What do you feel is the hardest part about growing up as a boy?

28 comments

1. Learning how to voice your emotions when you’re already an adult.

2. Slowly learning that you don’t matter

3. Being told everything is wonderful while being brutalized by other boys

4. Everyone expects you to be tough. Being told boys don’t cry, and when you do cry it, ohh that’s nothing I’ll give you something to cry about. Then as an adult, you have no feelings, no emotions, and you’re a closed book who don’t know how to express yourself because you’ve had to suppress your feelings for the first 18 years of your life.

5. We rarely ever get this cute age of innocence where we’re seen as just harmless children. Maybe it’s because I’m Black but it’s like the second we’re able to walk and talk society flips a switch and decides that we’re capable and willing to do just any crime or despicable act.

6. Trying to figure out how to become a man, when you have no male role models around

7. Being expected to deal with bullies by getting tough on my own and not receiving any help from adults supposedly in charge.

8. The pressure to hold up a family was something I had in my head growing up. I saw my dad bust his balls doing the most shit jobs to pay for me, my sister, and mother to live normal lives.

9. Being force fed psychotropic drugs because your little ape body wasn’t designed to sit still and concentrate for 6 hours

10. Trying to figure out what it means to be a man while only having shitty human beings give you the worst advise/takes imaginable, and fumbling your way through. At the same time defending yourself against piece of shit human being when you don’t conform to their ideology of “manhood”

11. Worrying about if you’ll be a good provider for your family. My parents started telling me I’d never be a good provider when I was 11.

    Being shamed for having emotions. Be Boys Don’t Cry and all that.

    Feeling like you’re doing something wrong because you like a girl.

    In general, feeling as if you should apologize for shitty man behavior that you have nothing to do with.

12. Insecure. Finding myself. Who am I? What am I?

13. Growing up without a male role model

    Also being blamed for everything is pretty annoying

14. Feeling alone and unloved.

15. I think in a broad, generalized way what I struggled with most was this:

    I learned from one incident after another that once you pass out of childhood almost everyone treats boys and girls very differently. (this may not be everyone’s experience) but I witnessed endlessly that when a girl fails, is bullied, needs help, needs guidance, that people’s response is essentially “aww you poor thing let me help you” and for boys the response is “what’s wrong with you, just move on”

16. Nobody gives a shit about you.

17. Wow, so many of these comments have really hit home. It’s nice to know I wasn’t the only one who went through these things.

18. I remember reading a story a while ago here on Reddit that pretty well summed up how I’d respond to this question. Someone was talking about when he was a young boy, having a relative who was a little younger who fell into a body of water. He went and got her out, effectively rescuing her from drowning, and his family all left and took the girl back to the car or house or whatever to get her warm, while he, the boy, actually got stuck in the body of water himself and nearly drowned. After narrowly getting out, he caught back up with his family and they had no clue anything went wrong.
    Point being, I think a lot of young boys are parented with an overarching strategy of “oh they’ll figure it out”, so they get put in some difficult, dangerous, and traumatic scenarios, and people largely don’t care, because that’s just supposedly part of growing up a boy, is to figure it out or be seriously hurt.

19. I’ll be 43 in December.

    If anyone in this thread needs advice or help with ANYTHING that we go through or are going to face in the near future, my Inbox WILL ALWAYS BE open to anyone who doesn’t know what to do (in any situation). I’m completely unbiased and tell it like it is…so feel free, and no question is a stupid question.

    Stay safe out there.

20. Loneliness

21. Never complain. Not allowed… You have to provide, no matter what.

22. I’m a fat guy, eventually I got over the way it wrecked my self esteem as a kid, learning to box helped, cuz in boxing being a heavyweight ain’t so bad. I’ve got built arms and a good chest now, but I could never get rid of my gut. When I was a kid, I was just fat all the way down, and kids latched onto that and made fun of me. I never struggled with being athletic or doing anything physical, but other, more athletic looking guys saw me as weak, and girls pretty much wanted nothing to do with me. It made me an outcast, and I think it contributed to the way I acted out when I was a teenager. Made worse by the fact that my brother was thin as a reed, but he wasn’t very good with girls either.

    Also think it made me perform masculinity in other ways that maybe I wouldn’t have, so I guess it’s not all bad. I’m a good cook, and I like working on classic cars, and like I said I used to box, not professionally, but I was pretty darn good.

    These days I’m married to a woman who thinks I’m the sexiest guy alive, and she don’t mind my spare tire. We get told a lot as kids that we have to look and act a certain way to be accepted by society. Women get that too, but in different ways. Wish there was more awareness of how this stuff affects fellas.

23. Maybe this is shallow compared to other responses, but I was a very late bloomer while my older brother (18 month age difference) was a full grown man at age 13. Really affected my confidence in locker rooms, just wearing shorts and seeing other kids had hair on their legs. I didn’t hit puberty until I was 15. Mentally scarring going through the beginning of high school looking like a child.

24. Emotions, generally are beaten out of you in The World Of Men, but also you cease to be considered an emotional being in any fashion by the school system after about 6th grade, sometimes earlier.

    I recall Marshall Rosenberg, creator of Non-Violent Communication, talking in his NVC audiobook about how he’d done 20+ years of schooling to get his Ph. D. and never once could he recall an instance where anyone asked him how he felt about being functionally drafted into this system.

    Also, this is a fundamentally violent and exclusionary culture overall, and to “succeed” in it as a man you are essentially co-opted into that worldview.

    All of this leads to the emotion of feeling EXPENDABLE toward yourself. Collectively, you ARE expendable.

25. Coming to terms with the fact that by the time you’re 18 most women, even if subconsciously see you as a threat and how to navigate making them feel safer around you.

26. Is knowing that my value as a person directly correlates with what I bring to the table. Or knowing no matter what I do or achieve I should be able to do better

27. I feel like we aren’t taught things as we age. We are just expected to figure things out because we are boys. As if we will magically know how to do everything.

28. As a mother, thank you for asking this question. My mom told my son the other day that boys don’t cry….. he’s 2. He didn’t pay attention to her thank goodness but I need to figure out how to protect him from her without isolating them entirely. She’s awful with those damaging old school ideologies.