Boys Deserve Better Than the Command to 'Be a Man'
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
July 9, 2026
Adam Stanaland’s (2025) Scientific American essay, “Our Narrow View of Masculinity Is Hurting Boys,” offers an important intervention in a moment when masculinity is being weaponized in our politics, schools, media, and homes.
His argument is both simple and profound: masculinity itself is not “toxic.” What harms boys is the pressure to perform a narrow, rigid, emotionally constricted version of masculinity—one that tells them not to cry, not to appear vulnerable, not to be “feminine,” not to ask for help, and not to become anything less than dominant.
This matters deeply for educators and parents. Thankfully, research offers helpful evidence-based insights into how gender norms, social pressure, and rigid expectations shape boys’ development, identity, and behavior (Orenstein, 2020; Rudman & Glick, 2021; Stanaland et al., 2021; Stanaland et al., 2024).
In schools, boys are often socialized into silence long before they are invited into self-knowledge. They learn that tenderness is weakness, that anger is more acceptable than grief, and that care work is somehow beneath them. They absorb lessons about manhood not only from parents and peers, but from classrooms, sports culture, social media, churches, political leaders, and the larger society.
Stanaland’s point is that these pressures do not produce strong boys. They produce fragile ones—boys who may feel compelled to prove their manhood through aggression, domination, homophobia, sexism, emotional withdrawal, or contempt for anything coded as feminine. His research with colleagues similarly finds that adolescent boys can respond aggressively when their masculinity feels threatened, especially when they already feel pressure to be conventionally “manly.”
This is not just a family issue. It is a public issue.
When boys are taught that power matters more than connection, that dominance matters more than empathy, and that vulnerability is shameful, democracy itself suffers. A democratic society requires people who can listen, reflect, collaborate, repair harm, and care for others. These are not “soft” skills. They are civic capacities.
This is why the current political attack on so-called “gender ideology” is so harmful—and, frankly, so nonsensical. The phrase itself is vague by design. It turns serious scholarship, honest classroom discussion, and students’ lived experiences into a caricature. It suggests that talking about gender somehow imposes an ideology, when in fact silence about gender is itself ideological.
The command to “be a man” is gender ideology.
The shaming of boys for crying is gender ideology.
The insistence that girls be compliant and boys be dominant is gender ideology.
The erasure of LGBTQ+ students and families is gender ideology.
What opponents call “gender ideology” is often simply the attempt to give young people language for understanding themselves, one another, and the unequal world they are inheriting.
The irony is that our society has rightly encouraged girls to enter domains historically coded as masculine—science, leadership, politics, law, medicine, business, athletics. But we have done far less to encourage boys to enter domains coded as feminine: teaching, nursing, caregiving, early childhood education, social work, emotional labor, and peacemaking. We tell girls they can be anything, but too often tell boys they must be one thing.
That is not liberation. It is another cage.
For communities of color, this conversation is especially layered. Black and Brown boys are already too often read through racist lenses of threat, discipline, criminality, and deficit. They do not need more pressure to perform hardness in order to survive. They need schools and communities that recognize their full humanity—their brilliance, tenderness, humor, creativity, grief, anger, cultural knowledge, and capacity for care.
This is where culturally sustaining education matters. Ethnic Studies, gender studies, restorative practices, critical pedagogy, and social-emotional learning do not “weaken” young people. They give them language for their lives. They help students understand how power works, how identities are formed, how harm is reproduced, and how people can choose otherwise.
In today’s culture wars, however, these very forms of education are under attack. The same politics that censor race, gender, sexuality, and history also narrows the emotional and moral vocabulary available to young people. It tells boys that strength means control, that freedom means domination, and that care is weakness. It calls this “tradition,” but it is really a refusal to let children become fully human.
We should reject this.
Boys deserve a wider horizon. They deserve to know that courage can look like telling the truth. Strength can look like asking for help. Leadership can look like listening. Manhood can include tenderness. And masculinity, when freely chosen and rooted in care, responsibility, humility, and justice, need not be toxic at all.
Stanaland’s essay reminds us that the work before us is not to shame boys or men. It is to free them—and all of us—from scripts that are too small for the lives our children deserve.
The question for parents, educators, and policymakers is not simply, “What kind of men are we raising?”
The deeper question is: “What kind of human beings are we allowing boys to become?”
References
Stanaland, A. (2025, March 10). Our narrow view of masculinity is hurting boys. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-narrow-view-of-masculinity-is-hurting-boys/
Stanaland, A., Gaither, S. E., Gassman-Pines, A., Galvez-Cepeda, D., & Cimpian, A. (2024). Adolescent boys’ aggressive responses to perceived threats to their gender typicality. Developmental Science. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39007941/
Stanaland, A., Gaither, S. E., & Gassman-Pines, A. (2021). The role of social pressure in eliciting men’s aggressive cognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33504285/
Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (2021). The social psychology of gender: How power and intimacy shape gender relations (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Orenstein, P. (2020). Boys & sex: Young men on hookups, love, porn, consent, and navigating the new masculinity. Harper.
Our Narrow View of Masculinity Is Hurting Boys
Masculinity isn’t “toxic” by itself, but the strain boys feel from society and parents to meet unrealistic expectations is
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This question I pose to my students is based on research I and others did a couple of years ago, looking at how pervasive social norms, especially current views of masculinity, can shape people often in unideal ways. As I’ve noted before in Scientific American, many boys and men report feeling pressured to be stereotypically masculine. This means, for example, pressure to be tough (physical and emotionally), able to fix things and in positions of power – what we call “hegemonic masculinity.” These pressure are often rooted in fundamentally human needs, such as men’s desire to provide for their families, or simply to belong and accepted by others.
Importantly, we’ve found that pressure to be a certain kind of masculine leads to aggressive thoughts and feelings, especially among adolescent boys and young adult men who are in throes of forming an identity. To me, it’s not masculinity that is inherently bad or toxic. Rather, problems arise when rigid masculinity is pressured onto boys and men.
In psychology, pressure is the antithesis of autonomy—or the basic human need to act in line with one’s true self. This is why acting out manliness for pressured reasons leads to “fragile” masculine identities. Instead of a healthy identity rooted in authenticity and autonomy, fragility stems from an insecure need for external validation. As a result, these boys and men feel compelled to prove their manhood to others through stereotypically masculine means. We see the results in the disproportionate rates of men’s gun violence, homophobia, sexual aggression, political bigotry and even anti-environmental behavior, compared to women.
Against this, parents are a critical part of how boys see themselves, and how they understand masculinity. With the rise of a “masculinity” that is increasingly pressuring, parents can help boys develop more expansive identities. This is not about demonizing one idea of masculinity, or boys and men as group, but reducing the pressure to be a narrowly defined man. Genuine and compassionate versions of masculinity exist, and it’s okay for boys to take those paths. Getting there means conversation, modeling desired behavior, and reckoning with our own definitions of what a man is. But it matters, because this pressure to conform to narrow norms is hurting boys.
While we were collecting data on boys’ aggression, we also surveyed their parents, asking them to agree or disagree with statements relating to current beliefs about masculinity. Some of these items had to do with relatively benign beliefs—like, whether men should be handy—and some were more consequential, such as beliefs about homophobia and gender inequality.
We found that parents’ beliefs about hegemonic masculinity related to pressure their sons reported to be stereotypically masculine; that is, parents who simply believed that men should have status and power over others had sons (some as young as 10) who reported feeling pressured to be manly. It’s no surprise, then, that these were the boys who responded aggressively when we challenged their manhood, especially when they were already in the throes of puberty.
These results tell us there is a consequence to raising boys in a man’s world: living up to these expectations is stressing them out. We know this because they report being bullied, or shut out of peer groups. They tell us they have low self-esteem. In their book on the psychology of gender relations between women and men, Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick propose that we are powerfully shaped by how societies are structured—with men most often at the top and women (and people of other genders) situated below them. For proof, look no further than government and business in the U.S. where only 27 percent of federal lawmakers, 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and 0 percent of presidents are women.
Immediately, we think about what these disparities mean for girls, and we should, but to the extent that girls receive messages that they can’t get to the top, many boys are hearing that they must get to the top. It’s certainly a double-edged sword. Boys and men are afforded power and privilege, yet many are also pressured to earn and maintain it.
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We’ve made great strides in inspiring girls to achieve just as well as boys (and even better)—though there is still much work to do here—yet we’ve so far failed to encourage boys to aspire toward culturally feminized work and communal careers in fields such as nursing, child care and early-childhood education. Instead, in many capitalist cultures across the world, we continue to push and pressure our boys away from anything remotely feminine—away from the innate nurturing and caring tendencies that they demonstrate in childhood—and toward the pinnacles of what we (as societies) have defined as success.
Redefining masculinity starts with you. Not every expression or experiment in masculinity will be safe for your child to pursue, especially in certain areas of the world. (For example, we found that parents in conservative parts of the U.S. put significant pressure on their sons to be masculine, which may be rooted in a fear of openly challenging masculinity norms.) But, as psychologist Onnie Rogers notes, we can encourage boys to “run with intentionality in the opposite direction, against the grain, and more importantly, toward [their] full humanity,” and this means that ideas around masculinity are worth talking about.
As you talk to, play with, observe and guide your sons along their paths, here are some ideas to consider, what I think of as “four Rs” to get you started:
Realize that you can have these hard conversations; that you can intervene and guide. Although you might feel like your sons will develop in ways beyond your control, you do have a significant effect on your children’s core beliefs, values and worldviews. Psychologist Sylvia Perry recently wrote in this very column about how children and young adults can handle hard conversations about race. They can understand complex ideas, histories and perspectives about gender, too.
Reconsider the messages boys are sent (and not sent), both explicitly and implicitly. Children learn about gender through many pathways—summed up as direct teaching, experiencing and modeling. You might try to directly teach your boys to combat gender stereotypes and even explicitly encourage them to take part in “feminine” activities; but arguably more important is what they learn by watching you and what they experience in their own worlds. What’s vital is that boys be given the space to develop apart from pressures to be masculine or feminine—nothing is inherently wrong with boys liking to play with trucks, and pressuring boys to do more “girly” things against their inclinations defeats the purpose.
Resist in the sense of equipping boys to resist messages about who they should and shouldn’t be. Even the best schoolteachers sometimes fall back on antiquated tropes like gendering pink versus blue pencils. If your son wants to use the pink pencil, why the hell shouldn’t he? A new and exciting area of research is looking at how easy it is for boys to actively resist masculinity norms and what benefits they may get from this.
Recognize that the way that society is right now isn’t how it has to be. You could, for instance, tell boys that even though there has never been a woman U.S. president, anyone can be president, regardless of their gender. Highlight women who are leading companies and, possibly more importantly, men who excel in HEED occupations (health care, early education and domestic roles).
These won’t be easy. It won’t be a onetime thing. But the sooner we can start dismantling gender gaps at all levels of society, the sooner we’ll see boys (and girls) less pressured to meet outdated expectations—and more fulfilled in finding authenticity.
Adam Stanaland is an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Richmond. He received a joint Ph.D. in psychology and public policy from Duke University, after which he completed postdoctoral training at New York University. Broadly, his research explores the interplay between societal structures and social norms, such as how political and economic systems influence norms, as well as how norms and beliefs shape group-level behavior.More by Adam Stanaland
