I recently hosted a conversation with Dr. Cara Natterson, who has written some of my favorite books about boys and puberty like Decoding Boys and Guy Stuff Feelings. We started out discussing issues particularly relevant to teen boys during the pandemic, like pornography, extreme weight gain/weight loss, anxiety and depression. Some people attending the conversation asked in the chat when we were going to “start talking about puberty.”
Their question reminded me that we are acculturated to have a very narrow interpretation of what puberty is, particularly for boys. Even more, it brought up for me a trend I have noticed in talking to parents about puberty and adolescence. While parents of girls often focus on addressing the broader emotional ups and downs of their daughters like “Ugh, she is so MOODY,” parents of boys worry more about addressing more specific tactical issues like, “How do I not walk in on my son masturbating?”
The folks who didn’t think that boys’ mental health or body image belonged in a conversation about male puberty are what I would call puberty originalists, i.e. people who believe in the strict interpretation of male puberty: the classic tropes of erections and masturbation, but not including the emotional twists and turns that come alongside boys’ physical changes.
Male puberty is not just about erections and masturbation (although they feature heavily), it’s not just about voice cracks and acne (although those are really tough aspects for boys), but about the entire universe of boys’ experiences during those formative years. The temptation to boil down kids’ experiences makes it easier for us as adults to manage and compartmentalize — “Oh, boys are like this and girls are like that" but we must resist that temptation, as comforting as it might be to draw clear lines. (And by the way, this doesn’t even begin to explore the spectrum of kids’ gender identification or expression, for which the categories of male and female are insufficient.)
The truth is that boys’ puberty is about a much wider and more complex universe of physical and emotional changes than we allow for, the same way girls’ puberty is about more than their volatile mood swings and menstrual fluid. Both male and female puberty encompass mental health, body image, relationships and emotional lability, as well as the hot button topics things like pornography and wet dreams.
We often box boys into a particular set of experiences during adolescence which also serve to perpetuate tired, harmful stereotypes of masculinity. Their journeys can be just as rich, confusing and complicated as girls’ journeys. As adults, the sooner we recognize the fullness of their experience, not just physically but also emotionally, the healthier our boys are going to be inside and out.
Which does not mean the tactical and practical challenges of raising boys through puberty are not deeply important to them and to us. One of the most interesting things we learned early on in our Dynamo girls’ puberty workshops is that they worry a lot about logistical concerns related to puberty -- What if this happens? What do I do when? How do I know if? Those worries may seem small to us but they weight heavily on kids and we minimize them at our own risk.
Boys are no different. They have their own experiences of feeling unprepared, self-conscious, inadequate, confused, ahead, behind, other and different. They do just as much comparing and contrasting, worrying and handwringing, but may just not feel the same permission to discuss or admit it. As Cara Natterson talks about in Decoding Boys, boys have a tendency to become quiet in puberty, but that doesn’t mean we stop talking to them or stop encouraging them to talk to us.
I have three sons and the only thing they have in common is that they each have a penis. Otherwise, they are vastly different human beings in almost every possible way and their journeys through puberty have been equally varied. I cannot imagine if I had taken a strict constructionist approach to parenting them through the tween and teen years and treated all three the same. Frankly, my youngest son is benefiting greatly from every mistake I made with the first two when trying to fit them into a one-size-fits-all puberty box.
If I’m being brutally honest, I have blown it so many times with my older sons, talking when I should have been listening, nagging when I should have been hanging, assuming when I should have been inquiring. No area has gone unblemished by my screw-ups when parenting my older boys through puberty — everything from their haircuts to their shaving, from their eating to their relationships, from their joy to their heartbreak. I have stumbled in literally every corner of their adolescence. And truly, the only thing I’ve become really good at it is circling back, mocking my own mistakes and beginning the conversation again.
Boys' puberty is about a whole lot more than when pubic hair grows or voices drop, when the hourlong showers begin or the zits emerge. Boys’ puberty, just like girls’ puberty, is about the beautiful, messy, painful slog of moving from a kid to a teen to an adult. It is not only about moving around in an (almost) grown-up body it’s also about the rollercoaster of (almost) adult feelings — pain and sadness, elation and exhilaration, wonder and indifference. We cannot assume that beneath the rowdy and jolly demeanor or the sullen and mute exterior of adolescent males there is not an entire universe of roiling emotions. To do so would be to kids’ detriment and to ours.
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