When Mike Richard was a teenager, Dad was the one who took him to his hockey and lacrosse games, but when he had “issues,” he turned to Mom.
“We’d have sit-down chats,” says the 24-year-old, who remembers asking his mom for advice when a high-school relationship was coming to an end.
“She had all the right things to say.”
Although Richard credits both his parents for bringing him up right, his mom might be the one to thank for nurturing his sensitivity and communication skills through those awkward adolescent years.
His new wife might want to thank her, too.
Richard, who is training as an actuary at a Toronto insurance company, got married three weeks ago.
New research suggests boys who are close to their mothers are better at shunning the macho stereotypes that interfere with their relationships — and often their mental health.
In a longitudinal study of 426 boys in middle schools in New York, developmental psychologist Carlos Santos found that many Grade 6 boys were able to resist or reject gender norms that say boys should be physically tough, unemotional and independent.
But as the same boys got older, entering Grades 7 and 8 and inching closer to high school, more of them bought into those same stereotypes.
The ones who still resisted them, however, were less likely to be depressed and more likely to have close relationships with their mothers, but not necessarily with their fathers.
“The extent to which boys felt they were supported by their mothers was significantly associated, almost across the board, with their ability to resist these macho stereotypes over the course of middle school,” Santos says.
Although he doesn’t have any data that explains why this is the case, Santos thinks boys who are close to their mothers might be using that relationship as a model for others.
It’s more than just a matter of becoming good husband material.
“Resistance to these stereotypes carry real consequences to boys’ mental health and their well-being,” Santos says.
A well-established body of research backs this up.
Studies have shown, for example, that grown men who think it’s important to be autonomous are less likely to ask for medical help when they need it.
In Santos’ study, the boys who thought it was OK to share their feelings and lean on others also had better mental health, as measured by the Children’s Depression Inventory.
Niobe Way, a developmental psychologist from New York University who mentored Santos during his dissertation, says teenage boys learn to adhere to gender stereotypes to the detriment of their social and emotional well-being.
For her upcoming book Deep Secrets: Boys, Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, Way followed 200 boys for more than five years.
She was awed by the intimate friendships the boys described during their younger teenage years.
In a sentence that could be uttered by a therapist, a 15-year-old named Marcus said, “sometimes you need to spill your heart out to somebody and if there’s nobody there, then you gonna keep it inside, then you will have anger.”
But things started to change around age 16. Vulnerability and sadness became anger and frustration.
Way says 16 is the age when boys start to get the message that they need grow up and be a man.
And in our culture, male maturity is defined by independence, not by having supportive close relationships.
Way’s theory is that mothers foster their sons’ resistance to stereotypes of masculinity.
Women have been raised in a culture in which they are allowed to be emotionally and socially expressive, and tend to mother in the same way, she says.
Fathers tend to perpetuate masculine stereotypes with more ferocity than their partners, although mothers do it, too — out of fear that their sons will be called mama’s boys, or girlish, needy or gay.
Andrea O’Reilly, director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement and the mother of a 26-year-old son, is all too aware of this.
She edited a book published in 2001 called Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity and the Struggle to Raise our Sons, one of the few books on the topic, particularly at that time.
She says that even if mothers are challenging patriarchy, they’re still raising their sons in a patriarchal society where they are expected to be macho, strong and independent.
Nicole Baute writes for the Toronto Star
Other writers such as Olga Silverstein and William Pollack have argued that mothers actually begin to pull away from their sons when they reach a certain age because they are afraid of emasculating them as they approach adulthood. They say men are deeply wounded by this, and that it may drive them toward reckless behaviour.
O’Reilly, who has a close relationship with her adult son (they have travelled together to 15 countries), isn’t afraid to be frank.
“If you’re raising a feminist son, you are alienating him from his male peer group,” she says. “You are turning him into a misfit. But it’s a good thing. And I’m hoping if enough mothers do it, they won’t be misfits.”
Richard says he’s always been bigger and stronger than most of his friends, and that they’ve never teased him about being sensitive or close to his mom.
He says he wouldn’t want to hang out with someone who would do that, anyway.
(Toronto Star)