Falling Behind: 'We're in jail with our emotions'
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Picture in your mind for a moment a group of teenage students sitting together and pouring their hearts out about the things that are stressing them out, about their feelings of inadequacy, about their heartaches. Now, be honest. Did you picture a group of boys or a group of girls? I'm going to guess that almost all of you imagined that kind of emotional honesty and support coming from a group of girls.

And that's okay. That's what we are conditioned to expect. That's what boys themselves are conditioned to expect. And that's one of the reasons why it's notoriously difficult to get almost any teen boy to risk the vulnerability required to trust other people with his feelings. But the truth is, boys in America are reporting increasing rates of loneliness. They're in desperate need of emotionally supportive outlets.

But how do you get teen boys to open up and talk? I mean, we could always cut into class. At the Haverford School, the boys like to talk. Founded in 1884, Haverford is an all-boys pre-K through 12 private school just outside of Philadelphia. And for the past few decades, it has intensified its focus on boys' mental health. At Haverford's high school, boys are part of a voluntary peer counseling program.

The sessions can include more than 60 teens paired up in intense, intimate, and strictly confidential conversation. We weren't allowed to attend a peer counseling session, but a group of Haverford seniors showed us how it works. I want you to do some role-playing. Oh yeah. So who's going to model this? You want to be that director? I'll be that director. I'll be the... We're watchers. We're watchers.

Finn Kelly volunteers to be the counselor. Samaj Lee volunteers to be the young man who wants to open up. They sit in two chairs facing each other. Of course when Samaj first sits down we're gonna ask the room, "Gentlemen, what do you guys like about Samaj?" And so you can call him Josh here.

I met Samaj in my freshman year of football before school starts, football starts. So he was one of the first people I met on the team actually and he was really, really muscular for being a freshman. It's probably because he's like 25 years old as a freshman, triple reclass. In maturity. Of course, of course.

Finn explains to us that this is how the sessions usually begin. There's a request for compliments for the boy who's about to take an emotional risk. So Dr. Recker will ask maybe like five, six more people, a lot of similar stuff, especially for Samaj. And then we'll kind of start by like, how are you feeling? I've been okay, you know. Second semester senior, right? It's getting to be that time. It's getting hard.

to focus, but I'm hanging on. Samaj is role-playing here, but it's pretty clear to me that this is probably how the peer counseling sessions actually do start. Friendly mocking, soft-spoken uncertainty, nervous laughter. So tell me something that's happening with you right now. You know, decisions for schools coming up soon. Don't know where I'm going yet.

Yeah, he does that thing. So he... When he scooted closer to you? Right, when you're starting to open up, he'll scoot closer to you. We call it the blunder. He gonna get you. He gonna get you going. But back in the scene. When Samaj begins talking about college decisions, Finn scoots his chair much closer to him. Finn makes steady eye contact with Samaj.

"The blender" as the students call it because emotions are about to get stirred up. But I'm still, you know, trying to figure that out. That can be really stressful, right?

Finn reaches out to Samaj. Yeah, so he does that too. So he'll put, that's the blunder right there. This is the blunder. So the hand on the shoulder and the eye contact, he's going to get you now to just really just open up. Well, I have to say, I noticed that you were making really steady eye contact. And that's not super common amongst teens, right? Right.

So that seems like a skill that you learned through this? Well yeah, absolutely. So in my opinion, I think it's harder to be a listener than it is to be a talker actually. And so he really emphasizes the skills required to be a good listener because the better the listeners are, the more involved the listener is with the talker, the more vulnerable the talker can be. And as I said earlier, peer counseling is at its strongest when the talkers are the most vulnerable.

Well, I'll let you guys off the hook because I just wanted a little flavor of what that's like. And even just that this was role-playing, it felt intense, like right from the start as someone like observing it. So now only imagine 60 of your close friends or classmates staring at you. 60? Is that how many people? It's a very full room. It's like 60, 70 kids in there.

So the Dr. Reichert those young men were referring to, Michael Reichert, that's you, right? Yes. It's really funny hearing myself role-played. Yes, that's me. And I can tell you, Meghna, that what they were role-playing was little more than a sort of an audacious dream 30 years ago. What was that dream?

That young men would be proactive about taking care of themselves and each other in the way that those boys were modeling. What inspired that dream 30 years ago? Having two sons, honestly, and recognizing that

the kind of boyhood that they were going to have, the kind of boyhood that every boy enjoys is one that we create for them and that the boyhood that we have lived with for centuries doesn't accord very well with boys' human natures. Good morning everybody! Good morning, this is Mahalo Show! Y'all ready to have a good day today?

I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is an On Point special series, Falling Behind the Miseducation of America's Boys. The ways that school doesn't work for lots of boys comes with a higher penalty. He calls it six cruel hours of our lives, you know, an acronym for school. The data will show that we're failing them desperately. Hey, yo! It's a beautiful day in California!

If you have a teacher who tells you, like, you're really badly behaved and sends you all these messages that you're not going to do well, it turns out there's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there. One, two.

As a first grade teacher, relationships with the boys became a window into what I argue now is a need for the reimagining of Black boyhood. Just because your skin color think that you condone violence, because they see other Black children on the news condoning violence, killing, like,

It brings you down. One thing I do with my class is I always ask them if they can remember the time when they were first told that boys don't cry. And 100% of them can do it. Like as men, we're like in jail with our emotions. Like we can't let them out. It just sucks. The quote actually comes from Frederick Douglass. It's easier to build strong boys than rebuild broken men. Today's boys are tomorrow's men. Episode 5, In Jail With Their Emotions.

I'm Michael Reichert. I run a research collaborative based at the University of Pennsylvania called the Center for the Study of Boys' and Girls' Lives. You were part of a group that authored this survey from a couple of years ago called the State of American Men. And...

Several findings jumped out to us, one of them being that 66% of the youngest men ages 18 to 23 agreed with the statement, no one knows me. Yeah, that stood out for me in particular as a sign of what I call developmental precarity. Mm-hmm.

That profound sense of loneliness seems to have seeped into other aspects of mental health for young men. Yes, that's right. The one that really pained me most was that nearly one out of two, 49% of the youngest men, the 18 to 23-year-olds, agreed with the statement that in the last two weeks they had considered suicide. What that means, Meghna, is that this is a population-wide issue.

canary in the coal mine kind of finding that's telling us that the boyhood that we've created and outcomes like feeling alone and not knowing how to go forward with optimism, that's a reaction to the system that we've created. Obviously, we have been focusing on schools, on education, and the role that schools are playing in the outcomes as boys become men.

So with that in mind, we spoke with Christopher Reigluth. He's a child psychologist and an associate professor at Oregon Health and Science University. And he says there is a direct connection between boys' mental health and their education. Kids cannot reach their academic potential if their mental health isn't

and their social and emotional well-being is not solid and fortified, right? I mean, just thinking about performance on tests, paying attention in class, right? Absorbing lessons, et cetera, right? I mean, you can't do any of that well if your mental health is compromised. Yes, I certainly agree with that, but I would go further. My research prior to the State of American Men study was in the field of education. One of the most

profound outcomes we discovered. Boys need to have that sense of being known and cared about, and that by and large, that essential foundational fact is where schools struggle with boys, because we all labor with this myth that boys actually don't need relationships if they're built to be non-relational. You know, I'm looking at how broad the

the numbers are, right, from your study. Does your research suggest that there's something kind of elemental in our society and the institutions that operate within it that's not recognizing a basic human need in American boys? I like that word, elemental.

As a developmental psychologist, I think of the structure more in our understanding and the way that we weave that understanding into the institutions and the structures that we build for boys, whether it's schools or sports teams or families. And I think that if we're not grasping boys' elemental human natures,

their need to talk about their feelings, their need to be yelled, their need to have a relationship in order to engage in learning. If we're not grasping that, then the kinds of structures we're going to build for them, the various ways that we welcome them into the world, they're going to be off and they're going to produce casualties. Falling behind, the miseducation of America's boys continues in a moment. This is On Point. On Point.

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Boys too often end up being treated like malfunctioning girls. The gap emerges before boys hit third grade. So more than ever, experts are saying with urgency that something must be done. The quote actually comes from Frederick Douglass. It's easier to build strong boys than rebuild broken men. Today's boys are tomorrow's men.

I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. Look out for our special series. It's called Falling Behind, The Miseducation of America's Boys. You'll find it right here in this podcast feed. So be sure to follow On Point wherever you get your podcasts. Marty Knott listens to the show in Texas. She's a high school math teacher whose students come from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. But she says there is one thing that most of the boys have in common. I am seeing...

a lot of boys struggling academically, socially, just trying to find their place in the world because it is not clear to them what masculinity means anymore. I think that with the women's movement, somehow men and boys just have not found their place and it's really confusing for particularly teenage boys.

Well, we're speaking today with Michael Reichert. He's the founding director of the Center for the Study of Boys' and Girls' Lives at the University of Pennsylvania. And joining us now is Dr. Kevin Simon. He's Boston's first chief behavioral health officer who

He's also an attending pediatric psychiatrist at Boston Children's Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Simon, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. What have you seen in your practice? Yeah, so as we just kind of heard from that teacher in Texas,

Systems aren't well equipped with identifying that the distress or the outburst, the flip table might actually be depression or anxiety, school refusal. A lot of times I'm working with school systems or attempting to work with school systems to help them recognize that

the young man that is deemed to have a quote-unquote problem, there's some underlying challenges here and how we as a society or how we as a school are engaging that young person might be misaligned. Is it fair to say that even just clinically the things that we screen for that would be indicative of mental health distress

are they not always things that boys actually present when they're in that kind of distress? Yeah, I appreciate you just said screen. So I can give you a true case example. 16, 17-year-old male, he comes in and he's looking upset visibly. He's mad, F this, F the world. I'm like, okay, what exactly happened? And in that day...

School safety officers identified that he had some substances on him. In that same day, he gets suspended for 10 days. In that same day, his mom is alerted that this is going to happen. And so he leaves the session. Mom comes in, and I'm like, I see that he's frustrated, but I can tell you that likely not just that he's angry, but he's probably humiliated. And he likely feels disgusted by himself that this has happened. Now, what's missing from...

the suspension that the school is unaware of is that less than 24 months ago, he lost his father by suicide. So you have a person that has a risk factor who's experiencing grief, who likely is depressed, yet when he shows up in school, that lens is not what they see. And so parents are stuck trying to find those services out in the real world or out in community where it's often actually pretty difficult to navigate. I think both how we see boys

and how boys then internalize how they're seen and acted out. Both of those are true. So in terms of being able to vulnerably say, "I don't feel good, I'm depressed, I'm hopeless, I'm scared," that language even is largely unavailable to young males. And where does that emotion go, given it has a certain compulsive energy? It comes out in behavior, and it can come out in ways that are aggressive.

It can come in in ways that are destructive, self-destructive. And we actually have to understand those dynamics in male development in order to offer boys the kind of helping hand that we want them to have. Hearing what the two of you have to say about, honestly, the unrecognized distress that many boys and young men can feel, it got me thinking about some of the boys that we met at the Haverford School in Pennsylvania.

And just kind of off the cuff, I asked them what they think society expects a man to be like. And I just want you to hear what their responses were. There's a stigma that to be a man, you have to be unshakable. I think the stereotypical one is like, you know, you have to be a stoic figure. Like nothing can scratch you. Like words aren't supposed to hurt. You're just supposed to...

just be a man about certain things. We have this thought placed upon us that we have to live up to the expectations 100% of the time. And the hardest part about it is kind of navigating those moments where we don't quite get there.

So Dr. Simon, basically all the students answered with what seems to be different versions of being a man means being strong. But the way we've socialized, boys, to them, strength means self-negation. Right. So to bring it back to clinical work, all the words you just heard the young men describe, that they have to be quote-unquote stoic, I can't show emotion. Or if I do show emotion, it has to be of the aggressive type. The young men that I engage with

A lot of times there is a significant lag between we start engaging and then they trust and then they open up. But then they fully recognize opening up in the session can only occur in the session because they know when I go back out in the community, I can't be who I am in this space, which is a very interesting thing.

space for me to be in because I'm trying to help them to understand, no, actually sometimes showing vulnerability is actually the strength that you should have. You know, there's a movie, The Mask You Live In, made by the Representation Project, and it's based around a quote from a George Orwell story. And the quote is, he wears a mask and he grows to fit it. As a developmental psychologist, that notion of growing to fit is

The image that society is telling us it wants us to be is so relevant to what those boys were talking about, the stereotypes and even the archetypes that greet them. Making space for boys to redefine what it means to be courageous, for example, or to be strong. You know, it takes great courage to be vulnerable. And those guys are talking about how they understand that. And they're having to do that code switching

from the popular culture to that peer counseling room in their minds every time they come across that threshold. If you're part of the small percentage of boys that fit the stereotypes, i.e., you play a sport, you're good athletically, you actually get to express emotions quite a lot, right? You're frustrated, you get to yell, you get to be sad because you lost.

Over that process, you are learning how to modulate and manage your emotions.

The challenge is there's a lot of kids that are not athletic and are going to make said team. And so what happens to them? Where are they learning how to have the volatility of emotions throughout a day or even in an hour? A lot of that gets lost. And so then sometimes we identify these as boys in the gap. The opportunity to practice emotional literacy and emotional competency, coding your feelings with language and showing them,

We don't give boys sufficient opportunities. Really making a systematic space for a boy to code his feelings with language and communicate them, that kind of practice and emotional competence is essential. That's why I think of it as ground zero in male development. It's the most important place to intervene, I think. But when it comes to culture making, when it comes to socialization, in a young person's life...

The major space, I would say, where that happens outside of their immediate family is in schools.

So I want to return to this question of what can we do in schools to help create a more emotionally welcoming space for boys? And we put that question to child psychologist Christopher Reigluth. And here's what he had to say. When kids are younger, parents are their bigger socializers. But as kids are older, peers become much more influential, especially in adolescence. But I mean, as young as kindergarten.

And so if schools inadvertently are the chief gender socializers of kids in ways that can be problematic, there also need to be interventions in schools that work against that. Well, I think we have a perfect example of that kind of intervention with the peer counseling program at the Haverford School in Pennsylvania. So Michael Riker, can you take us back to the genesis to what inspired you to start the program? So when I came in in the late 80s,

It was one psychologist to a thousand boys, grades kindergarten through 12th. And I recognize that that's not a great ratio in terms of prevention. So I thought, how can I help boys, young men, 16, 17, 18, help each other?

back 30-some years ago, that was a bold aspiration. And it wasn't easy at first. I was regarded as a real outlier, a lot of suspicion. And that's been one of the things that has changed most dramatically. The program has really gone from being on the outskirts of school life to absolutely in the center.

Bringing the peer counseling program to the center of school life at Haverford took time, and it took pizza. I think this goes for a lot of kids. I was hungry, and they had pizza in there.

Josh Williams is a senior at the Haverford School. He's clearly a social and academic leader. He's a star scholar and football player. The kind of young man who never fails to kneel down to a preschooler's level to give a high five, even though he towers over most adults when he stands up.

But even Josh discovered that he needed peer counseling. Going not because of the food, but because of some things happening with my parents. I was scared and I needed to talk to people. You heard Josh and four of his classmates role-playing a typical peer counseling session for us at the beginning of this episode. Meetings take place bi-weekly. It's open to 11th and 12th graders. And 60 to 70 boys voluntarily come each time.

Josh says he'll never forget his first real experience with the program, sitting face-to-face with Michael Reichert. I was trying to be strong. I didn't want to cry. I didn't want to, like, you know, I was looking down. I tried not to look people in the eye. And then he told me something. He said, Josh, you don't have to show that you're strong. And he, like, turns to the crowd and he says, don't you guys already know Josh is strong?

For Josh, this was a revelation. When I actually did start to cry, like, I was actually sad about all the things that I was talking about, but it was also because I was just kind of upset with, like, my inability. Like, as men, we're, like, in jail for our emotions. Like, we can't let them out. It just sucks.

When Josh Williams stands up there and talks about being vulnerable, he's heard the head of the upper school, he's heard the head of the school talk about those things a lot. Janet Heade is Haverford's upper school counselor. She's been there for more than 30 years and helped Michael Reichert start the peer counseling program. She's talking about how dedication to raising emotionally healthy boys goes all the way to the top of the school. The thing is, while being a giver seems easy,

I have found that it is often really hard. It is much easier in life to focus on ourselves and to find success in our own achievements. This was the case with my college lacrosse career.

That's Tyler Casertano, head of school. Earlier this year, Casertano gave what the school calls a reflection. It's a deeply personal speech, often given by upperclassmen, but sometimes by faculty in front of the entire high school student body. I work tirelessly, but only in service of my own performance. And I found strength in seeing my name on the stat line or seeing my picture on a website or in a newspaper.

But ultimately, I didn't have the courage, the strength, to look past my own ambitions and to define success through the achievements of my team and my teammates. And while it might have seemed in the moment like we lost all those close games because I didn't make enough plays, ultimately, it was because I didn't have the strength to invest more in my teammates than in myself. Again, upper school counselor Janet Heade. Boys deserve this opportunity to find the ability to relieve stress

the upset that they feel. You know, if you love children, you want to work with children, you should not want them to carry around this kind of distress. And what this program does more than anything is it relieves loneliness. Though it's a high school program, peer counseling is actually the culmination of programmatic efforts at Haverford to improve boys' mental health beginning in pre-K.

Reading is the focus in the younger grades. Tyler Casertano, the head of school, says the emphasis then changes in middle school. The cognitive gap between boys and girls is greatest in around seventh grade. And that's also when misogyny tends to come in. And so for us, what we really hit on with boys starting in middle school is their understanding of what it means to be a boy in ways that it might be limiting their growth.

The hope is this long-term emotional development leads to boys who are ready for the intensity and vulnerability required for peer counseling when they get to junior year.

Our kids come from all different backgrounds and they come into this space and they find out that the kid that they thought had a really beautiful life because they know how resourced that family is, that that boy struggles and matches their own. And that is how we create a brotherhood and it's genuine and we can count on it and it's like magic. But is it magic or is it money?

After all, Haverford is an elite private school. Annual tuition is in the $40,000 range. It does make one wonder if such a comprehensive initiative that spans a boy's entire K-12 years would be possible anywhere else.

Once again, here's senior Josh Williams. We talk about brotherhood like every single day here and it's like emphasized on the walls like it's everywhere. Like even if you take out peer counseling, like we have a culture here that's all about like supporting one another and like about love and trust and tackling peer counseling on top of that. And it's like it's a much different culture around here than it is at my public school.

Dr. Simon, since you work directly with the city of Boston, I mean, do you think that schools have it, practically speaking, the means to do these kinds of things? That's challenging. Nationally, there's an organization, Youth Guidance, that has a program called Becoming a Man. It's exactly what sounds like Dr. Reichert's group does. And they do that during school. So it is possible, but...

And certainly the funds that are needed are particularly in this time being truncated. But schools do have to be somewhat progressive in thinking differently.

Well, it's going to take a courageous school, Meghna, a courageous school and an honest school. I've spoken at schools all around the world, and I can tell you that there are some schools that have come to a point where they recognize that something's not working in relation to boys and that they have to go back and rethink boyhood and the way that they teach boys, the way that they coach them, the way that they engage with them in relationships.

And I'm afraid that number of schools may not be a majority yet. And I do think that in schools where that initiative to rethink who a boy is and what he needs is underway, in those schools we can do really, really important things that open up different trajectories for boys' imaginations. When we come back, can mental health efforts in schools overcome what's inculcated into boys everywhere else they go?

Our series, Falling Behind, continues in a moment. This is On Point. This episode of On Point is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

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Psychologist Michael Reichert said a few moments ago that improving teen boys' mental health can happen if young men are given time, space, and support to imagine wholly different, less constricted emotional lives for themselves. But when we visited the Haverford School outside of Philadelphia, I wondered whether imagination itself is enough to overcome social expectations that are inculcated into boys at the youngest ages.

That question became inescapable when Janet Heade, head counselor at the Haverford Upper School, shared this observation. One thing I do with my class of seniors is I always ask them if they can remember the time when they were first told that boys don't cry. And 100% of them can do it. And it's very often they were like less than six years old. It's often around kindergarten. These boys could all remember that. I don't think that happens to girls.

Dr. Simon and Michael Reichert, I hope you don't mind me putting you on the spot here for just a moment. But do you, Dr. Simon, have a recollection of when you first were aware of that? Yeah, and actually, I'll get personal here. So I have a son. He'll be four in May. And it's not uncommon that he cries. And despite what I do, who I see, who I treat, there was a time where I caught my own self crying.

Wanting to say, KJ, don't cry. I didn't, and I ended up saying, KJ, it's okay. Tears came down. But even for myself, and I have an older daughter, but I had the quick reaction of wanting to say, don't cry.

And so I bring that up in so much as it is so ingrained within our society. It's such a part of who we are that even, yes, we have to slow down and say, wait a minute, no, he's allowed to have this emotion. And let me actually help him process that emotion. When you asked the question, it immediately made me think about my own son. What went through your mind when you caught yourself wanting to say that as a father? Yeah, so...

That I've never said that to my daughter. Wow. Yeah. You know, he's four. And I think about the people that I see and want to do everything that's possible to help him recognize what he's going to feel. And I also know because he is a boy of color that there will be a point in time where he'll be adultified. There will be a point in time where people won't see him as KJ anymore.

So that's what came through my mind when I caught myself. Thank you for trusting us with that, Dr. Simon. And if I can say thank you for also modeling exactly what we're talking about in terms of creating spaces for boys and men to be able to speak freely. Michael Reichert, I'm not quite sure how to follow up on that, but what do you want to say?

I am so awed by Dr. Simon's courage there. I can say two things. One is that I'm quite a bit older than him and have been around a lot longer. And I find myself still, despite the fact that I'm teaching emotional literacy to high school boys, I have two sons and a grandson. I have been at this work as a therapist for 40 years. Despite all of that, I wish I could be as free as

as he exemplified. That's how deeply I internalized the prohibitions against being vulnerable. I do my best and, you know, I try to model emotional honesty for the boys in that peer counseling group, but it's swimming upstream. What you're describing to me

Doesn't seem very complicated. And by that, I don't want to oversimplify things. And yet you also said that it takes a certain amount of bravery in a school to want to engage in this process. Why? Bravery and I'd say humility, Meghna. But I agree with you exactly. I don't think there's anything about this that's rocket science.

You know, we have this crisis of masculinity today, and in many ways it's an opportunity to face up to the fact that boyhood, the transition to manhood, they've never worked particularly well. We've normalized casualties for generations.

And, you know, we're facing it now in a new way. And I think with that humility to go against the grain and try to give boys the kind of support and backing that lets them be fully themselves. Dr. Simon, let me turn to you. In producing this specific hour, we have been exquisitely sensitive to the fact that the example we're using at Haverford School is,

is a school that's a private, all boys, pre-K through 12 school. And so therefore, it's like, well, how much can we draw from an example like that that would be applicable to 99.999% of boys in this country? Forgive me for droning on, but I keep thinking of what Michael Reichert said at the beginning, that if the evidence of distress is so broad, there's truly a societal issue going on here.

That makes me wonder, like, will it also require some kind of societal or policy shifts even? Right. So right now in many schools, there are clinical social workers. There might even be a school psychologist. But we're still predominantly operating under the model of one for one. And the shift of, hey, we can do groups in the public sector. It's, wait a minute, why are the resources being used for a group?

Why is it my child and something else? So that's some of the subtle challenges that exist for the public sector actually embracing what is what I would call low-hanging fruit. Right. I mean, some are subtle and not so subtle, right? I mean, there has to be time created in very complex scheduling and logistics and having the educators available to do that, et cetera. But let me press on one little thing.

For even those guidance counselors and clinical folks who were there in the schools, you said something earlier about just even the way we look at how a boy expresses distress is interpreted differently. Yes. Right? It's interpreted down a path of discipline. Yeah. I mean, so that's also just a

a fundamental change that has to happen in the guidance counselor's office, in the classroom, in terms of what we see when we see boys acting out. Correct. So this broadly falls under the guise of stigma. So it really is a fundamental shift that... Because then you say, oh, wait a minute. Could this be something else? Is it not that he's just frustrated? And then you slow down.

Even for clinicians, sometimes we don't do very well. Okay, so that leads me to my last question. What can parents do? Meghna, I recommend three strategies. Number one, just simply carve out time. Fifteen minutes once a week would be a great start, where you just put aside all of your worries and your urgencies and your preoccupations and

and you pay attention to your son with delight. And believe me, he will notice. The second strategy is similar. It's also designed to kind of strengthen the young man's sense of being valuable and known. And it's simply carving out a time, an agreed upon time once a week, where that young man gets to choose the activity and you follow along. And then the third recommendation is for a model of discipline where the point is not merely to suppress the behavior,

but to help the young man strengthen his self-regulation by connecting what he's feeling with why he was misbehaving or misfunctioning. So it involves setting a limit, not with threat or irritation, but simply setting the limit saying you can't do that. And then sitting back and being prepared for whatever wells up in your son. That's how we strengthen self-regulation. Mm-hmm.

Well, Michael Reichert is founding director of the Center for the Study of Boys' and Girls' Lives at the University of Pennsylvania and author of many books, including Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys, Lessons About What Works and Why. Michael Reichert, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you, Meghna.

And Dr. Kevin Simon, attending pediatric psychiatrist at Boston Children's Hospital, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and Boston's first chief behavioral health officer. Dr. Simon, I can't thank you enough. Thank you. Thank you again.

Well, to help us wrap up this five-part series, I want to bring back Richard Reeves. He is the president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Richard, thank you so much for coming back. It's great to be back. First of all, I just want to hear some of your thoughts about this question of boys and mental health that we have been exploring this episode.

Yeah, it's very interesting how that's come up actually I think as a through line in a series that's been about education but it's really been about boyhood. Of course it's true that if you're struggling with mental health that's going to make school harder but it's also true that if you just feel like school is not working for you and just really struggling in that environment that's not good for your mental health either and so I do think there's this two-way relationship between how a lot of boys are feeling about themselves in the world and how our educational institutions are supporting them or not. Yeah.

The reason why I really wanted to bring you back to help us wrap up this series, Richard, is over the course of the many months that the whole On Point team has been doing the research, there's two things that have just continuously nagged at me. One of them, potentially the most robust criticism, is every time there's a gap of any kind, whether it be a racial academic gap or a socioeconomic one, and now we're throwing gender in there,

We point to schools as the source of the problem. But many, many educators for decades now have been saying, and I think rightly so, what we're charged with doing is fixing what comes in the door, meaning that there are certain things like poverty that schools can't fix. There's other things like, you know, the social mores of the communities they live in that they can't fix.

Can't that apply to this whole series that we've done here that schools could be saying schools aren't the problem when it comes to how boys are doing or feeling? It's the society they're growing up in. Yeah, I think it's a fair criticism. I think it's quite true that a lot of these issues are cultural. I think they're coming from outside the classroom. They're part of a broader set of trends.

But that doesn't mean that schools aren't crucial spaces that can help to address some of those problems. And I get it. I think the reaction, in fact, my own son is a fifth grade teacher. And so I'm very sensitive to this idea. It's the schools that are at fault. And I think that's just not true. But I do think it's true that making our schools better overall, which means supporting our teachers, for one thing, a lot more, would just be good for all our kids. But it turns out that it would be especially good for boys. Yeah.

So that's the way I like to reframe this is to say, look, I don't think anyone here is pointing fingers at schools. I do think what we're saying is schools with some changes, some positive changes, many of which you've been covering in this series, could actually be a big part of the solution. Well, and finally, Richard, there's this. When we were at Haverford, at the Haverford School, I also asked the young men that we spoke to there, like, what kind of man did they want to be as they left school and made their way out into the world?

And here's what they said. I mean, I think it's definitely someone who isn't afraid to definitely not bottle up emotions. I think definitely just a compassionate person. I think letting other people know that you care about them and showing them that they matter to you is pretty important. For me, like the man I want to become is a family man for sure.

being a great role model for my kids, a husband to my wife. So I don't know, I want to be a cook. I want to like, let me be the chef of the family. It doesn't have to be my wife. But I do want to give a shout out to my dad and my pops. He's really set the stage for me and what it means to be a man. One of the

biggest things that I've learned from him and I'm trying to implement myself is his unselfishness. He's going through a lot currently and he's helping others when he didn't have to.

I think when it really comes down to it, a man is someone who helps other people. Whether it's being a family man, whether it's being compassionate, whether it's the selflessness, I want to be able to and be comfortable and courageous enough to help other people and prioritize other people in the most ways that I can.

Richard, I am as moved now as I was when I was first seated in that room and listening to these young men. And I have to be completely transparent here. I was thinking of my own son. He's 10 years old now. And one of the things that has become so clear to me across these episodes is that

I would argue that most boys, that is the kind of man they want to be. That is their definition of strength, you know. But what I've also heard across all of these episodes, and you mentioned it in the very first episode, is we don't necessarily celebrate those things in boyhood. The way I think about this is partly reflecting on what you've just said. And actually my own sons, to be completely honest, my sons are all in their 20s now.

The way I feel about this now is that there's balance between the don't be like this, you can be much more open, et cetera. That's positive. But there's got to be something a bit special about boys and men as well, which doesn't take away from women and girls. And I think that's really hard to talk about right now. But I think that's the hunger. And what I like in those comments is this idea of service and relationships and helpfulness. I think at some really deep level,

Young men need to know that the tribe needs them. We need you to do stuff for us. We need you to serve us, help us, to be part of the tribe and an essential part of the tribe. And there's at least a little bit of that.

that is somewhat different to the ways in which perhaps the girls are going to be of service to the tribe too. And this is a really difficult conversation to have because everyone's quite rightly afraid of going back to the old traps. We don't want that, but we do need to go forward with a joyful vision of boyhood and draw out some of the things that on the average are a little bit different about boys and say, yeah, that's great as well. It's not just about what not to be. It's also about some of the things that are just...

really amazing about about being a boy and celebrating that just as we do girlhood too and and so I'm really hopeful now that we can actually get into a space where this can just be a much more positive conversation maybe even a bit more of a joyful one because actually you've got a son I mean boys are great if we allow them to be right and if we give them the space to be and I think that's an important part of the message too

Well, Richard Reeves, he's the president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Richard, thank you so much for joining us across this entire series. Thank you, Meghna. It's been a pleasure to be part of this. Thank you for joining us for this special series, Falling Behind, The Miseducation of America's Boys. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is On Point. On Point.