Here is an article from our wonderful Sarah O’Callaghan, CBT Psychotherapist at Laura Greenwood Therapy. Here is one for our valued, wonderful, teacher followers. Whether an official teacher or a ‘teacher’ in the home. Because this is what we all are as parents right? Teaching our children how to be in the world and grow into exactly who they are meant to be.
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Men’s Mental Health encompasses so much, but for Men’s Mental Health Month, I wanted to contribute something less about men’s current emotional health and working with the ‘now’, to rewinding the clock and thinking about what we can do to support our boys in their emotional development.
Creating more emotionally aware men who know how to access their thoughts and feelings and also in supporting their partners-particularly in the parenting journey- with emotional safety, has to be one of the greatest things we can do for our sons in growing up in an increasingly challenging world.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and whilst so much emphasis is rightly placed on parents, we overlook the impact of those caring for our children for most of the day- their teachers.
I have been wanting to read ‘Boys Don’t Try’ for a while after listening to Matt Pinkett on a podcast. A former teacher, he developed this book to look at how our school systems are failing our sons by gender stereotyping and unconscious (negative) bias towards them, which can drip feed into their self-esteem and self-efficacy. Pinkett found that methods of teaching designed with good intent to engage boys was often insulting to boys’ intelligence and encouraged the idea that boys are not as interested or as able in what they can achieve compared to their female peers.
Of particular interest were the points about boys’ mental health and how teachers can support this in the classroom. I have nothing but empathy for teachers in the current school system, and the expectations that are placed upon them.
What Pinkett identifies is that subtle small and consistent changes can be enough.
Here are some of the key points designed to support teachers in updating some of their interactions with boys :
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Watch your language- saying things like ‘I need a strong boy to help me…’ or ‘he’s a typical lad’. These seem trivial but can reveal much about attitudes towards pupils, expectations of how they should behave and what they will achieve.
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In younger years, playful boys are stigmatised by their teachers in contrast to playful girls who are not labelled the ‘class clown’
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Displaying emotional openness by teacher modelling. Express delight when a child has done something kind or done well at something, but also be open about the way topics make you as a teacher feel. Emotional openness should be modelled within school environments rather than just ‘outside sources’ to come in and talk about mental health.
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Challenging the way we see anger and frustration as aggressive rather than emotional. The need to understand how to help boys regulate their emotions rather than demonising the consequence of the emotion.
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Confronting gender stereotypes in lessons from textbooks, encouraging conversation about what does it mean to ‘run like a girl’ or what does ‘man up’ mean?
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Reflect on your own relationship with pupils and how you see the behaviour of boys. Are we reprimanding the young 6-year-old for giggling more than we are the young 6-year-old girl who is chatting to her peer?
Pinkett also illustrates the ‘Golem Effect’ in action, and how if our teachers have low expectations or lack hope for our sons, the result can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Take a look at the below image demonstrating how this might work in a classroom setting.
For any dads reading, what are your experiences of being a boy at school? And parents- do you have a son and is this something that resonates with you?
Sarah O x
