If you have a son, this conversation is going to stay with you.
Not because it’s alarming — though some of the research is — but because it’s one of those episodes where you find yourself nodding along and slowly realizing how much of what feels completely normal has been quietly shaping your child since before he was born.
This week on Kids These Days, Dr. Courtney sat down with Dr. Stephanie Bono, a licensed psychologist and founder of Evergrow Therapy and Assessment in Denver’s Highlands neighborhood. Steph specializes in ADHD, anxiety, and parenting, leads workshops for boy moms, and is herself in the thick of raising a toddler boy — which she’ll tell you with equal parts love and humor is its own full-time education.
1. It Starts Before They're Born
One of the most striking things Dr. Steph shared early in the conversation is just how early our gender assumptions kick in. Before a baby boy has taken his first breath, we already have a picture in our heads of what his household will look like, how he’ll behave, what kind of energy he’ll bring. Old wives’ tales about predicting a baby’s sex tell the story perfectly: boys are active and rowdy in utero, while girls are already being associated with beauty. The messaging starts that early, and it doesn’t stop.
2. The Clothing and Toy Research You Can't Unsee
Dr. Steph shared research from designer Hannah Garcia, who analyzed thousands of articles of children’s clothing and found a striking pattern. Boy clothing is significantly more likely to feature aggressive predator animals — sharks, bears, T-Rexes. Girl clothing features gentle prey animals, and on the rare occasion a girl’s shirt does have a shark, it’s smiling. The same pattern shows up in toys: girls receive tea sets and baby dolls that build relational and caretaking skills, while boys receive building projects that emphasize doing and achieving.
This isn’t a small thing. From the time kids start absorbing the world around them, these choices are quietly teaching them who they are supposed to be. As Dr. Steph puts it, we’re putting boys into an aggression-dominant box while simultaneously stripping girls of their power — and we’re doing it before they can even read the word on their t-shirt.
3. Boys Are Relational By Nature
Here’s the part that might surprise you most: the research shows that young boys are actually deeply relational. They’re good at naming emotions, building close friendships, and expressing vulnerability. Researcher Judy Chu’s work with preschool and kindergarten-age boys found that these capacities start to get socialized out of them as they enter school and become more exposed to cultural gender expectations. It isn’t something innate to boys that makes them shut down emotionally — it’s something that happens to them.
Which means it can be countered. At home.
4. The Implicit Bias That's Harder to Catch
Dr. Steph draws a helpful distinction between explicit and implicit gender messaging. Explicit messaging — things like telling a boy “boys don’t cry” — is something most parents today know to avoid. But implicit messaging is trickier, because it lives in our automatic responses. Research shows that adults make less eye contact with baby boys when they cry, use fewer emotion words with them, and expect them to recover from distress faster than girls. Most parents doing these things aren’t aware of it at all.
Dr. Steph’s personal check-in is one of the most practical things in the episode: whenever her son is upset, she asks herself, would I respond to him this way if he were my daughter? That one question, she says, catches more than any script or strategy could.
5. Emotion Coaching for Boys
Identifying, naming, and regulating emotions is a skill. It does not develop automatically. And for boys, the cultural pull is often toward repression — to brush it off, rub some dirt on it, get back out there. What this produces in adolescence and adulthood, Steph sees regularly in her practice: young men who feel emotionally flat most of the time, until suddenly they don’t, and the only emotion that comes out is anger. Because anger, culturally, has always been acceptable for men. Everything else gets squeezed out.
The practical alternative is the same emotion coaching you would offer any child: name what you see, validate it, sit with it rather than rushing to fix or distract. Boys are just as capable of this as girls. They need the same explicit teaching, the same patient repetition, and critically — the same permission to have the feeling in the first place.
6. The Long-Term Stakes
Dr. Steph closes the conversation with some sobering research on the long-term outcomes of hyper-masculinity. Boys who align strongly with traditionally masculine traits — extreme independence, aggression, emotional stoicism — show higher rates of depression and suicidality, are less likely to seek medical care, engage in more reckless behaviors, and have higher rates of injury. The boys who fare best, the research shows, are those who can draw from both sides: who are emotionally open and relationally connected, and also assertive, independent, and capable.
The world our sons are growing up in is asking something new of men. Partners, friends, and employers increasingly expect emotional availability, communication, and relational skill. The boys who will be equipped for that world are the ones whose parents started building those capacities early — not by stripping away strength, but by expanding what strength is allowed to look like.
Resources & Links:
Dr. Steph ended with a quote from Dr. Michael Reichert’s book How to Raise a Boy that stopped the conversation cold: “Recognizing how relational boys are can revolutionize boyhood. The best way to prepare boys for the world ahead is not to train them to follow outdated standards, but to permit their humanity to flourish.”
That’s the whole invitation of this episode. Not a checklist. Not a perfect script. Just a willingness to widen the box — to let your son be the full, feeling, relational human being he already is.
- Dr. Stephanie Bono: evergrowledenver.com
- Boy Mom Toddler Playgroup at Sloane’s Lake — details on Dr. Steph’s website
- How to Raise a Boy by Michael Reichert, PhD
- Integrated Behavioral Health: integratedbhs.com
- Follow Dr. Steph: @evergrowpsychology
- Follow IBH: @integratedbh