This rebroadcast originally aired on April 18, 2025.
Teenage boys are experiencing increasing rates of loneliness and suicidal thoughts — which is having a direct impact on their achievement in school.
How can schools address that?
It’s the final part in On Point’s special series “Falling Behind: The Miseducation of America’s Boys.”
Guests
Michael Reichert, applied and research psychologist. Founding director of the Center for the Study of Boys’ and Girls’ Lives at the University of Pennsylvania. Author of many articles and several books, including, “Reaching Boys, Teaching Boys: Lessons About What Works—and Why” and “How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men.”
Dr. Kevin Simon, Boston’s first Chief Behavioral Health Officer – focusing on immediate and long-term strategies to support youth mental health. Attending pediatric psychiatrist and addiction medicine specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. Assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Richard Reeves, president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Author of the book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters and What to Do About It.”
Also Featured
Josh Williams, 18-year-old senior at The Haverford School.
Finn Kelly, 17-year-old student at The Haverford School.
Semaj Lee, 19-year-old senior at The Haverford School.
Amir Johnson, 18-year-old senior at The Haverford School.
Finn Tierney, 17-year-old senior at The Haverford School.
Tyler Casertano, head of school, The Haverford School
Janet Heed, counselor, The Haverford School.
Christopher Reigeluth, child psychologist and associate professor at Oregon Health & Science University. Author of “The Masculinity Workbook for Teens: Discover What Being A Guy Means to You.”
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: 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?
BOYS [AMBIENT NOISE]: Well, we could always cut the class.
CHAKRABARTI: 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 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.
CHAKRABARTI: I want you to do some roleplay. So who’s gonna model this?
KELLY: You wanna be that director? I’ll be the director.
WILLIAMS: I’ll be the watcher, we’re watchers.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
FINN KELLY: When, when Semaj first sits down, we’re gonna ask the room, John, who do we, what do you guys like about Samaj? And so you can call him Josh here.
JOSH WILLIAMS: I met Semaj in my freshman year of football, before, you know. Before school starts football starts. So he’s one of the first people I met on the team actually and he was really, really muscular for being a freshman. Probably because he was 25 years old, you know, as a freshman, triple reclass.
CHAKRABARTI: In maturity. Of course, of course.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
FINN KELLY: And so Dr. Reichert will ask maybe like five, six, five, six more people. A lot of similar stuff, especially for Samaj, so. And then, we’re kind of like, how does, how are you feeling?
SEMAJ LEE: 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Semaj 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.
FINN KELLY: So, tell me something that’s happening with you right now.
SEMAJ LEE: You know, decisions for schools coming up soon. Don’t know where I’m going yet. Yeah, he does that thing.
CHAKRABARTI: When he scooted closer?
SEMAJ LEE: Yeah, when he scooted closer. When you start to open up, he’ll do that to you. We call it the blender. Right, he’s gonna get you. He’s gonna get you going. But, back in the scene.
CHAKRABARTI: When Semaj begins talking about college decisions, Finn scoots his chair much closer to him. Finn makes steady eye contact with Semaj. The blender, as the students call it, because emotions are about to get stirred up.
SEMAJ LEE: I’m still, you know, trying to figure that out.
FINN KELLY: Yeah. And that can be really stressful, right?
CHAKRABARTI: Finn reaches out to Samaj.
LEE: Yeah. So he does that too. So he’ll put, that’s the blender right there.
KELLY: This is the blender. This is the blender.
LEE: So the hand on the shoulder and the eye contact is, he’s going to get you now to just really just open up.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, I have to say, I noticed that you were making really steady eye contact and, and that’s not super common amongst teens, right? So … seems like that’s a skill that you learned through this?
KELLY: I think, 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 stronger, 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Well, I’ll let you guys off the hook. Even just the, this was a role playing, it felt intense, like, right from the start. As someone like observing it.
KELLY: Now only imagine 60 of your close friends or classmates staring at you.
CHAKRABARTI: 60? Is that how many people come?
TEENS: It’s a very full room. It’s like 60, 70 kids in there.
CHAKRABARTI: So the Dr. Reichert those young men we’re referring to. Michael Reichert, that’s you, right?
MICHAEL REICHERT: Yes. Really funny hearing it, 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.
CHAKRABARTI: What was that dream?
REICHERT: That young men would be proactive about taking care of themselves and each other in the way that those boys were modeling.
CHAKRABARTI: What inspired that dream 30 years ago?
REICHERT: 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Episode five: ‘In jail with their emotions.’
REICHERT: 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.’
REICHERT: Yeah, and the group that really jumped out at us was the group 18 to 23. And that number, 66% saying, agreeing with the statement, ‘No one really knows me well.’ Stood out for me in particular as a sign of what I call developmental precarity.
CHAKRABARTI: That profound sense of loneliness seems to have seeped into other aspects of mental health for young men.
REICHERT: 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 in the last two weeks, they had considered suicide.
“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.”
Michael Reichert
What that means, Meghna, is that this is a population-wide 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. 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 Reigeluth.
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.
CHRISTOPHER REIGELUTH: Kids cannot reach their academic potential if their mental health, their social and emotional wellbeing is not solid and fortified, right? Just thinking about performance on tests, paying attention in class, right? Absorbing lessons, et cetera, right? You can’t do any of that well if your mental health is compromised.
REICHERT: Yes, I certainly agree with that, but I would go further. My research prior to this State of American Men’s 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, that they’re built to be non-relational.
CHAKRABARTI: I’m looking at how broad the numbers are, right, from your study. Does your research suggest that there’s something elemental in our society and the institutions that operate within it, that’s not recognizing a basic human need in American boys?
REICHERT: I like that word, elemental, Meghna.
As a developmental psychologist, I think of the structure more in our understanding and the way that we weave that in 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 are not grasping boys’ elemental human natures, their need to talk about their feelings, their need to be held, 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 gonna produce casualties.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: We’re in our fifth and final episode focusing on boys’ mental health. Mardi Nott 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.
MARDI NOTT: 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.
“I am seeing a lot of boys struggling academically, socially … because it is not clear to them what masculinity means anymore.”
Mardi Nott
CHAKRABARTI: 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. 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.
DR. KEVIN SIMON: Thank you for having me.
CHAKRABARTI: What have you seen in your practice?
SIMON: Yeah, so as we just heard from that teacher in Texas, systems aren’t well equipped with identifying the distress or the outburst, the flipped 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 that 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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?
SIMON: 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. Like he’s mad, “F this, F the world,” and, “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 gonna happen.
And so he leaves the session. Mom comes in and I’m like, “I see that he’s frustrated, but I could 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Ah-huh.
SIMON: 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.
REICHERT: 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 out 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.
“Being able to vulnerably say … ‘I’m depressed,’ ‘I’m hopeless,’ ‘I’m scared,’ that language is largely unavailable to young males. And where does that emotion go?”
Michael Reichert
CHAKRABARTI: Michael Reichert and Dr. Simon. 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 off the cuff, I asked them what they think that society expects a man to be like, and I just want you to hear what their responses were.
(STUDENT MONTAGE)
UNIDENTIFIED BOY STUDENT 1: There’s a stigma that to be a man, you have to be unshakeable.
UNIDENTIFIED BOY STUDENT 2: I think the stereotypical one is 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.
UNIDENTIFIED BOY STUDENT 3: 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 navigating those moments where we don’t quite get there.
CHAKRABARTI: So Dr. Simon, basically all the students answered with what seems to me to be different versions of being a man means being strong, but also the way we socialize boys to them, strength means self negation.
SIMON: Right. So to bring it back to clinical work. All the words that 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’s 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, it 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 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.
“Words aren’t supposed to hurt. You’re just supposed to just be a man about certain things.”
Unidentified Boy Student
REICHERT: 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 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. 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.
SIMON: Something that Michael just referenced, the idea of being able to identify one’s emotion. 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. And 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 aren’t 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.
REICHERT: What Dr. Simon was referencing is the opportunity to practice emotional literacy and emotional competency, coding your feelings with language and showing them.
And 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.
CHAKRABARTI: But when it comes to culture, you’re making 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 wanna 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 Reigeluth. And here’s what he had to say.
REIGELUTH: When kids are younger, parents are their bigger socializers. As kids are older, peers become much more influential, especially in adolescents, but 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 school that work against that.
“If schools inadvertently are the chief gender socializers of kids in ways that can be problematic, there also need to be interventions in school that work against that.”
Christopher Reigeluth
CHAKRABARTI: 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 Reichert, can you take us back to the genesis to what inspired you to start the program?
REICHERT: So when I came in in the late eighties, it was one psychologist to 1,000 boys grades kindergarten through 12th. And I recognized 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?
And 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Bringing the peer counseling program to the center of school life at Haverford took time and it took pizza.
WILLIAMS: I think this goes for a lot of kids. I was hungry and they had pizza in there.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
WILLIAMS: 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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 biweekly. 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.
WILLIAMS: I was trying to be strong. I didn’t want cry. I didn’t wanna, 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 around and he says, “Don’t you guys already know Josh is strong?”
CHAKRABARI: For Josh, this was a revelation.
WILLIAMS: 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 upset with like my inability, as men, we’re like in jail with our emotions, like we can’t let them out. It just sucks.
JANET HEED: 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Janet Heed 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.
TYLER CASERTANO: The thing is, while being a giver seems easy, I have found that it is often really hard. It’s 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
CASERTANO [SPEECH]: I worked 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Again, upper school counselor, Janet Heed.
HEED: Boys deserve this opportunity to find the ability to relieve the upset that they feel, that if you love children, you wanna 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
CASERTANO: 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
HEED: 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 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
WILLIAMS: We talk about brotherhood like every single day here, and it’s emphasized.
It’s on the walls, like it’s everywhere. Even if you take out peer counseling, like we have a culture here that’s all about supporting one another and like about love and trust and tack on peer counseling on top of that. And it’s a much different culture around here than it is at my public school.
“We have a culture here that’s all about supporting one another and about love and trust … it’s a much different culture around here than it is at my public school.”
Josh Williams
CHAKRABARTI: Dr. Simon, since you work directly with the city of Boston, do you think that schools have it, practically speaking, the means to do these kinds of things?
SIMON: So the means, that’s challenging. I will say nationally, there’s an organization, Youth Guidance, that has a program called Becoming a Man, and it’s exactly what it sounds like Dr. Reichert’s group does, and they do that during school. So it is possible. 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.
REICHERT: It is 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 important things that open up different trajectories for boys’ imaginations.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
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 Heed, head counselor at the Haverford School shared this observation.
HEED: 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% percent 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.
“I always ask them if they can remember the time when they were first told that ‘boys don’t cry,’ and 100% percent of them can do it.”
Janet Heed
CHAKRABARTI: 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?
SIMON: 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 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, right?
So 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. You mean you asked the question, it immediately made me think about my own son.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. What went through your mind when you caught yourself wanting to say that as a father?
SIMON: Yeah. So, that I’ve never said that to my daughter.
CHAKRABARTI: Wow.
SIMON: Yeah. He’s four. And I think about the people that I see and want to do everything’s possible to help him recognize what he’s gonna 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. So that’s what came through my mind when I caught myself.
CHAKRABARTI: 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 am not quite sure how to follow up on that, but what do you wanna say?
REICHERT: I am so awed by Dr. Simon’s courage there, and the thing that I guess, 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 he exemplified. That’s how deeply I internalized the prohibitions against being vulnerable. I do my best and I try to model emotional honesty for the boys in that peer counseling group, but it’s swimming upstream.
CHAKRABARTI: Michael Reichert, what you’re describing to me. And actually, what we saw, it doesn’t seem very complicated. And by that, I don’t want to like oversimplify things, but it seems pretty straightforward. And yet you also said that it takes a certain amount of bravery in a school to want to engage in this process. Why?
REICHERT: 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. 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 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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 a school that’s a private, all-boys pre-K through 12 school.
And so therefore, it’s how much can we draw from an example like 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 will it also require some kind of societal or policy shifts even?
SIMON: 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 isn’t my child in 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Right. Some are subtle and not-so-subtle, right?
There has to be time created, and 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.
It’s interpreted down a path of discipline. So that’s also just 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.
SIMON: 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.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that leads me to my last question. What can parents do?
REICHERT: Yeah, Meghna, I recommend three strategies. Number one, just simply carve out time. 15 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 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 sun.
That’s how we strengthen self-regulation.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
REICHERT: Thank you, Meghna.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
SIMON: Thank you again.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
RICHARD REEVES: It’s great to be back.
CHAKRABARTI: 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.
REEVES: 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. The thing I’ve been thinking about quite a bit listening is that, 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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 you know, the whole On Point team has been doing the research for these episodes, there’s two things that have just continuously nagged at me.
One of them, what I think is potentially the most robust criticism of these five episodes that we’ve done and I’m just gonna raise it. And that 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 educators for decades now have been saying, and I think rightly, 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 the social morays 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, the schools aren’t the problem when it comes to how boys are doing or feeling. It’s the society they’re growing up in.
REEVES: 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’d be especially good for boys. 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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 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.
(STUDENT MONTAGE)
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 wanna be a cook. 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, my pops, he’s really set the stage for me in 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, just unselfishness, he’s going through a lot currently and he’s helping others who, he’s helping others when he doesn’t have to.
You know, 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.
CHAKRABARTI: 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, 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.
REEVES: The way I think about this is partly reflecting on what you’ve just said and actually my own sons, to be completely honest. And my sons are all in their twenties 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 gotta 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 is a 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, and 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 being a boy.
And celebrating that just as we do girlhood too, 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. Boys are great if we allow them to be. And if we give them the space to be, and I think that’s an important part of the message, too.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.