Joanna Schroeder is an author and media critic focused on issues facing boys. Her book, "Talk To Your Boys", a guide for raising happy, healthy tween and teen boys is out now.
569: How to Talk to Boys [What Boys Need Series #1]
Joanna Schroeder
Author and media critic Joanna Schroeder, co-author of "Talk To Your Boys", joins Hunter to explore how we can raise emotionally aware and connected young men in a world that tells them to “man up.”
They talk about emotional literacy, having tough conversations about sex, consent, and substances, and how to respond when boys are angry or shut down. Joanna shares insights on helping boys manage big feelings, stay engaged in school, and build emotional strength through connection and empathy.
Ep 569- Schroeder
Read the Transcript 🡮
*This is an auto-generated transcript*
Hunter (00:00)
You're listening to the Mindful Mama Podcast episode #569. This is the first episode in the What Boys Need series and today we are talking about how to talk to boys, because we need to talk to our boys.
Welcome to the Mindful Mama Podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have. And when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clarke-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting Course and Teacher Training. I'm the author of the international bestseller, “Raising Good Humans”, “Raising Good Humans Every Day”, and the “Raising Good Humans Guided Journal”.
So today I'm talking to Joanna Schroeder, an author and media critic focused on issues facing boys. She co-authors the book, “Talk to Your Boys”, a guide for raising happy, healthy tween and teen boys. It's out now and it is an excellent book. As you'll hear me say, I actually was really impressed by it. Love talking to Joanna. So if you are a parent of boys or you know some parents of boys, this is definitely an episode for you. So let's dive right in.
Well, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for coming on the Mindful Mama podcast. I want to talk about your book, which I'm really enjoying so much. Listener, you know, I never say this because I get sent so many books and there's so many books. My biggest pet peeve on books for parents is that they're padded with too much effing information and too many words and parents don't have time for that.
Joanna Schroeder:
Thank you for having me, I'm so excited.
Hunter (02:00)
They don't have time for that. this, talk to your boys is not, which I've like, thank, congratulations to you and Christopher Pepper for managing to do that. I'm very proud of you for that. I appreciate it enormously. That's the gift of working in digital media is I know how much time people spend reading. And it's not much. You gotta get in, you gotta get out. And that's the whole design of the book. I love that. So let's start with what inspired this work. You're talking about a boy crisis. A lot of us are talking about that, how boys are needing our help. So what does this mean, you know, from parents perspective? What do parents need to understand about boys right now?
Joanna Schroeder:
We need to understand that boys have all the same needs as girls. That when they're born and people tell us, you got a boy, it's going to be so much easier. Or they might say, it's really hard when they're little, but it's a lot easier than girls when they're older. That that sort of sets us up for a misunderstanding about what our boys actually need. It really presumes that they don't have emotional needs and that all we really need to do is kind of contain some wildness when it goes so much deeper than that.
Hunter:
Wow. Okay. So a lot of what we're seeing as far as, know, we're seeing men, right, who are really lonely in different parts of life. seeing that like, you know, 20 something boys are not going out. People aren't having as much sex anymore. Like there's a lot of loneliness. There's people suffering in a lot of ways. Do you see that as a correlation to the way boys have been raised?
Joanna Schroeder (03:40.11)
It's so interesting that you raised the sex because sometimes we talk about that data and every aspect of your question is so good and I want to talk about it. But I want to first talk about this data that came out a few years ago that said that young men are having less sex than ever before. And I think our immediate nature is to go, well, that's a really bad thing, right? Because we think boys and men, we should say men here because we're talking about adults. Men need sex to be happy. Well, yeah, people do, I think. So most people do. I think the way that we picture that when we talk about young men is that they need a lineup of women or a consistent girlfriend with lots of consistent sex in order to be happy. We don't really think about that with young women, right? Like we don't think like, “Well, I hope she's getting enough sex. Like, I hope men are turning her down”. And what I would ask people to challenge in their minds when they hear this data is maybe it's better sex, maybe it's more meaningful sex, maybe they no longer need to chase tail like they said when we were young in order to have affirmation about their wholeness and their wellbeing and how good they are. Maybe some of that is changing and that is what we have seen with some of the young men that we've worked with and interviewed is yes, there is a group of boys who are profoundly lonely. and the lack of sex reflects that loneliness. But there are also, there's been a bit of a role reversal in how boys and men see relationships. So with my oldest son's peer group, the boys tend to want relationships and the girls tend to want hookups, which is so different than when Generation X was young,
Hunter:
Yeah, you said your oldest son was around 20. So this is just to give people context.
Joanna Schroeder: I'm really lucky because my kids talk to me and we had a panel of more than 80 boys that we got to talk to for our book that are quoted throughout the book. It's like the boys now are thinking about a rewarding connection with sex and sometimes that looks like a hookup with someone that's very, has the same kind of mutual goal with them. And sometimes they wait for relationships in a way they never have before. And when w break free from this idea that men are horny monsters, then we make room for the fact that some of this less sex might be that they're waiting for more meaningful sex. Beautiful thing. And we're getting a little sidetracked on the sex thing. Yeah, sorry.
Hunter:
No, I love it. Who doesn't want to talk about sex? Yeah. But I read a book this summer about women in medieval times. was fascinating. It great. I wish I remember the title: dear listener, hit me up if you want to find it. it's and one thing I thought it was so interesting that you mentioned this idea that we have this idea in our heads of men are horny monsters. It was the exact opposite in the medieval times. They had this idea that women were just horny monsters, that like women were more animalistic than men, that they were always horny and like that completely changed. Yeah, obviously. At some point, I think maybe you're right with the Korean era and stuff, it really completely changed. And it's just like these assumptions that we have can be- completely taken the complete opposite assumption can can be made by a society just depending on what's happening.
Joanna Schroeder:
I have a degree in gender studies and so my original focus of my work was women. So I really focused on women and girls and I'm a media critic so I looked at how all these different images in the media affect girls while they're growing up. And I made a shift when I had boys as they grew up because not that I wasn't worried about girls but it was sort of like, lots of people have got this, girls are okay, right? Yes, we're always gonna continue supporting girls getting into areas where maybe they haven't before, making sure girls have lots of opportunity, especially focusing on girls of color and girls who haven't had as many opportunities, right? Nobody's talking about the emotional fallout and what I was seeing early with boys. And a lot of it came from this duality of girls need to be protected from the desires of boys.
And boys only needed to be protected from themselves. That we kind of had to control boys and protect girls when in reality, these are all children. talking about children. They all need structure. They all need guard rails. They all need scaffolding to grow up healthy. They also all need protection and guidance. So that was where my kind of revolution around 2012, I was like, “wait, boys need protection”.
Hunter:
Yeah, yeah. And so when going back to that idea then of the boy crisis, do you see a lot of parents as kind of still operating under the assumption that boys don't need protection, don't need as much guidance, know, do need to be maybe protected from themselves, don't need to be, you know, emotionally in touch or have to process feelings or things like that?
Joanna Schroeder:
Yeah, we do see that. We see that parents no longer want, there was a big shift around the Me Too era of, “we need to teach boys consent. We need to teach everybody that they deserve the right to give consent and have bodily autonomy. And we need to teach boys not to violate someone else's consent. We've got to stop boys from becoming predators”. Really important change of mindset in this country from girls being gatekeepers of their own virginity or, you know, sanctity and boys being their job was to penetrate that gate that they were using to protect themselves and stay pure. That changed. The conversation never went toward, okay, boys, let's talk about what you want in the future. Let's talk about, do you want to fall in love? When do you think you might want to have a partner? When do you think you might feel comfortable, you know, kissing or making out or having sex with a partner. What do you envision for your future? Do you think you want to get married someday and maybe be a dad? These were conversations we were having with girls when they got to dating age. We were asking them to envision the type of future they wanted and then to merge that with the way that they were dating now. And we were putting our values into that conversation. So while we started teaching consent to boys and thank goodness teaching consent to everybody is so important. Thank goodness we do that now pretty broadly.
And we stopped that boys will be boys, boys will be grabby and teasing and mean and condescending toward girls. We stopped doing that, but we didn't fill in a gap, which was what do you want to do with your body, with your relationships, with your life? And what are your values when it comes to sex and romance?
Hunter (11:06)
Stay tuned for more mindful mama podcast right after this break.
Well, this is so interesting and your book is about so much more even than sex and romance. yeah. You have this big emphasis on emotional literacy. So if we're thinking about this, if the listener is thinking, “wow, this is amazing. I want to these conversations with my kid”. I imagine there are ways that we need to, a) parents can start to shift our mindset about boys, which you're talking about already, like boys have needs, boys have needs scaffolding and help and all those things, shift our mindset, but also maybe start to set up a way of parenting and interacting with boys, even when they're young, so that they can be more self-aware, more grounded in positive relationships when they're older.
Joanna Schroeder:
So I'm so glad that you asked this question because it's best to start when they're young, like you want to raise good humans. You want to start in talking about values and building empathy when they're little, for sure. That doesn't mean that someone who's child right now is 15 can't pick up my book or even your book and look through these guides that are out there to try and find ways to help them. But when they're tiny, building empathy into your conversations is so key. And that can be done as easily as like if your child walks up to their pet and they're patting them too hard or trying to grab them as little kids do. Not just saying we don't hit the dog, but like, you know what? That really hurts Sandy when we do that. Sandy's ears are sensitive. if I grab Sandy's ears like that, that really hurts her. And I think she feels sad and maybe even scared.
And you don't have to lay it on them every time like that, but having a conversation like that every once in a while, those sorts of little things, not just the rule, don't hit Sandy, but like, how does Sandy feel when we do that? I bet she feels scared. asking, asking them to get into someone else's shoes. And it is easy to do that with siblings, friends, and, and pets when they're little. And then as they get older, we just continue that. So I have seen people become-and gentle parenting, as much as some people disparage it, has been great at inviting parents into nurturing little boys as much as we nurture little girls. So I see great change in that direction. What I also see and what we saw when we were researching our book is that parents stop doing that at some point, maybe 10, 11, 12, 13. A lot of times it's when your boy starts to show those signs of adolescence.
And you know, when they start to get a little body odor, when they start, um, you know, there's a way, if you have kids that you've watched grow up, they go from, uh, walking and moving like little kids kind of bebopping around, you know what I mean? They're, they're kind of floppy and unaware of their space. Yeah. They're just, they're just, yeah. Lucy goosey all over the hallway. They, and then somewhere around, I don't know, second semester, fifth grade is when I noticed it in the classroom it's like, “okay, we are fifth graders”. And sometimes it happens in sixth grade, every kid's different, where they start carrying themselves differently. It's so subtle. voice guzzles, the voice cracks, you get the funny little mustache, you get a little bit of that initial oniony body odor. And we subconsciously, it seems like at that point, shift away from talking to and cuddling and emotionally connecting with- even those parents that did that so well when they were four and five and seven and eight. It's like something happens and we think they don't want that. They don't want it. And they do, they do want it. It just might change forms, you know?
Hunter:
Yeah, I mean, I guess it makes me think that, you know, the parents and the boys, we are all in this culture that is very, that has very, very specific messages for boys and is very, very gendered. You know, I think more so than when I was a kid. Like it's, think marketers have figured out if you divide by gender, you sell more. we are more gendered than we ever were, which is kind of odd for like this. You and I are the same age. just go. In the early 80s, was like we all wore the same burnt orange overalls. And the Lego ads that had girls had a girl in overalls and a t-shirt. It's such an iconic image right now. Yeah, yeah. That the little girl's holding a Lego construction that's just bricks of Legos, which is what children actually usually build when they're playing with Legos. And you could swap the hairstyle, right? And it would be a boy. And now I love Lego friends. They're great.
Joanna Schroeder (18:16)
Now we have Lego friends and Legos and it is not easy to get my daughter to buy regular Legos and it is not easy to get, it was not easy to get my sons to buy Lego friends. Even though one of them loved cats and there were all these Lego friends that's with cats and cat cafe and kitty vet and it would be like, no mom, that's for girls. And I was like, my child, even my child saying that, they they pink washed the heck out of it and they really created a binary in ways that has not served, that has not served our kids or our culture, I don't think personally.
I mean, I remember as a girl, felt fine to be like a Tomgirl. That was very accepted and things like that. But so in, to go back to, know, this idea of our emotions and feelings, you may be raising a boy and having them get in touch with their feelings and asking them to think about how their touch feels to Sandy the dog. And, and, know, do you think those words, how they might've felt to your friend and whatnot, but then
We're all in a culture that has like, you know, these, the male role models. mean, all the male like movie stars are so jacked right now and everybody's got huge six pack abs and the culture of the world is telling them to be tough and to man up. think even more so than it ever was in some ways. So in a way, maybe we're all just like being influenced. We can't help probably, but the influence by this culture that has a very definite message about what it means to be a man and to be masculine. And so it seems like it's a tough road for a parent to counter that in some ways and like, do you want to, do you want your, you you don't want your boy to not fit in, et cetera. There's a lot of tricky questions around this.
It is. I remember watching my boys for the first time, greeting with a high five, you know, with their friends. And then eventually they were greeting with a handshake, half hug. And they were all of these little subtle things where they were starting to act like men and not boys. And it's like, you know, fifth grade, seventh grade, 10th grade, and watching how they were learning to be a man and treat other men the way men treat men. And I think a lot of times the reason that we back off and sort of stop parenting and stop encouraging empathy with boys around 13 is a lot of times it is the mom doing the emotional training in the house for the kids. we sort of go, that's a language I don't understand. Like when they do the high five or they do that half hug with the hard slap on the back, it's like, he's doing that like his dad or this is what men and boys do and we back off and one example might be say you're driving, you know, you've got four 15 year olds in the back of your car or 14 year olds and they're talking and they're giving each other a hard time, right? You know how they will be like, yeah dude, like that girl burned you so hard or like she just rejected you or like, “yeah, Trevor can't kick a ball at all. Have you seen the way he punts? Like, whatever, okay?” This kind of thing that they do back and forth and they're all laughing. And we think we wouldn't have done this. Like if we had girls, we'd be like, ladies, this is getting a little mean, right? But we're like, this is a culture I don't understand and maybe this is normal and I don't know if I should interrupt and I'm just gonna back out of this, right? So I don't think we should interrupt how the boys are interacting necessarily, but that is an opportunity for a mom to pull the kid aside or a dad. think the dads are better at handling it in the moment only because they, they're not afraid that they're doing guy culture wrong. And just being like, Hey, you know, I heard what you and Chris were saying about Trevor. And like, I know Trevor was laughing, but I, I wonder if that actually like hurt his feelings. Cause I know you guys were just trying to be funny and it's like how you guys bond or something, but I was worried about Trevor's feelings in that moment. Bring it up. Don't just assume that there's a secret language that they all follow and that Trevor's feelings were not hurt. You know what I mean? we can do that and have that conversation. We don't have to harp on it and make our kid feel like bad person. But we need to keep doing that once they start acting like tiny men too. Not just, you know, that kind of gender neutrality of a five, six, seven year old.
Hunter (22:52)
Okay, I like that. I appreciate that sort of permission, implicit permission to say, go in and talk about it. But you talk about how boys do want to talk to us, even when they stop becoming, you know, there's this point when you have little kids, you think, my God, if my kid will just like leave me alone. But then all the parents of teenagers know the kid is going to leave you alone for a little while. There's this point, right, where it stops and they become more reserved and you have written and talked about how our boys still want to talk to you, even when they're not, when they're not making those over gestures. So talk to parents about how they can kind of over, you know, when they should try to overcome that, that, you know, that pulling the hoodie tight and quietness, right?
Joanna Schroeder:
Yeah, anyone who has an adolescent knows that it's like, it feels like they get in the car one day and they are just chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter, chatter. And you're like, it's starting again. And then it feels like it's just a few days later and they get in, in that hoodie string goes and they're like this, I got the AirPods, AirPods, phone and it's so quiet. And you are like, I know teenagers do that. The big trick is to remember, yes, a lot of teenagers do that, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the way that you and your child will relate forever. And that is a conversation to have when they come home or when they settle down in the car after school, because sometimes they do that because they're overwhelmed. There's so much their brains are trying to take in during adolescence. Sometimes they do need to get in the car and close it all off. Sometimes I need to get in the car, wish I had a hoodie that I could tighten around and put in my AirPods and forget the world.
But then it's like, tell me about your day. I'm curious, like making a snack and sitting down together, or even better, start a relatively easy video game together and talk while you're playing the video game and just be like, what's going on at school? Like, what's new? What's overwhelming? Who's getting in trouble these days? You know, there's a lot of, we have a million questions and prompts in our book, but, or if what he likes to do is play tennis, you can go hit tennis balls together, just loosely down to the public courts and get them moving. And if they don't naturally want to move, you can save them. We're going to take a walk. We're going to take a walk around the block, Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 6 PM or something, instead of time when they can walk with you. Because when they're moving and they're not eye to eye and so intense, a lot of times they do start opening up. And ultimately it's just about hey, I'm more relaxed when I've had a little walk before dinner. I feel like it'd be good for us. It'd be a good chance to talk or just walk. That kind of little thing feels very foreign with boys because we think they don't wanna talk to us and they may even think it's weird to talk to us, but we just give them the opportunity. And then the key when they start talking is to do our very best not to judge them: they're gonna say stuff that's weird to you because they're teenagers. They're gonna have opinions that are different from yours. They're gonna observe stuff that doesn't fall within your value system. And that's literally why we wrote the book because what do you do then? What do you do at that moment when you don't know what to say? And even when you're getting like a little bit irritated and you gotta have tools.
Hunter:
Yeah, I've often said, you kind of have to date your teenagers, whether they're boys or girls, you know, like, kind of like you have to date your spouse, right? Like if you're, you want to be in a long-term relationship that is connected, right? You kind of have to reach out to them and date them. And that means like, kind of see what they like to do and do some of the things they like to do. And you're describing this essential attitude of mindfulness, which is like to practice non-judgment, practice curiosity, right? To kind of notice, these judgmental thoughts are rising and instead try to get curious, know, listening and reflecting back to them what they're saying kind of, you know, “wow, it sounds like as if you might with a friend, that sounds frustrating or it sounds like you guys really disagreed on that or whatever it is that they're saying, have this reflection back and hold your tongue a little on the opinion.”
Joanna Schroeder:
Yeah, and that can be so hard. I'm so glad that you said that about mindfulness and being aware of your internal narrative. Because if your generation acts are old or millennial, you may have grown up in a time when you didn't feel comfortable around the boys in your school, probably middle school and high school. You may have grown up in a time when you had to be very protective of adolescent, you know, from adolescent boys, you had to have your guard up. And sometimes when we slow down and we pay attention to what we're feeling when we're interacting as moms with our teen and tween boys, sometimes something can come up. I remember when these types of boys made me really uncomfortable. remember feeling really unsafe with the way that they rough house next to me or the way that they shouted really loud, like, whatever it is, when we start listening to ourselves in those moments, instead of jumping to they're doing it wrong, or jumping to I gotta get away from this kid, sometimes it can be, well, this is something from my past that I'm bringing forward, or this is a prejudice that I have that I'm bringing forward. That mindfulness is so key with tweens and teens, and you do need to be curious about it. Not just curious to them. One of Christopher's great lines is, get curious, not furious. It's just so cute and it works so well. But also curious about ourselves. Why is this making me so mad?
Hunter (29:21)
Yeah, we have a framed piece of calligraphy in our stairwell that says, “Are you sure?” It's really, really helpful. And I think that that's a great way to kind of think about this, but you're saying, I just want to summarize for the listener, because you're saying like, make it a point to have these conversations, even if you're not joining them in something they're liking to do. Say, let's go for a walk three times a week. Be a persistent, be pleasantly persistent in dating your kid and connecting with them. And don't just kind of give up on talking to them. That's kind of like an underlying thing that I'm hearing here- wasn't a lot of research into how to communicate with tweens and teens, right? Little kids, toddlers, how to use language, that's pretty well covered, but we went looking for it. What's the best way?
Joanna Schroeder:
And what we found was there wasn't a lot of framing for that. So we actually turned to the relationship experts. It's great that you said that about dating. So we looked at what the Gottman said and a big thing is you have to watch for bids. So the way that the Gottman's from the Gottman Institute framed it was when you're married to somebody and you say your partner's looking out the window and they say, what an interesting bird. If you just sit there silently, that's an unmet bid, it's unanswered. But if you just say something is like, what kind is it? Or you have noticed a lot more birds lately or what color is it? Just any kind of answer- you have met their bid for attention and the Gottmans discovered that marriages tend to fall apart when people aren't meeting each other's bids. We were like, Christopher students, the boys that I've worked with, they're making bids for their parents' attention that the parents are often not answering. Because we don't kind of speak necessarily the same language. So when we start looking for like, what is my kid doing when he wants to talk?
Hunter (31:07)
Ding ding ding.
Joanna Schroeder (31:27)
He lingers in the living room longer. Normally he would have gone upstairs and started homework. What's that about? Or he's come and he sat in the couch in my bedroom while I'm folding clothes instead of going to his own room. My own son tends to be very rough with the silverware drawer when he's got something going on. He opens it loud, he wrestles around, he closes it loud. And that was where I had to be mindful of my own reactions. Like, is so low, you it's like, okay, what's going on?
Thumbs up. That's a bit. And you know, another thing like you said, reflective listening. Like, I, you know, I heard that someone said something about how you play soccer, I can imagine that might've been really upsetting. How did you feel? Reflecting what you heard and then making sure that you've got it right. That's the imago therapy model for relationships. And we talked to Harvel Hendricks who invented that model and I was like, what do you think of useness for kids? And Harvel's like, I use it with my kids all the time. I still use it with my daughter and she's sporty. So it's great to have these sort of tried and tested tools and that's what goes through our book. You do need to keep making the effort to understand this person. And maybe you understood them so well five years ago, but they still want to be understood.
Hunter (32:52.182)
Stay tuned for more mindful mama podcast right after this break.
Yeah, they want to be seen and heard and understood and accepted. Yeah. And so that's a good segue to even thinking about all those different big emotions that come up. You've written about anger, you start to buy your son a bit of silver, and when a boy's angry, slamming doors or snapping at siblings or whatever. What do you recommend parents do in that moment to help him regulate and then reconnect?
Joanna Schroeder:
Well, if you're listening and you have little kids, there are a few things you can do right now to start helping your kids handle anger. So my favorite thing to do is to model how I handle anger. And I have found that this works best. I live in Los Angeles. When I'm driving and someone cuts me off and I start to feel road rage, I am observing myself and I say it out loud, man, that guy cut me off and I'm so mad right now. I'm so mad and I am so tempted to flip this guy the bird. You would say that with an older kid, obviously. So tempted to yell at this guy. And I'm not going to because it doesn't get me any worse. So take a breath. Okay. Feeling less angry, we should put on a fun song. So it's like, we do those things. Every time you're driving that you don't flip someone the bird, it's because you felt the anger, you observed it in yourself. You process through it and you went on with your day. So when something like that comes up in our lives, no matter how old our kids are, we can age appropriately, tell them how we're processing it so that they have a model. That's a great thing to do if your kid is making you angry. We start modeling that and it is important for dads, men to model this for their kids too, not just us. So that and then with teenagers, we need to recognize anger is a very normal part of being a human being. They are feeling more anger now as they get older and that is normal. What is missing with teenagers is often the guidance for how to handle their anger. Oftentimes they feel anger and then they feel ashamed of their anger because they don't know what to do with it. It doesn't seem right. They don't want to be doing that. They don't want to yell at you. They may see that you're afraid or you're pushing them away and their shame that comes in shame is one of the worst emotions that we can let our kids sit in because often that just turns into more anger and more aggression.
So recognizing the anger, letting them feel angry, it's okay for them to be angry at you: “You can't go to that concert on a Thursday night. I'm sorry, you have a test on Friday and they're angry”. They're- “you never let me do anything”. And they may say things that if a partner or a fellow adult said, you might be like, you know, that's unkind. Take a breath. I totally get why you're angry. It must, I can imagine it is so frustrating to have something that's so important to you and then just have someone else tell you you can't do it. And recognizing that and see if they can come down with you and like, just take a breath. I totally get that you're angry and I understand.
Hunter (38:10)
Yeah, yeah, turns the emotional temperature down. That's research by Dr. Dan Seals talked about how like how that just recognizing naming the emotions, name it to tame it, just turns the all the cortisol, all the emotional temperature down in that. you're what you're describing, of course, to your listener requires a lot of emotional regulation from you. Yes. And so yeah, you practice it in that moment. You name it for yourself. “You're really upset. I'm feeling a lot. Let's like, yeah, this is a lot right now. You know, maybe it doesn't come out in the perfect words, but you practice with your kid and you show them that.”
Joannna Schroeder:
And the gift of tweens and teens is that you can say more about your experience than you might with another younger kid in that. If he's slamming that silverware drawer, and if that is triggering to you, then unlike a five-year-old, you can say, you know what, dude, I gotta tell you, I know you don't mean it this way, but that reminds me a lot of when grandma and grandpa used to fight and throw things. It was really scary for me. I know that that's not what you're trying to do, but that's the experience I'm having when you do that. Now, I don't have that, so I just laugh when my son does it, because I know what it means. But if that is authentic to you and you're having that with an older kid, you can say, I know you're angry, let's find another way for you to let me know, because this one's really hard on me. It affects my day. And that's okay to do with an older kid. That's the gift of older kids.
Hunter (39:43)
Yeah, it gives them an opportunity to show empathy, show compassion, show that they care about you. they need to have opportunities to show that they care about the people. Yes. You talk about ways, there are so many great ways to talk about tricky things in this book. You talk about education, motivation, substances. We started the conversation talking about like sex and consent. If you need to have a difficult conversation with your kid at whatever age with your boy, are some of the ways that you recommend that parents come in and do this?
Joanna Schroeder:
Yeah, the number one thing is too, it's so fun you said that it's like emotional regulation for the parents. Our book is basically an emotional regulation book for parents. It's about making a plan for how you want to behave in triggered moments and in tough moments so that you don't just, you know, you're not just acting right from your gut and your instincts and that like we like to call it the crocodile brain.
One of the most important things we discovered from our boys panel, and it meets right up with research, is that too often we charge into their space and tell them when we're going to have a conversation. And with adolescents, that is not a good feeling. They often feel disrespected and violated. Now we could argue all day whether they should feel that way or it's your house, you can walk into their room whenever you want. Okay, that's a different conversation. But if we want them to open up to us, the first thing we need to do is respect their time and space and their emotional headspace, how much bandwidth they have. So this is really easy. You do what you would do with a friend. If I'm calling my best friend, I'll say, hey, do you have a second? need to talk to you about something important. I wouldn't call her in the middle of her work day and be like, you're not going to believe this. I'm so mad.
Actually, I might do that with my best friend, but with most other people, I probably wouldn't. I don't even do that with my husband actually, because I know how that affects him at work. So just knock on that door. Hey, I need to talk to you about something. Do you have a minute? Don't presume that when they have their phone up and they're doing this, and I'm blocking my face on purpose because it feels so closed off, right, when you walk in, that they're doing nothing. Yes, they might be scrolling social media. But they also might be texting with a friend who's having a hard time. They also might be checking their assignments on Google Classroom. They also might be flipping through flashcards studying for their history tests. There's so much they do on phones that we did not do. We would have gone to the library for, you know, we would have made flashcards. My kids look at their flashcards on their phones. So don't presume what they're doing is unimportant. Don't presume they can talk to you right at that moment and ask, “do you have a minute”?
A lot of times they'll say, “ugh, what is it?” Instead of getting mad about the attitude, just be like, “oh, it's not a big deal, but I need to talk to you about”- and say what it is. “I need to talk to you about going away to grandma's this weekend. I need to talk to you how you left your backpack right in front of the door again and I tripped and it really hurt”. Say what it is, give them a little preview or it's nothing. It's a tiny little thing. It'll just take a minute, but let me know when you're done. These things are all so simple, but for some reason we just don't do this with our kids. We just impose our will. And then if it is something difficult, we say, you know, it's kind of a big deal. It is kind of a big deal. I definitely want to have like 10 minutes to talk to you about this because it's serious and I want to make sure that we neither of us are distracted. If you get news from the from the principal school that your kid was defacing property. Yeah, that's a big deal. And if you are a parent of a middle school boy, you should know that happens a lot.
Okay, it's unfortunate, but it is a strange thing right now where they deface property and they take the deals of it. anyway, if you get that call, you, it will be a serious conversation and your kid does need to be face to face with you and your kid does need to be held accountable for that. But we do want to have that conversation in a way where he can hear our, our words and our intention, which is to help him do better and to create empathy for the people that are impacted by it. So I like to say this is really serious any 10 minutes of your time, then they know it is what they're getting into.
Hunter:
That's great, yeah. And they can't avoid it forever: “No, I don't have time right now”.
Joanna Schroeder (44:28)
I need to do it after dinner. Yeah, after dinner, before dinner. We can set a framework and still help them feel like they have a choice. I need to talk to you in the next few hours. I need to talk to you before bedtime. I need to talk to you before you go to Chris's house, whatever it is.
Hunter:
So if you're a listener with a boy, from what I'm hearing from you, Joanna, is that these are awesome conversations that any parent can have that moms should have with boys and things that we should practice and kind of shift our mindset on. But also, I'm really hoping if you're a mom and you are in a partnership with a man who is your child of your parents or stepchild of your parents, like this could be very impactful, I imagine, coming from the adult men.
Joanna Schroeder:
So important, and you know, I had this idea for this book many years ago, and I needed, I knew what I needed in a co-author. I needed a man who's a dad raising boys who works with boys. And that's Pepper, thank goodness for him. And Christopher very specifically wanted to write a book that dads can read. And so many times when women are writing books, we subconsciously, we can't avoid it, write a book for moms. And Christopher was very dedicated to that purpose. It can be hard to listen to a whole podcast about parenting if you are a man, because you were raised in a culture where everyone talks about, feel like things are being talked about way too much. But that's how we wrote our book, simple and clean and clear. And here are some ideas. And want people to bring their own values. And that's the other thing is some people have said, well you want, what did someone say? You're trying to raise boys to be defective girls, that boys are seen as defective girls. And I think in a culture, in our culture, that was part of what inspired the boy crisis was the almost like boys are broken and girls are doing great. So that's not what we wanted to do. Boys are not supposed to be like girls. They're not defective girls. They are their own individual creatures. They're wonderful. We love our teenage sons and we aren't trying to turn them into any type of boy or man. We want them to be who they are and if that's captain of the football team, that's fantastic. If it's theater club or anything else.
Hunter:
Yeah, I love that attitude. And so I hope the dads are listening. Good for you if you made it to this spot. Yay. And it is such a great book as far as being able to open it up and find what you want to talk about. know, talking about school, talking about emotions, talking about sex, sexuality, and sex stuff. there's, all there. It's all very, very direct. And like I said, I really appreciate that. But to close in the spirit of mindful parenting, what's kind of one small intentional change parents could make this week to foster more openness and dialogue with their boys?
Joanna Schroeder (47:44)
There's so many different things, it's hard to choose just one. I think pausing to consider our words before we say them, even as our kids get older, even with tween and teenagers who may not do the same for us.
Hunter:
I like that. Just kind of consider the impact of what you're saying. Yeah. I like that. Well, Joanna Schroeder and Christopher Pepper's book is “Talk to Your Boys: 16 Conversations to Help Tweens and Teens grow into Confident, Caring Young Men”. It's out now wherever books are sold. Joanna, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and for sharing your wonderful direct, you know, insightful way of communicating with all of us. I think it's really helpful and I know all the parents of boys will be appreciating it, making that impact. So thank you. Thank you for coming on.
Joanna Schroeder:
Thank you anytime.
Hunter (48:58)
Hope you enjoyed this episode. Parents of Boys, join us. And Christopher Pepper's book is really excellent. I highly recommend it. You know I don't always say that about books. I mean, maybe you don't if this is your first episode hearing it, but I don't. And yeah, this is going to be part of a What Boys Need series. In the next couple of weeks, we're going to have three episodes on What Boys Need, including talking to Dr. Karen Aderson and Dr. Judy Chu. So if you are a parent of a boy or know some parents of boys, get them to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any episodes of this. And there's other episodes, of course, on talking to boys. In the past, boys and men issues have come up over the years. In episode 510, we talk about what boys need with Ruth Whipman and episode 395, we talk about taking men and boys out of the man box with Todd Adams. So check out those episodes. And I hope this episode has helped you. We'll help you with your boys, boy or child, whatever, you know? And yeah, I'm wishing you a great week. I hope this has helped. And if it has, help us continue to make the podcast by letting people know that just is what we need to spread the word around. So wishing you a great week. So glad you were able to listen and I look forward to talking to you again real soon. Namaste.
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