Boys Do Cry

There’s widespread social concern that boys and men are not allowed to express their tender emotions. What if it’s a myth?

It was a particularly cruel heckling. Ketel Marte, a star baseball player for the Arizona Diamondbacks, was brought to tears by a heckler who shouted derogatory comments about Marte’s late mother, Elpidia Valdez, who died in a car crash in 2017. Fortunately, Marte was consoled on the field by the Diamondbacks’ manager, Torey Lovullo, and the heckler has been banned from all MLB baseball parks indefinitely. When Marte returned to the field in his first home game since the incident on Friday, fans not only cheered: they gave him a standing ovation for his courage. Earlier, during a game against the White Sox on Wednesday, the opposing team displayed a supportive message on their scoreboard during Marte’s at-bat in the first inning: “Baseball is Family: The White Sox community supports Ketel Marte.”

I want to be clear that I applaud both Marte’s open display of emotion, as well as of course sympathizing with his heartbreak during the cruel heckling. I also applaud and want to share in the uniformly supportive response to Marte’s emotional display on the field. All of this represents important and welcome social progress. But I think it also gives the lie to a popular narrative about a norm to which boys and men are still supposedly subject: namely, that they are not allowed to show their emotions, particularly sad or tender feelings. This norm was doubtless once in play in wide sectors of society, and did a lot of damage. But I suspect the norm is much more often bemoaned now than it is actually enforced. And that may be having a distorting effect on how we raise boys, thinking the main problem is one of their needing more permission rather than less entitlement.

Again, I want to be careful here about what I am saying and what I am not. I am not denying that boys today are sometimes told, cruelly, that they are not allowed to cry on account of their gender. I am sure that this happens in some families and institutions held hostage to norms of masculinity that are rigid and toxic—but are now largely defunct in society at large. And I am of course not denying that an enormous number of men were once taught, implicitly or explicitly, to suppress any feelings save for anger and aggression. But none of that means what is so often asserted: that boys and men are still up against prevalent messages that they don’t have permission to cry or feel or emote. Even prominent Republicans, like Brett Kavanaugh and Pete Hegseth, have conspicuously shed tears under tough questioning. (And while it’s true that Hegseth was mocked following his recent emotional display, that was more about his petulance in response to fair and important questions about the Iran airstrikes than it was due to the sense that masculinity prohibits it. It wasn’t that he cried, in other words; it’s that he cried about destruction it was his responsibility to face soberly.)

In fact, I think that Marte’s story shows that—happily and fortunately—we’ve changed our tune as a society. We do now allow boys and men to cry, and show other tender, sad, and feminine-coded emotions publicly. Think about it: the baseball world represents a broad cross-section of American society, with no significant political leanings (and certainly not of a progressive or left-wing variety). The story I linked to in opening was from Fox News, of all places—a first and likely last for me, which I included for its probative significance. It seems plausible the tide has turned against the damaging sense that a range of emotions from men is verboten, wimpy, a sign of weakness.

As well as anecdata, an impressive meta-analysis of the difference between boys’ and girls’ displays of emotions backs me up here. The finding? No big differences. The researchers found that, across hundreds of studies, and over 20 000 participants, boys and girls in fact show very few differences in their amount or type of emotions, especially prior to adolescence. (Unfortunately, and typically, non-binary children were not coded for.) True, boys showed slightly more “externalizing” emotions, like anger, and girls showed slightly more positive and “internalizing” emotions, like sadness—as well as one particular “externalizing” emotion in the form of contempt, interestingly. But the researchers emphasize that the effect sizes were “very small,” and mostly emerged in older age groups. And, since this meta-analysis was published, in 2012, my hunch is that these differences may have diminished even further, with a wider social consciousness that boys should not be discouraged from displaying sadness, anxiety, sympathy, and so on.

I’m always cautious about interpreting the results of this study because just because boys do cry roughly as often as girls doesn’t mean, of course, that they’re not punished for so doing. But two points: first, social norms by definition have effects on how people behave—a norm that exerted no influence on behavior whatsoever would be a defunct and not an extant one. Second, a lot of folks continue to insist that boys are heavily suppressed and oppressed when it comes to displaying their emotions, i.e., that the norm “boys don’t cry” is still in effect and widely efficacious. I want to see the evidence for this confident assertion.

I say this not merely because it’s an inherently interesting question. It’s also because I see a lot of emphasis in parenting discussions on raising boys to know that their big feelings are legitimate. But what if society at large already acknowledges this? What if the challenge to focus on as a parent is less on prevailing on a boy to express how he feels, and more on teaching him that he is not entitled to channel these big feelings into violent, aggressive, or anti-social behavior?

As I’ve argued at length before, white boys in particular in Anglo-American culture are subject to powerful messages that say they are entitled: to women’s time, attention, love, sex, admiration, and affection. To our emotional, material, sexual, and reproductive labor. To our sympathy—or, rather, himpathy—when things go awry and they err or wrong or harm us. It’s not obvious to me that the usual advice—to be extra tender with boys, and to solicit their emotions—is well-designed to address these challenges or to raise boys who are caring and responsive to the needs of others. If we misdiagnose the problem, how can we possibly address it? And I can’t help but feel there must be more to moral development than just making children feel understood and trusting that the rest will take care of itself, somehow, in terms of kind and pro-social behavior. (“Remember, our kids are good inside. We don’t have to train them to be kind. We have to help them to manage some of the barriers to kindness that can look, on the surface, like harsh behavior,” according to Dr. Becky, whose confidence on this score alarms me and strikes me as markedly under-evidenced.)

It is important, of course, that all children are raised to feel valid in their feelings, and comfortable expressing them—and the challenge to help girls to feel and express their anger openly but appropriately seems a particularly important one, from my perspective as the mother of one child, a daughter. But emphasizing this endlessly, particularly as the mother of a boy, may well run the risk of over-extending some of the emotional labor that boys need to be taught not to extract more than their fair share of. And as well as learning that mothers in particular and women in general have limits, and boundaries, I want young boys to be taught that they need to care more about, and do more for, other people of every gender. Women are not emotional ‘giving trees’ and they are not ‘the boy’ of Shel Silverstein’s famous tale. The need for social connection is legitimate and real, of course; but all of us are responsible for making that connection and not just waiting for it to come to us, entitled and expectant.

Maybe it is time to stop telling boys that they get to cry, if they have the social permission already. Maybe it is time to start reminding them to be attentive to the tears of others, and, most importantly, not to cause them.