Can a program teaching empathy help boys resist the perils of masculinity?
‘Why does everyone always tell me to shut up?’ A new book looks at how boys are raised and the messages society sends them
In spring 2016, I visited an elementary school in a small city just north of Toronto. I was there to sit in on a session of NextGenMen, an after-school program for boys in grades 7 and 8 that’s run by a trio of friends in their twenties. They dreamed up the program a year earlier and funded it with a small seed grant for initiatives devoted to men’s and boys’ mental health. Over 10 weekly sessions, NextGenMen uses sports, team-building exercises and group check-ins to help boys become more emotionally literate, empathetic and self-aware.
Jermal Alleyne runs the after-school programs. The bell to announce the end of the school day has just rung and while the boys burn off their energy playing basketball, he and I chat at the side of the gym.
In trainers and glasses, Alleyne is jockish and thoughtful, a former chess club kid as well as a competitive athlete. Before launching NextGenMen, he earned a degree in public health and worked as a case manager for a youth organization. While we talk, the boys circle him, passing him a ball, asking him to join in the game.
In developing NextGenMen, Alleyne and Jake Stika, who have been best friends since university, along with another friend, Jason Tan De Bibiana, imagined the kind of program they wished they’d had when they were in middle school, one that delved into issues that boys find hard to discuss, including peer pressure, sadness, crushes, friendships and jealousy.
“It had to be fun,” he tells me. “It couldn’t feel like homework. And it had to be safe. Safe for them to talk about their feelings and safe for them to air their opinions without being shot down or made fun of.”
After basketball, he gathers the 10 boys into a circle and opens the session with a check-in. The boys aren’t particularly forthcoming — they mention a birthday party one of the boys had, video games they like. Then one boy mentions spending the weekend with his dad, and a couple of the other boys perk up. “That’s great,” they tell him. “Cool.” (I later find out the boy’s parents are divorced, and he doesn’t see his dad that often, so the visit is a big deal, and the other boys know it.)
Meanwhile, a new kid to the school repeatedly gets up, wanders toward the far end of the gym and chases the younger brother and sister of a skinny boy in glasses who is also in the group. Alleyne keeps patiently shepherding him back to the circle, until everyone has had their turn at sharing.
Then Alleyne divides them into groups of three and four to do a short exercise about gender stereotypes. He tells them to make two lists of words, one describing women and girls, the other describing men and boys. The boy who’s just seen his dad senses a trap. “Are you asking for stereotypes? Or real descriptions, like, based in reality?” Alleyne tells them just to write down what comes to mind.
When the group reconvenes, the list for women includes the following: smart, loving, joyful, mother, weak, emotional, beautiful, hot (this gets snickers), arty, nice, happy, sensitive. For men: athletic, strong, tough, army, gangs, money, tuxedo, guns, brave, fearless, creative. Alleyne takes them through an examination of why they ascribed particular qualities to one gender or the other. When he asks them if they know any males who are, for instance, sensitive, a chatty, curlyhaired kid shoots up his hand. “Me! I’m really sensitive.”
The gender analysis doesn’t last long. The little brother and sister of the skinny kid pile into his lap and demand a snack. The sensitive kid tells a rambling and confusing story about evolution and male hunters and female gatherers. When after several minutes he’s interrupted by another boy, a slouchy kid who has barely spoken since the exercise began, the sensitive boy wails, “Why does everyone always tell me to shut up all the time?”
The session seems to be falling to pieces, but then one boy steps in to referee, asking them politely to stop bugging each other, so everyone can get a snack. Alleyne wraps up the discussion and closes the session by asking each boy to say something nice about another one. The compliments are sweetly earnest and specific: “You tried hard today.” “You’ve improved a lot in basketball.” “I think you’re the best League of Legends player I know.” “You’re always a good friend.”
Alleyne says that in the “culture of being a man,” there’s little room for authentic conversations and connections, because there’s such a fear of looking weak or being judged, or else concerned they’ll say or do the wrong thing. “They’re not bad,” he tells me. “They’re just trying to figure things out. And I try to meet them, wherever they’re at, with empathy.”
Several boys in the group are obviously popular. One wears immaculate Vans skater shoes, and the kids tease him, admiringly, about his fashion sense. He’s close to three other boys, who together form an almost impenetrable clique. Lying on the floor filling out their male/ female word lists, they lean into each other’s shoulders and knees. Other guys seem to lack the confidence of the popular boys. (Later, one of those outsiders tells me his best friend moved away a couple years ago, and he hasn’t made a real friend since.)
Alleyne says he sees boys like these try to connect with other boys and fail. At one point, the new boy sneaks up behind the stylish kid, the smallest in the group, and picks him up. It’s an awkward, unwelcome overture. The short kid laughs it off, but he’s clearly uncomfortable.
What’s tough for a lot of boys, Alleyne explains, is that when they attempt a connection and it doesn’t work, they may never try again. It’s too hard for them to be vulnerable, to put themselves out there and be rejected. He says that even with him, if a boy ventures to confide something personal and he misses the moment, because he’s distracted or busy, it can take weeks before that boy shares something personal again.
“By the time boys get to 10 or 11, it’s already ingrained in them that men figure out things on their own,” he says. “The message is that needing help means you’re a failure as a man. So, if you work up to the courage to reach out, and it doesn’t get picked up on, some boys, if they haven’t seen healthy models of masculinity, will just shut down.”
This becomes a negative feedback loop: in their desire for male approval, boys learn to become guarded and withholding, which then prevents them from actually bonding with each other. Niobe Way is a psychologist at New York University whose research focuses on the emotional lives of young men. As she explains this dynamic in her 2013 book, Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, “Boys’ problems at their very root are not related to their biology or their psychology but to a culture that refuses to see boys (and men, girls and women) as more than a set of gender, and in the case of boys of color, racial stereotypes. Given the nature of these stereotypes, the very social and emotional skills that are necessary for boys to thrive are not fostered.”
This sounds bleak, but it’s actually cause for hope. Since boys have the potential for empathy, connection, kindness and affection, then it’s merely a matter of figuring out how to encourage those qualities. Way says that deep, intimate friendships are one of the ways that boys can resist the conventions of masculinity. To illustrate how, she tells me over the phone about a talk she gave a couple years ago to a group of some150 boys at a middle school in New York City.
She shared quotes from Deep Secrets and asked them to interpret. What did they think about boys’ friendships? About an hour into the conversation, a boy came forward and told a story about wanting to be friends with another boy and being rejected. It was a small enough school that everyone knew who the other boy was. Way was surprised to see one of them opening up so publicly about having his feelings hurt.
She was even more surprised when another student asked her, “Professor, who did you write this book for?” Here’s how she describes the moment: “It totally took me off guard. And I said, ‘I wrote it for parents and teachers.’ Well, he looked at me, so irritated, and said, ‘Why didn’t you write it for us? Because we’re the ones who need to hear this because then we’d feel less alone.’ He hit it on the head. Boys don’t think their feelings are normal, they don’t get told it’s normal for a boy to feel scared, vulnerable, sad, jealous, hurt.”
Then a different boy chimed in and said, “Professor, can you tell us how to make a good friend?” Way turned the question back on the kids. “You tell me,” she said. And 150 pubescent boys spent the rest of the day talking about strategies for making and keeping good friends. “And that,” Way tells me, “is the resistance.” It may be that we don’t need to tell boys anything at all, she adds. “We might just need to start listening to them better.”
This excerpt has been adapted from Rachel Giese’s new book Boys: What it Means to
Become a Man (HarperCollins Canada, 2018).