What Really Matters When Raising Boys: Consent, Peer Pressure & Doing the Right Thing

Becky Kennedy (0:00)

This episode is dropping in your feed on an off day, but not because it's bonus content or a nice to have. It's because I think it's so important, and honestly, I want every parent to hear it. I want to talk about boys and consent, but what you're going to hear is probably from a slightly different perspective than how I often hear the conversation go. And I want to start with something I think we get wrong when we talk to boys about consent, and it's going to sound a little weird at first, but stay with me because I think it might completely change what you start to pay attention to in everyday moments with your son. We tend to focus only on knowledge. A lot of us, me too, we've had conversations like this with our boys. Should you respect someone's no? Yeah, mom. Hey, if someone changes their mind, would you stop? Dad, obviously, yes. What would you do if your friends were doing something wrong or being disrespectful? I would speak up. Okay, let me be clear. This is good. Our boys know the right answers, and knowledge matters. Knowledge is a very important first step. But hear me out. Knowing the right answer and being able to access what you know in an emotionally charged moment are two very different things. And let's be honest, we know this from our own lives. You and I, should we yell at our kids? No, you could ask me all the questions, and I would have the right answers. But we both still do sometimes. None of us have a knowledge problem, and I think we have to take that idea so much more seriously with our boys because by the time a boy is in a high stakes moment involving consent, he is not walking into that moment with knowledge alone. He's walking in with years of emotional patterns and circuitry that have been practiced over and over again. He'll bring those into the moment. What has that boy already learned about how disappointment works? Not from a textbook, but from his experiences. Has he learned that disappointment is a feeling he can tolerate and is expected to tolerate? Or has he learned that his disappointment is someone else's responsibility to take away? How practiced is that boy at noticing what another person's cues are? Their face, their body, the moment something shifts. And where has this boy been encouraged, even subtly, to look when he's not sure what's right? At what everyone else is doing or at what he is noticing inside himself? Because all of that comes to the party with him. All of that loads onto that moment. And this is why I wanted to release this conversation more widely. Because I think we're missing a key part of the conversation about raising boys. What I'm sharing is an abbreviated edited version of a live event I did inside the Good Inside community. After so many parents there wanted to go much deeper than an Instagram post about the sexual assault allegations at Cornell. In terms of, well, what does it mean for raising my boy who's young today? Now, I want to be really clear. I do not believe that parenting causes or prevents any of these outcomes. I believe that childhood is one place human beings repeatedly practice the emotional skills they will later need in much higher stakes moments. And so what I'm about to share, it lives somewhere in between powerlessness and a guarantee. It is not everything, and it isn't nothing. Now, one thing you won't experience as you listen, and I need to name it because it was such a huge part of the event, was what happened in the chat. And chat kind of undersells what it was. It was so powerful to hear other people's stories in a space that felt safe, and to do what humans do best. Listen, understand, and make meaning together on a topic that both brings up so many fears for our kids, right along so many of our own painful memories and experiences from our own past. Fair warning, in case this isn't for you, or if you just want to moderate who's around while you listen, there's some cursing by me. I was fired up about this topic. I still am. You can probably hear it in my voice, and apparently that gets reflected in some of my vocabulary choices. Finally, I want to share this from a true place of my own fear and vulnerability, but I debated putting this out there because I worry that what I'm about to share could be interpreted through a one thing is true lens. Wait, so you're talking about all the factors that led to this horrific behavior? Are you saying it's not that person's fault? I'm not saying that. I believe people are fully accountable for their behavior, and I believe that we have to be deeply curious about all the different factors that tend to lead to that type behavior. I'm holding those two things as true at the same time, full accountability, full curiosity. I don't know how else we could ever help people change or help other people get to a different outcome. All right, let's get into it.