My Son Is Becoming Sexist. How Do I Stop This?

The Ask Lisa Podcast does not constitute medical advice and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have concerns about your child’s well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional.

The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It is really, really hard to be a seventh grade boy. Their self-esteem is enormously fragile. They’re growing and changing so fast and what they can do with their minds is advancing at an extraordinary rate, but not equally between boys and girls, buddy you’re getting the short stick here. The conditions of being a seventh grade boy, oh my gosh. Is Andrew Tate waiting there to help you feel good.

Reena Ninan:
Can moms of boys do something to make sure their boys do not become sexist.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
What are the solutions here?

Reena Ninan:
Do you cook for Thanksgiving?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
We potluck. We potluck.

Reena Ninan:
Smart.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And we host, but we do the turkey and I like the vegetables, so I make a bunch of vegetables. What do you guys do?

Reena Ninan:
This year, I’m hosting and so I’m just trying to figure out, you always have a good structure of things and what to do when, but every year I get to this and I wonder what should I make ahead of time? What should I not? And it’s quite a process, I think.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
We have it down to a science. We know exactly who brings what. They bring the exact same thing every year because it’s the same 12 of us every year.

Reena Ninan:
Smart.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think it’s a lot harder when you don’t have a pattern. It sounds like you’re having to build this from scratch.

Reena Ninan:
Because I’ve always been blessed to go over to my in-laws and they do all the cooking, so.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s kind of a great outcome. Absolutely.

Reena Ninan:
It’s my turn now.
Well, you gathered around with families and lots of interesting conversations happen. We got this great letter from a parent talking about their son becoming sexist that wow, it just raised some great points. I’m going to read it to you.
Hello, Dr. Lisa. Last year, at the end of seventh grade, my 13-year-old son pointed out that most of the year end awards at school were given to girls. He told me that he believes the reason for this is the school is sexist and favors girls over boys. I know he is a good kid and I’ve actually been impressed with him and his friends who in my presence have spontaneously brought up figures like Andrew Tate and how awful they feel these people are. So when he brought this up, I challenged his views and told him that if girls won these awards, they clearly had worked very hard for them. To my surprise, he reacted very strongly, whereas in the past he would’ve come to a calm agreement. He dug in his heels and tearfully told me that I just didn’t understand. I was shocked and I’m also concerned that this is the start of him having a sexist outlook on life and disrespecting girls and women in general. I feel like we’re at a tipping point and I wonder if you have any advice on speaking to teenage boys about not falling down this trap. Thank you. A worried mom.
Well, what’s your initial thoughts when you heard this letter? Cause, can I tell you I did feel bad reading that he felt that the girls won it and the school is sexist.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, I mean my initial thoughts are like I can’t believe the letters we get. I mean this is extraordinary, right? It holds all of the tensions of this challenge, right? So my initial thoughts are like, yeah, I bet the girls did win a lot of the awards.

Reena Ninan:
What do you mean?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s really, really hard to be a seventh grade boy. You know last week we were talking about puberty. Here it is again. So Reena, one of the ways we talk about puberty and its onset is we talk about the modal age. So there’s mean, median, mode. Mode is most frequent the number that arises most frequently. So the modal age of onset for puberty in girls is 12, and the modal age of onset for boys is 14. So most girls are going to hit puberty somewhere around seventh grade. Most boys are going to hit puberty somewhere around ninth grade.

Reena Ninan:
Oh, that’s so interesting.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Those numbers aren’t perfect if you can slice ’em lots of different ways. They don’t represent all groups equally, but that’s a good starting place. Girls are ahead of boys no matter how you slice it. With puberty comes not only height, strength, speed, also neurological gains, right? That the brain becomes more sophisticated, it becomes more powerful. If you’re a seventh grade boy and you’re out at recess, you’re 12, chances are the girls can outrun you out, wrestle you, out jump you. The only thing that boys are always better at than girls through development is actually throwing velocity and it’s I think a practice effect. Girls don’t play catch as much as boys play catch.
Okay, so if you are a seventh grade boy, you are basically getting circles run around you out at recess by the girls and then you go in the classroom and the girls have had the magical puberty fairy come and give them all of this neurological firepower. So the girls understand things. The boys are just developmentally not quite there no matter how bright they are. Girls can do work with their minds that the boys are going to be able to do, but a lot of them, if you just look straight modally are not going to be able to do. It feels totally lousy. And then if you’re the seventh grade awards committee, you’re going to probably have to be looking for a boy who’s hit puberty early to be able to have an apples to apples comparison with your average girl.

Reena Ninan:
No one has ever put puberty as the neurological fairy that comes through and helps you. I had no idea. I mean, of course you see the difference in development, but you don’t realize the neurological protection or upgrade you get.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s a huge upgrade. It’s a huge neurological upgrade and it’s an interesting one in that it’s actually involves pruning. It actually involves the removal of neurons that are not being used. You would think, oh, all of this like a blossoming of neurons and there is some of that, but it’s actually creating more efficiency. It’s actually getting rid of dead weight. The brains of teenagers, and this is why I love them, they’re growing and changing so fast and what they can do with their minds is advancing at an extraordinary rate, but not equally between boys and girls. Boys are getting a coming and going when they’re in the seventh grade. So I think this kid’s observation is probably true now his explanation for it that the school is privileging girls above boys. I doubt it.

Reena Ninan:
I want to get a little bit into the head of this seventh grade boy, if you can help us with that. Why do you think he believes that these girls are being favored?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
One of the challenges we run into is that school’s built for girls. This is something we’ve long acknowledged. When you look at gender differences, almost always they’re overblown. And whenever we’re looking at gender differences, we’re always talking also about overlapping bell curves. So if we say girls are stronger than boys at language, okay, well there’s a lot of boys who are stronger than the average girl. There’s a lot of girls who are less strong than the average boy. I mean it’s not like they’re two different populations altogether, but one of the things we know that is a real true gender difference, boys are actually more physically active. It starts in utero that they tend to be busier with their bodies. They develop gross motor skills faster while girls develop fine motor skills.
Fine motor skills are both in our hands, but they’re also in our mouths, the ability to articulate words.

Reena Ninan:
Huh?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I know, right?!
So school is a place where you have to sit quietly, work a pencil and answer questions with your mouth. On balance, it’s built for girls. You have to really like middle schoolers and then you have to really like middle school boys because they are often compared to the girls kind of off the wall sometimes. And so I could also see where if he’s looking around the classroom, I am sure the teachers are sometimes riding the boys more. I am sure the teachers are more short tempered.

Reena Ninan:
Friends, please send this podcast to parents of young boys because this helps explain so much that they don’t know as to why they’re getting calls for bad behavior in class. This is mind blowing to me. I want to also go back to the conversation where the boy talks about Andrew Tate. Given what Andrew Tate has said in the past, do you feel like something changed in his mind on his impression on Andrew Tate?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s a really good question. So, you know, Andrew Tate for if you don’t know, is this wildly, wildly misogynist influencer who has a lot of boys who follow and who basically, I don’t like the term toxic masculinity, but I think this is a great place to use it, right? I mean it’s just sort of advancing this idea of masculinity is like men are awesome, girls should do as we ask and probably not even said that nicely. And I mean just muscles and cars and not great, not great stuff.
I really believe this parent who’s like, he’s a great kid, he’s a good kid and I believe that he and his friends look at stuff from Andrew Tate and know it’s wrong, right? They’ve been raised right, they’re good kids. You also see Reena about how the conditions of school, the conditions of being a seventh grade boy, oh my gosh, they make stuff like Andrew Tate stuff such fertile ground.
And you see how if a kid is feeling small, feeling like he’s overlooked, feeling like the teachers are riding him and his friends all the time, but not the girls. Oh my gosh, is Andrew Tate waiting there to help you feel good? So I don’t know if he’s changed his mind, but you sure see how a kid could change his mind.

Reena Ninan:
What do you think this mom should do?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
What are the solutions here? And I think there’s a few different versions of it. I think it’s really good that they’re having the conversation and I think it’s really good that the kid’s like, “You don’t understand.”
I think he’s still trying to say you’re not, there’s something you’re not getting at, you’re something you don’t see. I would ask him to keep talking. I would ask him, “What is it I’m not getting? What is it I’m not getting?”
I think if there is as part of that conversation, an opportunity for the mom to be like, let me show you some biological math. Let me show you what puberty is doing for the girls and what it will soon do for you. And let me show you how this is actually not an even playing field and that, buddy, you are getting the short stick here. I think that kind of objective honest explanation may help him feel a little better, right? “Yeah. The girls are winning and it it’s because they have two years on you almost developmentally, even though you’re in the same class.”
I think that might be a place to start. What do you think?

Reena Ninan:
Yeah, talking about it because no one’s explained. I mean like I said in our podcast last week on menopause and puberty, there’s so much there that no one has broken down and said the way you have. And also developmentally, yes, yes, we know girls develop faster, but talking about the neurology and how that really affects their growth and the gap between boys and girls. But do you think Lisa, there is something that this mom can do that is preventable? Can moms of boys do something to make sure their boys are not sexist or do not become sexist?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, okay, so one is, I mean keep the conversation going. She’s saying listen, these girls probably worked for it and she’s trying to understand. Part of it is that we have to find ways to help boys maintain self-esteem through this. This is their whole day. This isn’t just something they’re dipping in and out of it’s class and then it’s recess and then it’s back to class. And a lot of these guys are trying to consolidate some sense of masculinity and for a lot of them, I mentioned this in “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers,” the definition of that is not getting beat by a girl and all they’re doing is getting beat by girls. So their self-esteem is enormously fragile.

Reena Ninan:
That’s great to know. That’s like a newsflash for so many people that at this point their self-esteem is fragile,

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Can be very fragile. And it’s interesting Reena, another thing we’ve always seen in the data is that for girls to hit puberty early is actually not on balance all that good for them. That they get these very adult women bodies when they’re sometimes even 10 or 11, which is so hard on a kid. For boys to hit puberty early has always been associated with good outcomes. They’re bigger, stronger, faster. They have neurological advantage. We know that this is hard on kids if they are right in the middle or even late puberty, you’ve got a son, you see the range of where the kids are. Some are shaving, some look like fourth graders. I mean they’re all classmates. It’s such a strange configuration at this point. Eighth, ninth grade for boys is like they’re all over the map. So first and foremost, this kid has to have ways to feel good about himself and so do all of his friends, they need to have their own scout group or they need to have their own hobbies or they need to have their own fill in the blank.

Reena Ninan:
Find something that you’re passionate about.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yes, they can take pride in. Service projects, like you can’t mess those up. I mean there’s just so much value in those things and especially at this moment for boys. There are other solutions that people have advanced that I think are interesting. I do a fair bit of work with Richard Reeves who runs the American Institute for Boys and Men. And one of the arguments he makes, and I don’t think he’s wrong, it’s a complicated one, is that we should be redshirting boys that they should actually go to school a year later than girls to sort of even this playing field so that you don’t get these kinds of outcomes. So you’ve got two kids, they are one year apart in school. Would you ever have kept your son and put him in the same grade as your daughter?

Reena Ninan:
It is so funny that you say that because I redshirted my son thanks to my mother-in-law because in Connecticut at the time, they just recently changed the law. But you are January to December, so kids on the calendar year go to school and my mother-in-law smartly was said to me, he’s a smaller, he was a little boy at the time and he says developmentally, that extra year can make such a difference. And she’s a speech therapist, work with kids in this age group. Understood.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So she knows.

Reena Ninan:
Really trusted her judgment. But also I could see, I think you know what the principal at the preschool we went to said that has always stuck with me was when you don’t hold ’em back, there’s this possibility that they just go with the flow. They get in the car with the person who’s drinking because that’s what everybody else is doing and they might not be fully ready to make those decisions. That was enough. I heard that and I was like, we’re going to hold you back. And by the way, if we were in Florida where I grew up, it’s like end of August, beginning of September, most schools in the country, that’s kind of the cutoff date and Connecticut has since changed since he went to kindergarten when you do that. But I am so grateful because I am seeing the difference in the middle school, early high school years of boys versus girls that I did not know as a young parent.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So this is so interesting. So they’re two years apart in age, but one year apart in schooling, you actually did hold them back a year and you’re going to see the benefits of that. Right. Okay, so that’s so interesting. Okay, so that worked great for you. The downsides of this are often families need their kids to go to school so they can go to work, right? Just like randomly redshirting a kid is not a consequenceless decision. But I mean I think you made such a good call, Rena. I think given everything we know about boys, when it’s a possibility, it’s a pretty good idea to sort of try to level things.

Reena Ninan:
By the way, I’m seeing it also in the eighth grade year and a lot of, I would say maybe more wealthier school districts. Some people choose to reclass their kid in the eighth grade for sports and you see the difference of the player they are versus if they had just continued on.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, no, the sports piece is huge and we could write books on this, right? There are books on this.
Should it be for boys? Well, okay, that’s a whole other thing, but is it? Heck yeah. Right? And part of why when boys hit puberty early, part of why it converts so much benefit is they’re actually gives ’em a lot of sports swagger and that goes really far with boys. Another thing, and this is now we’re well into the privileged universe of options. There’s a lot to be said here for boys schools. What a boys school can provide is that you are not spending all of seventh grade feeling like you can’t keep up.

Reena Ninan:
Interesting.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Because you’re just with your guys who are all in the same developmental window that you are. One of the beauties of boys schools, if that’s something a family wants to do or can afford to do or is considering, is that it actually protects guys through the dangerous valley of self-esteem, plummeting when they are smaller and less intellectually, they’re not less smart, but they just don’t have the neurological development of girls. It can get them through that valley. And what we see is once everybody’s gone through puberty, it levels off again. I mean once they’re all 15, 16, the boys are all now bigger, stronger, faster for the most part. And neurologically they have what the girls have. But that’s sophomore, junior year, right? I mean there’s a yucky juncture in there that they’ve got to find their way through. On balance, when we look at the data on single-sex schools, we don’t have anything that says they’re always better for every kid. This is a place where boys schools I think really shine.

Reena Ninan:
That’s great to hear, Lisa. So as we step back, any final advice for parents?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Keep the lines of communication open. This is real for this kid. He’s not making it up. I’m sure it feels terrible. He’s grasping for explanation. I think give him explanations that do not involve the world being stacked against him. Give him explanations that are like actually biology is stacked against you. It’s not, teachers are trying to be yucky and I’m not going to say hold him back. I’m not going to say go find a boys school, but I am going to say, unless that’s something you want to do. But I am going to say give this kid a way to feel good until his biology catches up.

Reena Ninan:
And just knowing what is happening can be so helpful when kids don’t really, are able to put the pieces together because parents might not even know as well. So this is so great, you walked us through it.
What do you have, Lisa for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’m thinking about where the men are in this boy’s life and I’m thinking about how much he is going to need their support and reassurance at this time.
So often our letters come from moms and I get it, but I actually think part of what this boy is trying to find is a way to feel good as a boy if there’s a dad in the picture who can help him do that. If there are wonderful male teachers or coaches who can help him do that and find a way to feel really good as a guy. And what is it that guys can take pride and bring to the table, helping him hone in on that and feel good about it. I think a lot these days about how do we keep guys from going down roads that take them to Andrew Tate and other people like him. And I think there’s a lot of work to be done by all of the adults around boys to help them find ways to feel valued and heard and cared for and understood.

Reena Ninan:
Thank you, Lisa. This perspective is so helpful in us discussing that. I feel like boys just, we haven’t had that opportunity to really have these conversations, so that’s great.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Time has come, the time has come.

Reena Ninan:
So I’ll see you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.