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Music, hello and welcome to teenagers.
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Untangled the audio. Hug for parents going through the teenagers. I'm Rachel Richards, parenting coach, journalist, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now I've only got daughters, and we have got Susie on regularly, and she's got sons, but I do fret. I fret about the boys, and I'm so excited to have managed to get Brendan Kwiatkowski, who's a PhD and educator and researcher who specializes in the social, emotional development and wellbeing of boys and men. He's coming on the show. Hi Brendan.
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Hi Rachel. Thanks for having me
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My pleasure.
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Brendan, you're you did a PhD in education, which involved a study on the emotions, masculinities and schooling experience of Canadian boys.
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What led you down that route?
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Yeah, in hindsight, I can really see a lot of clear markers, and I'd say the main ones is that I was a high school teacher, and I think personally, the personal answer is I was always like the good boy, the good kid growing up, and I ended up just being really drawn to the students in my classroom who weren't afraid to challenge me, weren't afraid To push back, and I really liked that. I prefer that in my classroom, and those tended to be boys. Long story short, ended up doing my master's in special education, focusing on the social, emotional well being in general, and I found out that 81% of students diagnosed with emotional behavioral disorders are male, one of my favorite students, who happened to be a boy, also died from suicide in my second year teaching, and that led me to kind of caring a lot about emotional well being.
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And we know that suicide rates, they're high for teens in general, but are disproportionately higher for boys, and that often increases.
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I think one of the greatest ages is like around 50 and up for men, that their suicide rates are disproportionate compared to that of women. And so that's a major focus, impetus for this.
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But I would say, like, I really care about humans experiences, and I feel like all of humans experiences are related. There was a story that sticks out to me when I left my job teaching and told my students, hey, I'm going to focus researching boys, because I, at that time, had led a social, emotional group for grade 11 boys that were at risk, quote, unquote. And so I was gonna focus on that more. And these girls came up to me after class, but like, why are you just focusing on the boys? Don't you care about the girls? And I was like, Oh, I view these things as so interconnected that the well being of boys and men definitely impacts all the genders around and vice versa.
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And so, yeah, that is the short story as to why I researched it.
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Yeah, I feel, I feel exactly the same way. We can't have one doing well without the other. We have to, we have to bring everybody up together. You mentioned in some of your sort of socials that you say there are two stages in a boy crises. What are those stages? And how do how do we help our boys?
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Yeah, well, those are huge questions. The first one the two stages, is around the age of five and 1415, and those are heightened time periods when boys often can get disconnected from parts of themselves, the first level
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parts. What do you mean by parts of themselves?
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Sorry, yeah. So
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they get disconnected, I would say disembodied, primarily from emotional parts of themselves. So around the age of five, boys are already aware to some degree that they that's two emotions in particular are less socially acceptable, and fear and sadness. And we can look at research about parents are less likely to use emotional language when talking to their sons than compared to talking to their daughters, particularly around sad events. So like, if their daughter gets hurt, or something like that, or something was sad. Be like, oh, reflecting back using that language. Oh, that was really sad for you. And so there's less language used around certain emotions for boys growing up.
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It's also when socialization pressures, like, as soon as you start school, you're exposed to so much more gendered teaching.
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And often this happens in schools as well. I've seen it in my children's schooling, and I'm not coming across as so judgmental, but just even offhand comments of like, oh, I need a strong boy to help me with this. We have all of these biases within us that we don't, oh yeah, we don't, and that's one of the huge steps for. For for healing and change, is just becoming aware of these gender biases. Like teachers tend to associate when girls do something well. In school, they we tend to associate that with their effort. Oh, you worked really hard. Whereas for boys, teachers and adults, we tend to associate when they do something really well. We view it as part of their natural talent like, Oh, you're, you're a great mathematician, or something like that. And so that creates, uh, problems for both genders. Is because ultimately, we actually know that when you encourage children for the effort and not the outcome that actually, in the long run is is better.
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Because when boys are taught like, Oh, you are great at math, and then all sudden, they face challenges with that, then that creates more internal conflict.
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And so that's one of the reasons why there's a higher dropout rate of men in universities, as opposed to girls and women in universities, is because some men have gone through their schooling experiences succeeding, and university can be quite more challenging. So when they face challenges, they can be like, Oh, I'm just not cut up for this. Whereas women tend to go into university expecting it to be hard. And so when they face that, they don't get as deterred by it. That's so that's fascinating, one whole level of it. But then I would say the main the most difficult time for boys growing up is around the transition to high school, because that is when they feel like they need to wear the mask of masculinity the most, which means they need to be the least authentic versions of themselves, primarily in order to fit in. And you have switching to a larger school, so there's more social dynamics.
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And I'd say social pressures, masculine pressures, are such a good measure for how popular you can be. And so those are going to be exacerbated when the social standing is uncertain, and the early years of high school social standing is so uncertain, there's so much posturing. And so that's also though developmentally, it's when teenagers of any gender are more likely to become peer oriented rather than parent oriented, which is you start caring more about what your peers think than what your parents think. So that's developmentally appropriate and normal, but there is a lack of guidance for teenage boys navigating those years. Because what happens is that, yeah, guidance changes as the parent, but most often it's like parents view boys as easier than girls to raise, and the main reason is during those teenage years, they view boys as less emotional, and part of the reason is because, yeah, they're intentionally doing that. And so it might seem easier, but they definitely do not need less guidance. In fact, they need more attuned guidance, and I think there's a paucity of that.
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Wow. And that's so true. So many people say, oh, you know, I'd much rather have a boy because they're much less emotional. They're much easier.
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And what you're saying is that that's not necessary. That's because they are having to mask to cope.
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I would argue that most research would actually say that boys, on general tend to be more emotional, and what the type of research that this depicts is like the physical reactions to emotions in their bodies. So this is been done with adults and has been done with kids, is that, on average, boys tend to have more physiological responses to emotional distress than than girls do. So they have I won't get into too much of the details about like, one study of listening to a recording of a crying baby through a speaker on one level, what they had is that these kids had the opportunity in this study to, like, turn off the speaker or not, but they were told that there's a Baby in another room. You go play in this room, there's a baby monitor, and when they heard the baby crying, boys were way more likely to turn off the speaker, which at one level looks like, Oh, they're just being so inconsiderate and not even caring with the baby. Like tuning the baby out. But what they have, the heart rate monitors check their check their stress levels, they actually experienced way more distress from the baby crying than the girls did, and part of that is because maybe the girls actually had agency. They actually felt like they tried to respond and get the adult into it. And so there's all these dynamics that play. Emotions are a human experience, and men and boys often get cut off from part of that human experience at a younger age, and girls get disembodied and disconnected.
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Can be in the same ways, but also are socialized to get disconnected in other ways. So yeah, I would say there's two boy crises at age five and 14, as well as there's also girl crises that happens at. Up around the age of 1112,
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fascinating.
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And I did see that you had talked about masculinity vaccinations. Can you? Can you give us a bit of an understanding of what you mean by that? Yeah. So
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if anyone's back is up, please hear me. Oh, I
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love it. Sounds great.
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Well, there's one of my favorite parenting experts, is Dr Becky Kennedy, I'm not sure if you're familiar with good inside and she, I believe, came up with this concept of emotional vaccinations, which is basically giving your child a little preview of something that might end up being very emotionally dysregulated for that child, so that when they go through it, they kind of know what to anticipate. And so I think that we need to give these so called masculinity vaccinations, which is giving boys a little taste or sense of what is to come ahead of the next developmental stage of boyhood or manhood. Like I think this can actually happen with men nearing their retirement, because a lot of men have put invested so much into their roles as producers for a company or for society, and they have to have a different identity. But going back to teenagers, is that one of the main things that I would say is so important to understanding raising teenage boys is the amount of loneliness that they feel. And this does not necessarily mean the level of friendships that they have, as Dr Brene Brown says the opposite of belonging is actually fitting in. And I would say teenage boys is a Well, girls too, like any gender teenagers, it's like it's an epitome of fitting in and trying to find your own identity. How much do you conform to other people around you? How much can you be resilient and stay true to yourself, essentially? And so counteracting teenage boys loneliness through guidance and also preparing them for this is super important. And I'll use one example from my research that speaks to this. So importantly about this masculine vaccination is that puberty has to be a huge topic about this, and not just the physical changes that happen with puberty, but also how this affects your emotions, how it impacts your intimate relationships that happen more in the high school years as well is that one of the boys I talked to all my research was with grade 12, boys around the ages of 17 to 19, and one of the boys had just left the hospital after being hospitalized from a suicide attempt, and he said that this actually he didn't realize At the time he was depressed, but it started around grade eight and nine, and he was like, oh, maybe this is just puberty. And he just kept it silent the whole time because, like, I don't know what's going on. Maybe this is normal, and obviously it's not. And he didn't realize until he's in hospital, like, oh, there's actually this isn't a normal experience to be going through.
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And that is the epitome. And maybe one of the saddest things of talking to all these boys is that they feel alone in their experience, that no one, no other teenage boy, or no one else understands or is going through what they experience.
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Almost all the boys I talked to wanted someone out. Wanted more emotionally deep relationships with the other boys around them, but none of them felt, or very few of them felt that the other boys also felt that.
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Yeah, I did an episode about male friendships and the research I'd read it, which came out of America. I forgot the name of the the person who did it, but it was that, you know, before the kind of 14 year old, you know that, and that man, that boy crisis, that you're talking about, the relationships are more like something out of love story.
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They're very, very affectionate, very, you know, they, they'll talk about the grow and, and then, then they, they hit with a man box and, and they just feel like they can't express themselves, and they pull away.
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Unless they're really solidly in the man box, they start to pull away, and because they don't want to be marked out as somebody who's too weak or emotional or be subjected to bullying. Is that the same as what you're talking about there?
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It's definitely related.
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I think you're probably talking about Dr naobi way, who does great research about that.
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Yes, and I would say, Yeah, where you see, where you see little islands of where teenage boys and adult men can still maintain that closeness, that physical affection often sports, is a chance for them to actually be that kind of physical with each other, like wrestling and stuff like that. Like, if you go in this high school hallways, like boys are touching each other a lot, like, often, like, through bumping each other.
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Like, there's weird, not weird in a judgmental way, but there are ways in which they get physical affection they're not like. As girls like going to the bathroom together, generally speaking, unless they're doing that to go vape, which definitely does happen. But you see different cultures, or subcultures that allows us to be more acceptable, so getting drunk and then having more emotional conversations when you're drunk, or things like that, as a way to have exceptions to the man box, where you have to project of being more emotionally restricted and suppressed and tough. So
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just coming back to that fantastic idea about, you know, an inoculation against masculinity, or not against it, just just to preparing, how would you how would a parent? What? Because you said, yes, it's, it's not just about the physical changes of puberty, which some parents can find awkward anyway, but it's, you know, this emotional preparedness. Can you kind of roleplay or explain to us how a parent would actually go about that?
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Yeah, absolutely. So a major topic. Could be around loneliness, about being like, maybe when they're in middle school, elementary school, about to go to high school, it's always good to start with, like, a question to get them thinking about it. Like, hey, how do you think going to a bigger school, like your friends circle? Like, how do you think that's going to change? Get them to think about it and do you already feel the pressure that you have to be less of yourself, that you have to try to fit in? And do you think that's maybe going to increase, like, when you're at a bigger school, all these other things? And then it's always helpful, in my opinion, like to kind of hide behind the research, so that you don't have to be like, Hey, I think this is what you're going to experience.
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But be like, maybe you've read my research and you're like, hey, there's actually a lot of teenage boys that feel like these next couple years, they feel like it's one of the hardest because they're always trying to fit in, and they feel like no one else understands that, and so they often keep things inside themselves. And I just want to let you know you might experience that you might not. We don't want to overly fear monger and like assume the worst is going to happen to them, but we also want to prepare them for the realities that there's going to be social posturing, fitting fitting in, and your start to establish that like I would love to talk to you about these things, and if you know from my research, there's three main reasons why teenage boys stop sharing and talking about their emotions with others. One is fear of judgment, being seen as weak. The second, which was tied in my research for the main reasons, was fear of being a burden. They felt like their parents were already dealing with enough stuff that they didn't want to add more things. Divorce was often a huge one in here. Divorce was really impactful for a lot of these boys about their emotional suppression, because it's like, Okay, I gotta take care of others. My younger siblings, maybe, or Yeah, mom and dad are going through a lot. And then the third reason had nothing to do with masculinity. The first two did, according to boys own admissions, but the third one was just they had been emotionally close to someone in the past, and that had ended somewhat unexpectedly, abruptly, traumatically, and so they didn't want to get close to someone again, because it hurt enough losing that the first time, they don't want to go through that again. So knowing those reasons can be great ammunition, I guess, to you, oh, sorry, not ammunition in the sense of using against but to equip yourself with knowledge as a parent of what things these boys might experience. So if your son is quite open in sharing with you, you can have all this conversation like, Hey, I know a lot of boys feel like they don't want to burden their parents with their problems, and just be like, I take responsibility like you. Your role is not to parent me like I care about what's going on. I might be impacted by what you're going on, but I'm going to try my hardest, like you don't have the caretake for me. That's why I'm here for you. And so obviously, I think almost all psychology minded things for how to increase the well being. If we're trying to help our children, it is looking at ourselves. And I know a lot of boys like my parents would freak out, and we have to honor that that their parents might freak out from actually hearing the experience. So as parents, we have to face with the reality, are we actually okay with our children and teenagers being honest with us as to what's going on in our lives? And have a lot of moms reach out be especially around like sex or pornography or issues like that, being like, I don't know what it's like from a male's experience, and so it does require, I guess, some level of knowledge, and an ideal situation. You have any parents involved that are mutually working together on this, because a lot of the emotional labor, labor or work.
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Relationships often is on the mothers and yeah, it's ideal when it can be multiple people.
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It's a close community of adults around these teenage boys.
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Yeah, mentors that you can find anywhere, that they can actually talk to, are just so helpful when it comes to boys being resilient. I mean, this is one of the tropes that constantly comes up, is this sort of sense of the problem is, if I'm too, you know, he needs to rough, he needs to toughen up. He needs to we don't want to Molly coddle our kids, you know, you want to have high expectations. But what do you think about how you can create a resilient son without falling into those old traps?
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Yeah, great question, because I would say resiliency is probably what at least is.
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One of my biggest critiques about schools right now, in at least in Canada, is that I think schools have done a great job at trying to move away from the Iron Fist approach that like, if you don't meet the standard, you're totally cut out. And then the opposite end of the spectrum is that we have such much more awareness of the social, emotional well being of teenagers than previously. And yet, I think we struggle with knowing Where's accountability, where does because resiliency isn't formed by either extreme.
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Because this is called a false attribution fallacy. Is that people who have had very tough upbringings where they were left to sink or swim. I want to just honor their experience that like you shouldn't have had to do that as a child or as a teenager. But of some people have survived that. It's kind of like survivorship bias is like they have gone through that and become resilient as a as a result. The thing is, it was not their aloneness in navigating that wasn't what made them resilient. They may became resilient in spite of that. And so that's really important to keep in mind, because we can assume that, like, oh, well, I did it. I learned it tough. I had it the tough way. These kids are too soft nowadays, and that's one extreme. The other extreme is removing all resistance, all accountability being so understanding of their context without accountability that they also don't learn resiliency that way. So resiliency is being able to guide, but also have it's being able to guide with gradual levels of autonomy for them to do things and so that they can come back to you and and if their actions impact others negatively, yes, absolutely, be accountable for that. And so the term is also often compassionate. Accountability would be what is a way to guide towards resiliency that we can't resort to the tough approach that our generations and our parents as generations were way more used to but we can't also just fold over and remove all obstacles for our children or for our teenage boys and give them endless excuses for their behaviors. Yeah, I'm
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interested in what you think about the rising number of boys who, what they call it, fail to launch. Or in the UK, we've got a rising number of what they call needs, which is not in employment, education or training. Do you have any sort of reflections on why that might be happening? I think
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there's sociological explanations, and there's just like environmental ones, of like cost of living that there's less like social media. We have so much more time kind of being socially connected, especially with strangers, and we are having a decreasing level of actual face to face interactions, or times playing.
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I think it even like goes back to even like sports, is that growing up sports, for me, it was like your different seasons of sports. It was way more common for boys to do sports.
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But now people are being pressured to, like, selectively choose at like, age 12, or sometimes even lower, but what you're committing to, and that becomes your life. So it's either like you're in the athlete world, and then maybe you have a lot of social connections that way, or or you're not. And you also have parents that are working, both of them working way more. So you have kids home alone who are maybe parented more by iPads or by social media or by just YouTube. So they're on gaming more, which is like predominantly YouTube is viewed by men, or by Yeah, by mail, a male audience, the amount of time spent on YouTube, things like that, Twitch, streaming gamings so like, there's so many different levels as to why there's a failure to launch.
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There's other theories of related to your question. About like, why is the rate of women outpacing the rate of men going to universities? Yes, and one of the sociological theories is that women are more aware socially of their internal or the biological clock, so they feel more pressure to have go to school, because they know that if they want to have a family or have kids someday, they need to kind of get that out of the way, so to speak, first. Whereas boys are less men, less in touch with that, they don't feel it in the same way. And so that could even be a contributing factor to the failure to launch because there's less pressure. Generally speaking, there is less I don't like. There's less hope and optimism growing up nowadays as well. And so that all feeds into a more nihilistic approach of like, okay, what's the point of trying really hard here? This also has to do with boy culture and socialization in high school. Is that it's not as cool in many schools and contexts to try as hard as a boy. This is very school dependent, like I did some research at an IB. I don't know if you have
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IB over, yes, international baccalaureate, yes.
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I feel like it's international I should be well known. It's interesting how the respected masculinity can look very different at that school versus a non IB school, which is like, Oh, those try hards trying too hard. Wow, aren't as cool and as accepted. Or I've done research at an art school, and it's like, Oh, interesting how that subculture is like, Oh, the musicians are like, the popular ones, and the artists are, there's all these ways that we have hierarchies. Yes,
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yes. Show me your show me your five best friends, and I'll show you who you're going to be that got that kind of stuff. Um, talking about being online. You have, I haven't read it yet, but you have resources on your website to help parents and teachers who are talking to kids about Andrew Tate, and I've done an entire thing about the manosphere, where I researched the various different strands that go into it, because Andrew Tate is only just one bit of that. What? What are your thoughts about why boys are attracted to it, and how parents should manage that, manage that kind of misogyny.
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Yeah,
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for the second point, I'd say definitely, I have a more thorough explanation in my resource on my website, but I talked to boys a lot about angio Tate, or they actually asked me quite a lot about it. And I think that's the important thing to keep in mind, is they are quite curious themselves, like I after an assembly I spoke at one time, I had boys come up to me after and they're like, What do you think about Andrew Tate?
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Like they interesting. When I mentioned Andrew Tate in my talking speaking, they all like the whole audience erupted with boys being like, top G, top G, top G. So boys in a group are very different than boys one on one, and that speaks back to the fact that we tend to go to the lowest common denominator of the group. Like research has shown that, like men, tend to assume other men are more misogynistic and sexist than they are. And it's kind of like keeping up with the Joneses. Is that if we don't talk about it, if we think that everyone's this way, then no one else is actually going to end up changing that way, and we end up becoming the lowest common denominator of what we think other people are. And so Andrew Tate is really appealing one because they're just exposed to Andrew Tate. Boys that do not like Andrew Tate still see him all over the algorithm all the time, and we have to acknowledge the messiness and complexity.
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I'm very against Andrew Tate, but Andrew Tate not everything he says is completely ridiculous. And that's kind of how radicalizations can start, is that you see things that you agree with, or like, Oh, I thought he was completely out to lunch on everything that he was like the devil incarnate. But he's saying some of these things that actually have talk about personal perseverance and drive and discipline, which are good things, and that speaks to a part of them. And so I think what's really attractive by Andrew Tate and lots of the manosphere is that they are very good at having simplistic, clear messages given to boys about do this and you get this. Whereas feminism is really good at picking apart things that are harmful and saying these are ways not to be. There is a vacuum of positive ways to be.
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And I'm not trying to point fingers and point the blame. I'm just saying that this is what's attractive about the manosphere, is that they have paused. Are, I'm not saying these are positive, but they are ways to be that are very clear and offer guidance that are less nuanced and complex, because a lot of issues of being a human and growing up and developing healthily are very complex. But when you have someone who's like, this is what women want across the board, this is what a man should be. This is what you need to do. Anything else you're I don't know what language you're allowed to use on here, but anything else, you're lesser, you're weak, you're feminine, you're gay, whatever that is, people are attracted to polarized content, like we know that in politics, that there's a certain politician whose speeches, if you analyze the grade level of which he speaks at, it's way lower than other grade level of speeches, and yet that draws more people because some simplicity is attractive and confidence is attractive, and angiotate embodies confidence, which, in itself, is so attractive.
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Yes, when parents have to discuss pornography, which they should at some point with their sons, what sort of I mean, you know, I I've always said, you know, just use any opportunity to bring it up and just drop it into conversations anytime that you can, when it feels, you know, don't have that big sit down.
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But I'm very interested in what you have to say about this. You know, you've you've got kids.
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When do you start having really serious conversations about pornography? Because we know that kids stumble on this stuff, and that boys are probably sharing. They share the worst because it's fun. It's like, Whoa. Look at this. You know, it's highly likely they're going to come across it without really us being prepared.
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Yeah, and I'm working with a school district right now that's had to deal with, like boys in grade three bringing explicit pornography to their schools, which is definitely not the norm, but it it definitely does happen. And so I think one I would first say that, as parents, we can be tend to think like, when do I need to have a serious conversation about this?
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But I think things around sex, conversations, or consent, all these things happen at such a young age, and they just can be just small conversations. So like, for instance, one example.
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This one example is like, talking about tickling that, like with my children, I if they say, no, stop the tickling, like they have bodily autonomy over that. And so when it talk comes to pornography, it's like, yeah, the average age is kind of getting younger, and we need to talk about this conversation in advance. And I think traditionally, there's kind of two responses to this that I think are quite problematic. One is viewing this as completely normal, and so don't even talk about it like just normalizing pornography and all of its forms. And then the other is very, extremely shame based. And I think a lot of people have very sexually shame based, whether this is with purity culture, different religious upbringings that all make sense.
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But shame isn't great at it's actually pretty terrible at stopping long term behavior.
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It's okay for like in the moment, but it also causes the boys to be even more closed off and things like that. So I think one of the things around pornography that is often missed is that I think the people that view it as so normal are also viewing it from a primarily biological lens, and so, like, there's so many different aspects of pornography, like of this, the sexual trafficking that happens in so much is like, what are? Is all pornography the same? And I have my own opinions on this. I know that feminism is actually pretty divided on the topic as well. And so one of the questions that I go back to is that pornography for teenage boys in particular, yes, there's hormones that you have way more like random erections throughout the day, like your sexual drive is different than any time before, and it's like heightened, but what is the emotional experience behind it as well? So if we think of boys, are really prone to being alone and aloneness, how much is porn use feeding in to their numbing, of like looking at porn or things like that as a way for them not to feel alone or things like that. And I don't think any sex ed is really addressing that, of like the underlying emotional issues around it. And there also is some research around porn use in like colleges and dorms, like together, and those often are interesting spaces, but also where there's a lot of projection, and tends to be more like violence against women in it. But. Like, it's nice to compartmentalize and think that they are completely consenting, but there is a lot of cases where it's, I would say the majority of like, mainstream pornography that a lot of boys are looking at isn't what is considered more ethical or feminist pornography, and that is another aspect of the conversation to happen. So I think that I would be having conversations early on just about like, Hey. I just want to know, like, if you ever see something, like anyone ever shows you anything, I think you need to do follow ups, or if you do sleepovers, which, my wife's a trauma therapist, and she's basically instilled with me, sleepovers are going to be super rare, because so many people have been abusing sleepovers, way more than I ever thought.
00:35:45.759 --> 00:36:21.139
But that is not something that's unique to a lot of my wife's therapist friends as well, just seeing so much abuse or things of that nature getting happening at sleepovers. So I think that would be like a pivotal time period. There was a huge shift that, like, when I think about my dad, like his exposure to put on the graphic images was like, you would have to go to a corner store or somewhere to buy a magazine. You have to show your face that is so different on
00:36:21.139 --> 00:36:23.059
the top shelf.
00:36:21.139 --> 00:36:30.320
It would be covered up. You would, you would have to actually go in there and reach up for it, or get someone to get it down for you. Yeah,
00:36:31.340 --> 00:36:54.460
yeah. And so there's like, so the reaction to be like, Okay, I can just prevent exposure to porn is, unfortunately for those who are against pornography entirely not possible. It's like, you need to actually teach you the literacy around it and get boys connected to their inner guidance. Like, hey, if have conversations of like, what would it feel like?
00:36:54.460 --> 00:37:44.860
Or can you imagine, like, what certain things depicted in pornography would feel like for a woman or someone you're in a relationship with, and maybe they're okay with it, something like that, but like getting back if the whole danger, which, as I say, the whole harm, is disembodiment with how humans are raised, and I think that our whole lives are spent kind of healing, so we become more authentic and more embodied. So if the whole thing is being disembodied, I think pornography can definitely be something that disembodies A lot of people and dehumanizes people. We can separate ourselves from what's going on on a screen versus what happened behind the scenes to make that happen. And so you want to get children and teens to reflect on the humanized aspects of that and to think for themselves. Yeah,
00:37:44.920 --> 00:37:56.380
I love that. I think that's a really interesting point. And what I haven't really heard, I don't want to let you go until I've asked you quickly about your research into teenage boys and their opinions of their dads.
00:37:56.380 --> 00:38:03.960
You know? What? How? How do boys perceive their dads? What causes them to have negative opinions?
00:38:00.659 --> 00:38:03.960
You know, what have you seen?
00:38:04.019 --> 00:38:45.699
Yeah, I'm just noticing that I'm getting emotional. Just thinking about it, generally, they love their dads, and most of them, if they critique one thing, it's that they critique the lack of emotional connection that they have with their dads, not like some of them, have 100% completely great relationships with their fathers. Don't need room for improvement, but they generally love their dads. They want more of their dads. They respect their dads. They look up to their dads. But if there's one area overall where they don't, it's in how they handle or aware of their emotions.
00:38:46.360 --> 00:38:49.059
Fascinating.
00:38:46.360 --> 00:39:24.320
And I had, I have, I spoke to Mike Nicholson, who has a an organization called progressive masculinity, and he said that, you know, when they're looking at what's going wrong, when boys don't actually talk to somebody, they they know that there are people they can talk to they you know that they just have never seen someone they admire and respect going and expressing that, you know, a need to talk to somebody, and then they just don't. So I think that's one of the great things that we can take away from this. Are there, is there anything we've missed, or anything that you would like to say to parents who've got tweens or or teenagers that you really feel would help them.
00:39:24.320 --> 00:39:55.900
Only thing that's popping to my head right now is understanding that all human behavior is initially adaptive, so emotional suppression is very adaptive. All the teenage boys I talk to, I assume that some of them would be like, I've always been this way. This is just who I am. But none of them said that. They all identified when, approximately when and why they started to suppress their emotions. And so all of their reasons legitimately make sense.
00:39:51.639 --> 00:40:22.820
And so there's kind of two things to hold intention here is understanding that, like getting. Uh, boys and men to be more connected to parts of themselves, just like it is for us as adults, as parents, is dangerous because it can create more psychological distress, because those are protected for a reason. And so it's kind of like the adage that like for healing, the best way through, the best way out, is through, and having to go through that, and that can create discomfort.
00:40:20.300 --> 00:40:29.659
So it makes sense why we don't want to go through that, and if this context around us isn't safe, then maybe now isn't the best time to go through that.
00:40:29.840 --> 00:41:28.519
But the question that I would always want parents to ask themselves and boys to ask themselves is like because we all have grown up with different trauma stories, different experiences is like, if our actions are cutting off, suppressing was adaptive and survival based, are we still living in a war, or perhaps, has our context changed and now it's safe to kind of open up and venture out use a bit of that courage and vulnerability to explore a bit more, because some people and their nervous system, based on trauma, can feel like everything is still dangerous and a threat to us and so healing can often seem as a threat, because it has traditionally been that way and so but our Nervous System can lead us astray as well, because we don't realize that we actually have not. We're not no longer in that war zone, and things can change.
00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:31.639
Fantastic.
00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:34.940
That's a brilliant thing to end on. Thank you so much, Brendan.
00:41:31.639 --> 00:41:38.300
That's Brendan kriyat Koski. I'm going to have a link on the podcast notes to your website.
00:41:38.840 --> 00:41:53.199
Is there any other way that people can reach you. I follow his Instagram. He's got a great Instagram account, lots of interesting reels on there, things to sort of spark your things you can talk to your kids, about your sons. Is there any other way that people should find you? That's
00:41:54.099 --> 00:42:09.840
definitely the best my website and Instagram, I'm most active, and I am. I've heard a lot of feedback that I'm going to create a resource about the masculinity vaccinations on certain topics and conversation starters for parents. So I don't know when this will air, but that will be coming up sometime in 2024
00:42:10.800 --> 00:42:12.539
fantastic, brilliant. Thank you so much.
00:42:12.539 --> 00:42:15.719
Brendan, it's A wonderful conversation. I really appreciate it.
