Father’s Day: Dads should let sons know there’s more to being a man than showing toughness

Father’s Day seems an especially appropriate moment for men to reflect on how they raise their sons (and daughters too, but that’s a matter for another essay). We are psychologists who specialize in the study of men and masculinity and here we share insights from our many decades of producing and reviewing the research on boys’ development and fathers’ behaviors.

Sadly, the worst insult you can direct to a boy is to suggest that he runs, throws, walks or acts like a girl. Thus, most boys learn at an early age to watch what girls and women do and scrupulously avoid those behaviors. And so, masculinity is largely defined as the antithesis of femininity.

This negative definition of manliness is an enormous problem, because there are a number of ways of being that are culturally defined as feminine, which, if adopted, would help boys and men gain access to useful resources to manage their lives. These include expressing warmth and empathy, revealing vulnerable emotions, nurturing children, and developing close relationships. These “feminine” ways have nothing to do with the biological fact of being female; they have everything to do with the ways we are pressured to behave based on our biological sex.

None of this means that boys must give up the things we define as masculine that are useful in the right circumstances: learning mechanical skills, the love of watching and playing team sports, or “toughing it out” when the situation calls for us to work through a little bit of pain to get the job done. However, the culturally defined feminine relational and emotional skills are the very ones that help us to be better husbands, brothers, friends, co-workers, and yes, fathers.

We have spoken to fathers who tell us, “I can’t be warm with my son; I’ve got to toughen him up.” The fact is that you can do both — by teaching him when a situation calls for toughness, such as when he’s tired in an athletic contest, and when it calls for him to set toughness aside, such as when he suffers loss or disappointment. Toughness does not help when your best friend moves away, when the family pet dies, when you get cut from the baseball team or when you want to become closer to someone else. These are inevitable events in a boy’s life, and it is critical for him to know that his father understands how he feels and is there to support him.

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Many of us grew up with emotionally stoic fathers who never seemed to be sad, anxious, disappointed or worried. Of course, they were all these things from time to time but rarely or never showed it. When we had these difficult experiences, we looked at our dads and felt like we would never measure up to him. This comparison between our inner experiences and our fathers’ appearances gave our dads a “larger than life” kind of image. Yes, we could look up to him, but it made it difficult to know him as a person who struggled from time to time. And this sense that our fathers always had everything together often led us to try to do things exactly as he did, including making the same mistakes. But most dads want their sons to be even better fathers than they were — to become “Dad 2.0.”

On this Father’s Day, we encourage all dads to raise their sons to express a full range of experience, not just the ones that the culture tells us are appropriate for boys — to reach beyond “man up” and into “human up.”

Christopher Kilmartin of Fredericksburg Virginia, is an author, trainer and activist in preventing violence in schools, the military and the workplace internationally. His latest book is “The Fictions that Shape Men’s Lives” (Routledge).

Ronald Levant of Copley is retired professor of psychology at the University of Akron. He is one of the key people responsible for creating the field of the psychology of men and masculinities. He was included in the Stanford University-Elsevier data base listing the top 2% of scientists in the world and served as the president of the American Psychological Association. His latest book is The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence (Oxford University Press, with Shana Pryor).

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Fathers: Encourage boys to learn personal, emotional skills