How can we guide boys through health, emotions and relationships in a culture that often tells them to “toughen up”? Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder, co-authors of Talk to Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Teens and Tweens Grow into Confident, Compassionate Men, share practical, real-world advice. We cover everything from navigating social media and digital culture to building friendships and emotional skills, giving parents, grandparents, educators and health care providers the tools they need to start and sustain meaningful conversations with the teen boys in their lives.
Featuring:
Christopher Pepper, award-winning health educator and author
Joanna Schroeder, journalist and author
Host/Producer: Carol Vassar
Announcer:
Welcome to Well Beyond Medicine, the world’s top-ranked children’s health podcast produced by Nemours Children’s Health. Subscribe on any platform at nemourswellbeyond.org or find us on YouTube.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Each week we’ll be joined by innovators and experts from around the world, exploring anything and everything related to the 85% of child health impacts that occur outside the doctor’s office. I’m your host, Carol Vassar. And now that you are here, let’s go.
MUSIC:
Let’s go. Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Today we’re taking on the topic of teenage boys, specifically the way we, the adults in their lives, talk with them about health, emotions, and relationships, how they talk to each other about those topics, and what it means to grow into adulthood in a tech-driven, social-media-soaked world. With me for this episode are Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder. They are the co-authors of the newly released book, Talk to Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Teens and Tweens Grow into Confident, Compassionate Men. Christopher is a veteran health educator who has spent many years in the public school realm listening to boys, what they really think, and what they really feel.
Joanna is a writer, editor, and a mom of three teens, two boys and a girl. And she’s been a leader in the public conversations on parenting and masculinity for years. Together, they’re going to offer us a roadmap on how parents, and educators, grandparents, and healthcare providers, too, can show up for boys in a culture where all too often they’re told they need to toughen up and go it alone. We begin our conversation with Christopher Pepper, whose background as a health educator in public schools is central to his work. So what are some of the most surprising things boys have shared with him when they’re in a safe space, talking about health, and emotions, and identity? Here’s Christopher Pepper.
Christopher Pepper, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
There’s a lot of news stories now about loneliness and about boys feeling like they don’t have a lot of friends, and I really see that playing out in reality in the lives of boys that I work with and that I talk to. It is pretty easy to go through your whole day as a middle schooler, as a high schooler, and not have substantive conversations about anything besides maybe sports or video games, but things that are at a pretty surface level. And I am surprised over and over again about how many boys say that adults aren’t really engaging with them, aren’t really curious about their lives, or talking to them about the things that come up as someone is maturing and going into adolescence. How often do we bring up questions like, What does it mean to you to be a man? Or what expectations do you hear about how men are supposed to be in the world?
And they say, “I guess no one’s ever asked me about that. It’s an interesting question, but nobody’s ever talked to me about that.” And I really think there’s a lot of room for us as adults to be engaging with boys, encouraging them to think deeply and richly about the kind of people that they want to be in the world, how they want to treat others, and providing a lot more guidance than we currently are. That’s the whole idea of our book Talk to Your Boys, is that there are a lot of conversations that are just missing that we need to start having.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Christopher, give me an example of a conversation you think is missing with the boys you work with.
Christopher Pepper, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Sure. I think a lot about relationships. I feel like often boys are struggling to make friends or maintain friendships, and that takes a lot of skills to know how to be a good friend in the world. We often don’t socialize boys really well to get those skills. They’re often a little delayed on developing those skills compared to girls. And one of the things that happens in the lives of many boys right now is that as soon as they get a cell phone, which is often in middle school, adults expect them to start managing their own social life. And that’s happening through texting. It’s sometimes happening through social media, through video games, and there’s just not a lot of adult guidance around that, and those conversations and communications can go off in several ways without an adult being in the room because it used to be there was a phone on the wall, you could hear a little bit of what your teenager was saying.
That doesn’t happen anymore. So you have to really work to figure out what’s my kid doing? Who are they interacting with? How are they treating those people? How are those people treating them? Do they have the skills to know how to manage their social life and invite someone over, make plans, all those kinds of things? And I think a lot of boys don’t have those skills and need some help in figuring out how to do all those, the things that go into having a relationship, either as a friend, romantic partner, or as someone who treats people well in the world. Taking care of other people is something that boys need a lot more skills to do well; they need more practice and they need more support.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And it sounds like the crux of this might be that cell phone and the digital world in which we now live. Joanna, I want to turn to you. Your writing often centers on the digital age and parenting in the digital age. Give me some feedback on what Christopher just said and talk about online culture and gaming and social media, how it influences the way boys look at themselves, the way they look at masculinity, and at their roles in the world today.
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
We have an interesting conflict happening right now where there seem to be two groups of parents, and one group says, “Kids can get the internet when they’re young and they need it for their social lives.” And the other group says, “No, they shouldn’t have it until they’re 16 or even 18, and I don’t want them to be introduced to that toxic world too early.” And in reality, like Christopher just said, so much of the planning and the socializing for our young people today happens in group chats or in direct messages or in other chat formats. And when we are making an enemy of technology or villainizing technology, sometimes what we’re doing is making our kids feel torn about whether they should be connected to their people or not ticking off mom and dad. And instead of guiding them through how to have these conversations in their group chats or in their DMs or on any format, we’re saying to them, “Get off your phone, stop doing that.” And that can leave them isolated from their peers.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Is that the only solution for parents? Because I don’t envy people who have teens these days. My kids are all grown. Getting off the phone is probably the simplest, maybe not the simplest, but the easiest thing to do. What other solutions are there?
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
I am a firm believer in introducing, and everyone’s going to know when it’s right for their kids, but introducing some sorts of social media and texting when the kids are pretty young, probably around sixth or seventh grade. And the way I did it with my own kids, the way I recommend for most people is to start by having an account on your own phone or your own device that your child can use and start getting that practice with making those relationships, with making plans, with making meaningful connections with people in their real lives so that they have the skills without having free access to the internet. So for instance, you might have an Instagram account on your phone set up for your kid once they’re 13 because that’s the regulation, and you might just let them look at it for 45 minutes a day, and you might have a tablet that they use at home that doesn’t have cellular, that you could watch their messaging apps and they could message with their friends from there letting them know that you’re going to supervise it.
And it’s not just supervising for somebody saying something inappropriate. You’re also supervising for helping your kids say, “Oh, hey, who wants to hang out? Who wants to meet down at the basketball courts? Does anyone want to meet at the coffee shop after school on Friday?” And guiding him in how to initiate friendships and also guiding him to look for cues that someone might need to have an important or emotional conversation, maybe a sidebar, a private DM with that person who’s in their group chat, so that they can learn how to be an emotional support to one another. These are just a few of the little things we can do to help guide them to use social media responsibly and turn those types of conversations into real-life friendships that they can build and people they can hang out with.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
So parental guidance really is still needed even in this digital world. I want to talk about the book, Talk to Your Boys. I’m curious, Christopher, what inspired you and Joanna to get together and write this book now?
Christopher Pepper, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Well, Joanna has been a public spokesperson about these issues around boys for a long time. And I was familiar with her work from the New York Times where she had a hit article about social media and how social media sometimes leads boys to extremist content, largely through jokes and memes and just saying to parents like, “You need to be watching out for what your kids are looking at online, particularly boys and particularly white boys who often get targeted with racist or xenophobic or anti-Semitic messages online.” So I was thrilled when I heard from Joanna. We met online and had some mutual connections, and we talked about this idea of writing a book together. I was able to bring in some of my background as a health educator where I’ve taught ninth grade health education classes for more than, I’ve worked in San Francisco public schools, and I’ve done that for more than two decades at this point.
And we teach about many of the things that are covered in the book. So in a health class in high school, typically you’re talking about healthy relationships, you’re talking about sexuality, you’re talking about eating and exercise and sleep, substance use, mental health, and all of those kind of things through a skills-based lens. How do you actually develop the skills to do these things? Well, it’s really a course on developing skills that you’ll need as an adult who, and for adolescents who are moving toward adulthood, getting them to practice some of the skills that they’ll need as they gradually become more independent.
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
What I saw as I work in digital publishing as well as being a journalist, and what I saw was that people knew there was an issue, but they didn’t know where to start. And people in my own life would say, “Oh, you’re writing about boys and the challenges that boys are going through. I have 500 questions about my own kid. What should I do?” And I happened to know a million experts through work and through my reporting, and I could go and ask them. And that’s when I was like, okay, this is what we need to do. We need tools. We need something someone can pick up and just turn to page 48 and just be like, “Here’s how I start this conversation that feels really awkward for me.” Or “Here’s how to start this conversation that I never had with my own father, and I don’t know how to do it. That’s what they needed. Something granular.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And something actionable. So give us a preview of some of these conversations, Joanna.
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Some of my favorite ones are about love, and that’s because we often don’t think about love when we think about teenage boys. We think about violence, we think about driving too fast, we think about drugs, we think about STIs, and all of that is important. But when we were interviewing one of our experts for the book, he brought up the point that no one had talked to him about how amazing it is to be in love and have true emotional intimacy where you can trust somebody and share your secrets and be a place for them to [inaudible 00:12:14] calm and a soft place for them to land.
And I thought, oh my gosh, nobody talks to boys about that. We talk to girls about that. We talk to them from when they’re small children about building beautiful marriages, but introducing the conversation of, “Have you ever thought about falling in love in high school?” Or is that somebody that you’re interested in who might be a good partner, or just someone to hang out with and have fun? And getting a little bit deeper so that they know that love and emotional connection are also an option for them, and they know that they can go to you for advice about how to build those connections and be better emotional partners to the people they choose to be with.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Christopher, do you think the love conversations are the hardest, or are there other conversations that you think might be harder of the 16 that you’ve identified?
Christopher Pepper, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Well, I think some things, basically our book is a guide to all the things that parents are reluctant to talk about. My experience is a lot of people say like, “Oh, I know I need to talk to my kid about that but I just haven’t figured out the right time to bring it up.” Or “I haven’t gotten around to it.” And often kids grow up fast, so often the kid is grown. They get to that point, and yeah, we never really talked about that. I hope they know what I think about it, but I guess I never really brought it up or I didn’t have a deep conversation about that. So a lot of what we do in the book is asking adults to make space for those conversations to do some personal reflection about their own values because people have different beliefs and values around many of the things that we talk about, but ultimately we close the book with a chapter on ethics and values.
And I want young people to have a sense of purpose in life. I think that really helps young people and people in general have a happy life is to feel like they’re needed, feel like they have a guiding purpose. And I also think it’s important to have a sense of ethics of how do you want to be in the world? How do you want people to talk about you? How do you want them to feel when they [inaudible 00:14:21] to you? And I often ask adults to imagine the kid that they have right now, especially adults who are feeling a little frustrated, which is a common experience with teenagers, is feeling exasperated, feeling fed up, like, oh, they’re not listening to me. But to pause and then think about that kid 10 years in the future or even 20 years in the future, and imagine them being out of your house.
They’re out in the world. How do you want them to be treating their neighbors, their partner if they have one, their kids if they have one, what kind of man do you want them to be? And then roll back and think, what are the things that I need to talk to him about right now, or that I need to practice with him, or that I need to show him, or I need to explicitly teach him so that he gradually gets to that place that’s my vision for how I want him to be in the world? And our book is all about those kinds of skills and has some specific conversation tips, like, here’s what to say around this topic, or here’s some ideas for how to bring this up. And there are tricky things. I think we have a chapter on racism, which is very challenging thing for many people to talk about.
We have several perspectives on that. We brought in a couple men of color who are experts on how to talk about this with boys of color to write about it because we know there’s lots of experiences around race and racism, and people have different ways of thinking about that and their lived experiences is quite different. But that doesn’t mean just because something like that is tricky to talk about or complicated doesn’t mean you should avoid it. It means you should try it. If a conversation doesn’t go well, that’s fine. You can revisit it. You can say, “I wasn’t happy with what I said yesterday, I want to try again.” Or “Can we come back and talk about that a little bit more?” The nice thing about raising children is that you have lots of chances for small conversations, and we really don’t want people to be giving long lectures. We want to have small, meaningful conversations regularly and keep those communication lines open.
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Well, I was going to say, you know what is revolutionary when we talk about this book with people, is the whole idea of talking to boys. People are like, “Oh, oh yeah, I guess we have to talk to boys.” Yes, we have to talk to boys. So it’s not even so much just one topic; it’s that when you open the book and you see a chapter on ethics and values, you see a chapter on pornography, you see a chapter on consent and romance and love, you’re like, “Oh, wait, I guess I do have to talk to them about it.” It’s even just introducing the idea of having emotionally connected conversations with adolescent boys that is wildly surprising to people, and hopefully just having the information out there that it should be something we’re doing is enough to get people going.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Absolutely. My curiosity brings me to this point. How do parents know when the moment is right? When does that opportunity appear, especially if it’s your first son or only son going through the teenage years? When do I open up and talk to him about love and romance? When do I open up and talk to him about pornography? What moments are going to bring that up? Because sometimes those don’t come up naturally in conversations with your parents.
Christopher Pepper, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Yeah, I think our book is meant to prompt people a little bit to say, “You need to be having these conversations.” And what I often hear from parents is like, “Oh, I’ll talk to him about if he brings it up, but I’m going to wait until he brings it up because I don’t want to make him feel uncomfortable.” And they’re not going to bring it up. Most of the time, they’re not going to come to you and say, “I really want to talk about this hard-to-discuss topic. Can we sit down and do that?” It’s going to be work for the parents, and it is going to be uncomfortable sometimes. So I think just acknowledging, hey, this is awkward. You might even say that to your kid. “This is super awkward, but it’s something that I’ve been reading about. It’s something that I feel like we need to talk about. So can I have five minutes to just sit down and get a conversation started with you about…?” Whatever topic it is.
You can lean on our book for some ideas to get those conversations started. Often, things in the news are a good way to pull in a conversation. So, “Oh, I saw that this celebrity got arrested for using this drug, and we’ve never really talked about that, but it is important for me to know that you understand what’s going on in the world right now and what kind of drugs are out there.” So we have a whole chapter on substance use with some ideas for how to talk about drugs today. It is important that you update that conversation because the drugs available right now are pretty significantly different than they were a generation or two ago. So the conversation that we as parents had as young people isn’t adequate for the moment that we’re in right now. We have to update those conversations, and we have to maybe do a little bit of learning about what’s going on in the world right now.
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
And one thing that has helped me was to learn how to pay attention to when my kid is giving me cues that he might need to talk. So he may not sit down and ask a question, but he might be in the kitchen clamoring about and opening the silverware drawer and just, “Uh, uh.” If you’re a mom, you know that sound from a teenage-
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Yep.
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
And it’s like something’s wrong, something’s on his mind, sometimes he just needs a snack. But even just standing up and saying, “Hey, what’s going on? Can I help you find something?” And then he might say something like, “I’m doing so bad in algebra, and it just pisses me off.” And he might have an attitude that makes you uncomfortable, and as long as he’s not being aggressive, but it’s cranky, he’s saying, “Pissing me off.” Phrases that maybe you weren’t expecting. He’s making a bid for your attention, and he’s saying, “Something’s wrong. I’m slamming the silverware drawer because something’s wrong and I need to talk to you.”
And then if you can sit down, then and do something while you’re talking, that can be really helpful. So if he’s clamoring around in the kitchen, and I think when I say this about teenage boys, a lot of parents are going to go, ding. “I do hear the clamoring around in the kitchen.” Maybe you grab a yogurt, you grab whatever it is that you might snack on, and then help him find something, and then sit down and be like, “Hey, sit down with me a second.” And then you’re eating and you’re talking, and it’s not just, I’m going to stare at you and talk to you about your grades and your study habits, and now you’re in big trouble, and I’m going to shine a spotlight on you like it’s an interrogation.
It’s really a conversation like you’d have with a friend. And that’s a huge thing. What are your kids’ cues? Mine, for some reason, are in the kitchen. So that, and we need to also ask them, “Hey, are you busy?” We get an idea, we need to go up in their room and have a conversation. And he might just be looking at his phone, but you can start a respectful conversation by respectfully asking, “Hey, are you in the middle of something important? Would now be a good time to talk?” Instead of just assuming it’s not important. And that’s getting you off on the right foot.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
As you would with an adult.
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Yes, exactly. And that’s what we say in our book is think about how you would go up to a friend or someone in the break room at work who’s on their phone. You wouldn’t just sit down and be like, “Let me unload all my problems.” Right? You’d be like, “Hey, is this a good time to talk?” Or like, “Hey, what are you doing? Is that important?” Whatever it is.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And we’ve talked a lot about parents using your book, and I’m assuming grandparents can use it in the same way. Pediatricians, nurses, school-based practitioners have a very different relationship with young men. How can they use the themes, Christopher, in your book, to build those relationships with the young men in their lives that they are serving, especially those who they feel might be struggling silently?
Christopher Pepper, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Sure. I think it’s so important that we try to engage with young men. I’ve been fortunate to be able to run a program where we have boys’ groups and young men’s, what we call young men’s health groups in our high schools and our middle schools, and they involve boys coming in together in groups and things that work to get them talking is to be curious about what they’re interested in, asking them about how they’re feeling, giving some time to check in about what’s on their mind. So that involves some real humanizing. You have to actually be an adult who cares about the young person in front of you and is interested in their lives, even if the thing that they’re really upset about or that they’re really worked up about or that they love and really excited about isn’t your thing. Maybe you don’t care about the trading card that they’re going to find at a convention over the weekend or the video game that they spent six hours playing to get to the next level, and they’re really want to tell you all about it.
You have to get interested in what they’re interested in. Teenagers, I think, get a bad rap as being boring or uninteresting, or there’s just a lot of criticism of teenagers, they’re loud, they’re obnoxious, and so on. I think starting by reframing what if we think about teenagers as people, people who are interesting and have their own ideas and can be really creative and can be really funny and fun and interesting people to be around and to spend time with. I think that helps a lot.
Sometimes getting peers in the room so it’s not just one boy with one adult, but having an interaction and observing what are they like with their friends can help a lot. So if you can be the parent who’s driving kids in a car pool sometimes, and just listen in to what they’re saying, if they’re playing video games and you can be in the room and fade into the background and just listen to what they’re doing, how they’re talking to people, what they get excited about or play with them, if you can get an invitation for that or have them explain why is this game so interesting, why do you love it so much? Getting them to tell you about the things that they love is a really good way to start engaging with kids before you start on any agenda that you have coming in.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Joanna, any thoughts on that?
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Yeah, I definitely think that the sample conversations and the prompts that we give in the book can be helpful to educators and healthcare professionals. Obviously, our educators are great at their jobs, and especially our school counselors are some of the most talented and helpful resources in our system. But just the idea of having a few examples that you can give a kid. For instance, we have some hypothetical examples of when consent becomes an issue in relationships with teenagers. I believe we have three examples of that that you can read to a kid, and they’re not graphic; it’s not adult-only material. It’s just something you might say to your kid, “Here’s this kid and here’s this kid and this is what’s going on. And in this situation, do you have any thoughts on that?” Instead of just being like, “Here’s the rules of consent.” Which can be very dry. We do a lot of storytelling situations that I think anybody can utilize, no matter how they’re talking to kids, in order to get the message a little bit more personal and relatable.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
As we close out today, I’m wondering, what can I do? What’s one thing that each listener can do to better support the teen boys, the young adult boys in their lives? Christopher, I’m going to go to you for this one first.
Christopher Pepper, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
Sure. I think, as we talked about earlier, a lot of teen boys are really looking for connection. They’re looking for adult guidance from people who care about them. We want to provide that. So really reaching out and letting them know that you’re available, trying to build connection with boys in your life, and you can be a parent to do that, but you don’t have to be a parent. And there is a lot of need for people to be big brothers, to be in a formal program, to be mentors, to be in an unaffiliated program, and just be like, “Oh, can I take your kid fishing on the weekend?” And there is a need for adults, and I think particularly for men, to step into that role of taking care of boys in our community and seeing that as a shared responsibility for all of us, and particularly teaching boys that men can be emotional and can have a wide range of emotions and express those and still be men.
And that is part of being an adult in the world is being able to have connections with people, to have friendships, and show all the emotions that you’re feeling. All those things are a part of being human, and they’re part of being a man. And we need to really emphasize that and make it clear to boys that we love them, we accept them, we want them to be part of our community, and welcome them with warm hearts.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And open arms. Joanna.
Joanna Schroeder, co-author, Talk to Your Boys:
One of my favorite things to do since I’ve been writing about boys for, I guess, almost 15 years now, is to check my own gut reaction to adolescent boys. And my own reaction used to be to assume they were up to no good. And I didn’t think this consciously. It was just conditioning. You see it in movies, you grow up, and get that message. And then as my own boys and their friends got to those adolescent ages, I was like, oh my gosh, these kids are hilarious, and they’re actually really, really sweet, and they are looking for somebody to look them in the eye and talk to them. Like Christopher said, men have a really important role here to model emotionality, model self-care, model having friends.
But anybody can just, if you’re waiting in line at a coffee shop and you would normally talk to the person behind you, and that person’s a teenage boy, you can talk to him, too. You can ask his opinion and see how he’s feeling. I like to make little jokes to any adolescent boy who’s around me, just like I would my own kid. Maybe a joke about the weather or some little thing. It’s like, hey, you’re a human. I’m a human. We’re here together. And our kids will live up or down to the expectations that we set for them. So maybe just every day in the wild, set a little bit higher expectation for what you think a teenage boy is going to be like.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Thanks so much to Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder for sharing a bit of time talking with us about talking to teen boys. And thanks to you for listening.
MUSIC:
Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Our podcast has a home at nemourswellbeyond.org. It’s a great place to check out past episodes, subscribe to the podcast if you haven’t already, subscribe also, if you haven’t already, to our monthly e-newsletter, leave a review, and maybe suggest an idea for future podcast episodes. You can leave a voicemail at nemourswellbeyond.org with your podcast idea to get it to us. You can also email us, [email protected]. The podcast is also available on your favorite podcast app or smart speaker and on the Nemours YouTube page.
Thanks to our production team for this episode: Cheryl Munn, Susan Masucci, Lauren Teta, and Alex Wall. Video production by Brit Moore, audio editing and production by yours truly. Next time, we’ll continue the conversation on demystifying today’s teenagers with New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Lisa Damour. Don’t miss it. I’m Carol Vassar. Until then, remember, we can change children’s health for good, well beyond medicine.
MUSIC:
Let’s go. Well Beyond Medicine.
