When I found out I was having my first boy five years ago, I was elated and excited ... and then worried about anger. There had recently been yet another school shooting, followed by yet another rash of headlines about boys, guns and rage.
I understand the roots of that kind of violence are deeply complex, and that in my own life I am surrounded by loving, empathetic men. But I was also a hormonal soon-to-be first-time mom (who, in hindsight, was probably grappling with a touch of perinatal anxiety). I worried that I would raise an angry young man.
I was not alone. Concerns about boys and anger abound, as comedian and writer Michael Ian Black captured in his viral 2018 New York Times opinion piece “The Boys Are Not All Right.” “The man who feels lost but wishes to preserve his fully masculine self has only two choices: withdrawal or rage,” he wrote. The story has more than 2,100 comments. Clearly it struck a chord.
Now that I know my boys and have spent years watching their beautiful, complex little personalities unfold, those fears I held during my pregnancy seem distant and reductive. Of course they do not inherently struggle with anger simply because they are boys. And yet they do lash out — sometimes in frustration, sometimes when I ask them to do something they don’t want to. What I want is to help them navigate that anger, so they can experience the feeling, but not be overwhelmed by it.
