmed, who treats the hard moments as information rather than emergencies, gives a boy permission to be exactly where he is.
What do parents of middle school boys most need?
RMSB: Permission to be imperfect and reassurance that imperfect is enough. The research on this is actually quite comforting: what predicts good outcomes for boys is not precision parenting. It is consistent, warm, responsive presence over time. A parent who keeps showing up, who repairs after conflict, who stays curious about their son even when he is difficult, is doing the most important work there is. You do not have to get every moment right. You have to keep coming back.
Parents also need community. Raising a middle school boy can feel isolating, particularly when you are not sure whether what you are experiencing is normal. (It almost always is.) Finding other adults who are in the same season, who can offer a reality check or simply the comfort of shared experience, matters more than most parenting books do.
And honestly? They need someone to remind them to enjoy it. Not every moment of it, because some of it is genuinely hard. But the ordinary Tuesday evenings, the long stories that take twice as long as they should, the late-night conversations that start about nothing and end up meaning something. Those moments are happening right now, and they will not look exactly like this again.
What’s one thing you wish every parent of a middle school boy understood sooner?
RMSB: That your relationship with him is the intervention. Not the right consequences, not the right strategy, not the right script for the hard conversation. The relationship itself, maintained through consistency and warmth and a willingness to repair when it gets strained, is the most powerful thing you have. Every major protective factor in the research on adolescent boys points back to the same place: a consistent adult who notices, who stays, and who makes it clear through action that the boy matters. You are that adult. That is not nothing. That is everything.
“Two decades ago, a landmark study showed that the brains of kids with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) take longer to mature. But new research suggests that this result, which was based on brain scans from a few hundred children, was a mirage.”
“What was thought to be a hallmark of the ADHD brain, the study found, instead reflects average sex differences in how the brains of boys and girls develop over childhood.”
“The behaviors associated with looksmaxxing look suspiciously like symptoms of eating disorders and body dysmorphia”
“Despite the widespread recognition that eating disorder-related content is harmful to mental and physical health, looksmaxxing has yet to be addressed by social media platform policies. Instead, prominent looksmaxxers are treated as internet celebrities”
“Whenever a well-meaning acquaintance or stranger asked whether I was having a boy or a girl, I didn’t even try to hide my displeasure: ‘A boy. Ugh.’”
“So much of my gender disappointment revolved around the chaotic scenes I’d witnessed involving young boys… My hormonal brain flashed to visions of a raucous toddler who wouldn’t stop climbing the walls while my best friend’s daughter calmly played with dolls”
“It turns out that my gender disappointment didn’t have anything to do with the baby in question. My baby is wonderful. All babies are wonderful. It’s us parents who have shit to work through.”
“the fear I heard echoed in almost every conversation: I don’t know what to do with a boy.”
“The stakes of raising your son wrong in this world are intimidatingly high…Unless we lock our sons in a room without an internet connection, they are sure to encounter misogynistic, racist messaging disguised as male empowerment on a daily basis.”
“The scientists…looked specifically at players of shooter games…[&] found that shooter game players were also more likely to hold inclusive values regarding gender roles and equality compared to the general public.”
“Across every model tested, the authors found no evidence that playing video games broadly corresponds to an increase in exclusionary values.”
Despite a recent misleading headline published by Parents, which claims “Nearly 1 in 3 Young Boys Report Suicidal Thoughts” and then promises to tell parents what they need to know.
Here’s what you really need to know: Whoever wrote and okayed that headline misinterpreted or misrepresented the data. The data shows that 1 in 3 boys under age 14 who contacted the Crisis Text line reported suicidal thoughts.
When, where, and how you get your information about boys matters, because there are those who will use info about boys for their own gain and purposes. They will twist facts and statistics to support their goals & leave out contradictory information.
When, where, and how you get your information about boys matters
There are also those who don’t know better. Who “parachuted” in to the topic of boys from somewhere else and simply don’t have a deep understanding of the history and context. Who don’t understand the baseline well enough to even see, much less question, a fact or statistic that doesn’t align with previous knowledge or on-the-ground-reality.
(I have some sympathy for this group — and for consumers of the work they produce — because I know that journalism budgets have been slashed in recent years. I know that the market is in the midst of yet another tremendous transformation and that there are far fewer journalists, fact checkers, and editors working today than even a fewer years ago — and that they are often expected to do more for less.)
Be Careful Who You Trust About Boys
The bottom line is this: You can’t trust everything you see or hear about boys. (Or about anything, actually. It’s 2026.) We’re in an era where the most extreme claims get the most attention, which is why you see & hear a whole lot more people talking about a gender war than pointing out the massive points of agreement and progress between men and women. (Hat tip to Richard V Reeves!)
Be skeptical of scary claims and headlines. There may well be some truth to them, but it’s healthy to approach with a degree of skepticism. Look not only at what they say but at what they don’t say as well. Measure what you read against what you know: Does it line up with what you see with your son, in your community? With other things you’ve read and heard on the same topic? Look too at their sources of evidence. Who are they citing? Who, if anyone, has been left out of the conversation?
When looking for information about boys, consider the source. Look for people who:
Have been working in “boy space” for a while
Work closely with or have personal experience with boys
Collaborate with and cite the work of others
Bad info about boys won’t help any of us — and it sure won’t help our boys. So, let’s uplift some trusted sources of info. Who are your go-to sources for boy information? Drop a comment and share your favorites.
“In almost every public debate about boys, whether it be attainment gaps, misogyny or youth violence, teachers are positioned as society’s key defence… But it assumes that schools possess the frameworks, training, and relational bandwidth to meet these challenges. Crucially, it also assumes that we truly understand the daily dynamics between teachers and working‑class boys. The reality is that we don’t.”
“Rather than a focus on what boys need to achieve at school, there’s a risk that [boys] are seen, both within schools and by the general public, as perpetrators of misogyny and violent behaviour in waiting”
“Around 90% of teachers reported that they consistently modelled dignity and respect in the classroom. But when speaking with the boys, often they described the respect they received from teachers as conditional, inconsistent or transactional.”
“Boys… described significant emotional needs which were often unmet, limited safe spaces to discuss feelings, and punitive responses to distress.”
“Our research showed that when reflective, safe, judgement-free conversations occurred, the boys and young men responded positively. It demonstrates that working‑class boys engage, reflect and thrive in educational contexts where they feel respected, listened to and understood.”
“He asked to walk to his Ma-Maw’s house three blocks away. We’ve practiced crossing streets, and he knows the way.”
“A second officer was called to the scene…They started asking him…’Do you know your address? Your phone number?’ He lied and said no—for reasons that later became clear…[later] He said, ‘I didn’t want you or Daddy to be arrested.’”
“We generally understand that the harmful actions of some individuals should not be used to indict entire identities, demographics, or belief systems wholesale…Yet discussions around masculinity increasingly drift toward precisely that kind of framing: treating masculinity not as something that can be guided positively or negatively, but as something inherently suspect in itself.”
“If we genuinely want to prevent radicalisation, we need to understand why some boys become vulnerable to it in the first place.”
“Most boys are not looking for hatred. We’re looking for direction. For identity. For belonging. For guidance.”
“I hate that everything falls to us parents: to manage tech and AI, because the government won’t regulate it; to manage disengagement, even though the design of schooling fails many kids; to manage preparing them for a workforce we can’t even begin to understand, because everything is changing.”
“Adolescents are neuro-biologically wired to resist parental guidance; it’s part of the necessary separation they are performing at that age. Struggling teens may resist it even more.”
Jessica Sabatini is worried about her six-year-old’s success in school. Not because he has trouble learning but primarily, she says, because he’s a boy.
That’s the opening of a CBC article published this week — and based on the response so far, it’s clear that Jessica isn’t alone. And her concerns are not misplaced.
When I reached out to Jessica this week, she told me, “I was surprised by the feedback that I have been receiving over this and how it is resonating with people.”
I’m not surprised. I’ve been in Jessica’s shoes. I published Why Schools are Failing Our Boys in the Washington Post in 2015. (The first lines: “My eight-year-old is struggling in school. Again.”) It wasn’t the first — or the last article — I wrote about boys’ struggles in school.
Developmentally, five- and six-year-old boys (and even 15- and 16-year-odl boys) aren’t as mature as their female counterparts. That’s one big reason why boys struggle so much in early elementary schools — their brains and bodies simply aren’t mature enough to easily do the things we ask of them. We set them up for failure by placing them in environments that don’t fit their developmental needs. And then, we blame and shame them. Is it any wonder, then, that so many boys start hating school?
Please note: I’m not blaming you, parents. And I’m not blaming educators. We’re all doing the best we can, with the information and resources we have. Ideally, we’ll take a long hard look at our systems and schools and redesign them to better meet the needs of boys, families, and educators.
That, however, will take time. You can’t wait for reform. You need to take action now. And I’m here to tell you that it is possible to protect your son’s love of learning even if school is challenge.
I did it, & so did Suzy Shaw, a mom of 2 adult sons and host of the Mothers of Boys Survival Guide podcast. Suzy invited me onto her podcast awhile ago, and we ended up talking about boys & elementary school. The episode just went live this week:
So tell me: How’s school going for your son right now?
Is he thriving, struggling, tolerating it, resisting it, or somewhere in between? Hit reply and tell me what you’re seeing. I read every response, and your stories help shape what I write next.
Here’s to building boys!
Jen
P.S. Our Boy Mom Circle starts on Wednesday — and yes, we’ll likely end up talking about school at some point. If you & your son are struggling, our Circle is a place you can admit that & get real support.
“She encourages him to join the boys, but he says he doesn’t like to play cops and robbers.”
“He doesn’t seem to be shy about approaching for play when the type of play interests him.”
“How do I help him navigate school and boyhood?”
“around 5 years old is when kids really begin to respond to society’s gender biases: For example, boys, knowing they’ll be praised for displaying strength, might lean into the roughhousing your son dislikes.”
“Wherever recess occurs, a variety of experiences should be offered, including a choice of quiet time or social interaction in addition to active free play and group activities”
“A quality recess will reestablish mental equilibrium and focus, a need of every student, kindergarten through 12th grade, every day. As such, recess should be a protected block in the daily schedule”
“Recess should not be withheld for academic or punitive reasons.”
“Boys who would never in a million years walk into an after-school program will happily jump on a Discord server to play Valorant with their friends.”
“If we want to engage them, we have to go where they are and build spaces they actually want to be in.”
“I really thought that in-person relationship building would always trump online connections. The youth we work with have proven me wrong.”
“Boys are genuinely hungry to talk about what’s going on in their lives. They just need to know that the people on the other end actually care about them and know how to help.”
“Teenage boys, aware that any message could be screenshotted or that a clumsy approach could go viral, may be reluctant to take romantic risks. Meeting one’s sexual needs has never been easier online, while pursuing real relationships feels more perilous.”
“Gaming is often treated as if it were one thing. But a cooperative game with friends is not the same as a solo game with addictive features.”
“Over the last 15 years, boys and young men more than doubled their average time per week spent gaming… For most teenagers, the perceived benefits outweigh the harms”
