One of the greatest things you don’t expect as a mom, is the incredible conversations you have with your kids as they turn into adults. Any sane, loving person wants their children to be happy, to grow up knowing they are cherished, and that they feel safe and secure as they figure out who they are and what lights them up.
As a woman and a feminist raising both a boy and a girl in this world, one of the things I wanted most, was for my son to grow into a man who genuinely respects and likes girls and women. I wanted that for him as much as I wanted it for all the people around him.
There weren’t a lot of guidebooks on the subject. “How to Make Sure You Don’t Raise a Misogynist” has yet to be written, and it’s 2026. There were some good books to read when I got pregnant, of course. “Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys” is a classic, and “It’s a Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons”, and “It’s a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters” are excellent companion pieces. Nonetheless, we’re all swimming in patriarchal waters, the programming runs deep, and the messaging is everywhere.
Some things are explicit and some are implicit. I remember when my son Dylan was little, I let my mom know I didn’t want toy guns as gifts, I wasn’t having toy guns in the house. She laughed and said okay, but he would just end up putting his middle and index fingers together with his thumb in the air, and run around the house making “pew pew” sounds, because “boys and guns are biological.” As if there were some evolutionary predisposition toward gun violence and killing, written into the Y chromosome.
Some of you may be shocked to know this turned out not to be true.
A couple of weeks ago I was having a conversation with Dylan. He is nineteen now, and no longer bursts into the kitchen dressed as a Jedi on a random Tuesday night while I’m cooking dinner, much to my chagrin. I’m nostalgic for those days, and those nights when he and his sister and I curled up, and I read to them for hours. I suppose I felt more able to keep them safe then, and maybe myself, too.
I feel a deep grief for all of us, because the water hasn’t changed, and it’s making us sicker by the day. I had so many experiences as a girl and a young woman that made me feel unsafe and scared and unsure of my value, but also the value of girls and women generally. Now as a grown woman, I worry for my daughter, but also for my son, and for all of our children, and when I say “our children”, my overriding belief is there’s no such thing as other people’s children.
We all belong to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. If you ran into my children somewhere and they were in trouble, I hope with my entire heart you would look out for them the way I’d look out for yours if you weren’t there. Everyone is someone’s child, even if they are sixty-eight. Even if they are ninety-two.
Dylan and I talk about pretty much everything now, and on the day in question, we were talking about the kind of men who enjoy asserting their dominance over women. He said it made him feel disgusted to have any kind of power over a woman, and I asked him why he thought he felt that way.
I was surprised by the way he answered that question, he said so many things about masculinity and male identity and what it’s like for boys growing up in a world that secures a place for them before they arrive, and as we were talking, I said I wished so much I could share what he was saying on the podcast, because he was saying things in a way that had never occurred to me. He said we could have this conversation on the podcast. So we did. This is it. It’s my favorite episode ever.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and if you have young men in your life, I hope you will share it with them. I know I’m his mom, but I think this is the kind of message more young boys need to hear, and frankly, plenty of grown men, too. I don’t say that as any kind of dig. I say that in acknowledgement of the fact that we have systemic issues, and also with a deeper understanding on the other side of this conversation thanks to my son: Boys, young men, and grown men alike, often have no impetus to consider what masculinity means to them, and what kind of men they want to be.
My whole heart lives inside my children, and so, I offer you my heart, friends. All you have to do is hit play.
P.S. That’s Dylan playing guitar in the intro and outro, too. Had to mention.
