Dr. John Duffy on Helping Our Struggling Teen Boys

Debbie:

Hey John, welcome back to the podcast.

Dr. John Duffy:

Hi, Debbie. It’s always so great to talk to you.

Debbie:

It is so great. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since, you know, I think I reached out to you when I had Cathy Adams on the show to talk about her book, Restoring Our Girls, and I knew about your book, Rescuing Our Sons. I’m like, I gotta bring John on to talk about this as well. And because I think they’re both such important conversations. So I want to get into as much as we can today. But before we do that, tell us a little bit about yourself through the lens of this specific conversation we’re going to have today, kind of like why you really do the work you do but specifically what your book is about.

Dr. John Duffy:

Yeah, so I’ve been practicing for almost 30 years. I can’t believe it’s been 30 years, Debbie. I did not intend to work with young people. I thought that’s gonna be messy. I don’t wanna do that. But I wanted to have my own practice and my initial referrals started to come from school social workers. And I just fell in love with these kids. So I realized, okay, this is my fate that I will be working with young people. And every few years or so, there are a few insights that come my way that happened here in the room. And I think, I don’t know if people know, I don’t know if parents know what’s going on with their kids. So I’m gonna write what I think I’ve learned here and put that in a book and send it out there in the world.

Most recently, I’ve noticed a big gender divide, which is something honestly, I hadn’t really made note of previously, but in the last three or four or five years or so, a big gender divide and that divide was large part hope. Like, you know, the boys I was working with didn’t seem to carry a lot of hope. So everybody was going through all the things. All the young people I was working with Debbie, were going through some depression, some anxiety, some social anxiety post pandemic. All the things you would expect the teenagers go through, relationship issues. But the girls I was working with had this resolve and this future orientation. They were able to kind of buoy themselves up. Like you could see for lack of a clinical word, you see light in their eyes. You could see like, okay, I have this feeling they’re going to be okay. Almost to a person. Whereas the boys seemed horizontal. Is the way I’ve been describing it most. They’ve been laying down. They haven’t moved since the pandemic. lot of the young boys and young men I’ve worked with, they don’t see that hope for the future. They feel kind of like the bad guys culturally. There’s also a little bit of a feeling like, isn’t our moment. So I’m not sure where we fit culturally in this moment. And so, and they also recognize I don’t want my dad’s life if they’re white or the the lives of the men around them and so there is kind of a combination of factors that is drawing hope from them and so we’re seeing all these behavioral issues and depression and anxiety but I think all of it is derivative of some degree of hopelessness and loneliness that they’re that they’re suffering they’re spending an awfully a ton of time alone that really concerns me.

Debbie:

Yeah. I mean, you just, there’s so many things that we could unpack in what you just said. And just to, I don’t want to spend a lot of time here, but just you said since the pandemic. um, is there anything, what is it specifically about the pandemic that you think has made the biggest difference with the boys?

Dr. John Duffy:

Yeah, you know, the girls I work with kept in touch with each other during the pandemic. You know, so they found ways to connect. They would meet outside. They would contact each other via FaceTime, like we’re kind of doing now. They had ways to keep their social battery filled and the boys I work with, they isolated, like, you know, kind of wholly isolated. So they were up in a room or down in the basement, virtually all the time. For the teenage boys and young men I worked with, in order to pass that time, they were either watching pornography, playing video games, or smoking an awful lot of marijuana. Like more than I think most of us have any idea because there’s so many different delivery devices, you know, that some of them don’t smell at all. And a lot of these boys, the vast majority were not smoking to get high. They were just smoking to past time, to get by. Like, you know, one boy described it as like, I’m going to induce a coma. And if something interesting happens in my life, I’ll consider coming out of it, but otherwise I’m going to stay here. So that’s kind of how, and that’s been kind of how it’s been described to me consistently over time. So I, everybody went through the same pandemic and went through some of the same stressors, but somehow the girls I work with have gotten through it with more grace and utility and strength and a lot of the boys still haven’t gotten started in my experience.

Debbie:

And so just to follow up with that, because one of the things you talk about in the book is just so we’re clear, the boys are not happy about this. not as if, you know, sounds like, yeah, I just want to hang out in my basement and play video games and smoke weed. That is not what’s going on. It’s kind of like a default or a choice or a stuckness, right? It’s not what they actually want.

Dr. John Duffy:

100 % thank you for thank you for pointing that out and then and punctuating that point because no this is not the life they want they want to be Connected and engaged there now Exceptionally verbal about that like I’ve got to get going I got to get my life going I cannot seem to get off the blocks here that’s why a lot of these guys are actively seeking therapy because they realize like I’m stuck. I cannot, I’m in this loop day by day, by day, and I’ve got to get out of this loop. So yeah, not to villainize the boys or, you know, I certainly don’t want to play into the myth of like laziness or anything like that. No, this is not where they are. They want to have active, vigorous, engaged lives. They’re just not sure how to even get started, how to reignite the fire within them. You know, that’s really what that’s where they are and that distinction is really important so I appreciate you pausing on that.

Debbie:

Yeah, no, I think I felt so much empathy in reading the book. it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past, well, many years actually as a woman and a feminist and growing up when I did in the 70s and 80s where it was a very different dynamic in terms of who was thriving in school and in university and the workplace and things like that. So I have been thinking a lot about this and feeling more and more empathy for the plight of boys and kind of their place in the pecking order or the opportunities that they have and what we know about the numbers of boys who are going on to higher ed and all of those things. There was a quote I pulled out because it really stopped me in my tracks when I read it, it was towards the beginning of the book. You said, more and more I see self-loathing in young men and boys. And I was like, ugh, like I just felt that so deeply. Can you talk about self-loathing and where does that come from? Like in your experience, how does that start to manifest?

Dr. John Duffy:

Well, if you picture the world that boys and young men right now have grown up in, they have not heard a lot of good things about well-known men. know, toxic masculinity is a phrase that they have heard over and over and over again. I worked with one family. And mom said to her son, hey, you have to recognize this is not your time. This is your sister’s time. So in the wake of the Me Too movement, which is a critically important movement that boys recognize is a critically important movement, they’re not sure what their voice ought to be, right? You know, they’re not sure whether they should step in and say anything. In the book, I tell the story of a boy who was taking a gender studies class. He was a freshman in college at the time and he had some things he had wanted to say and ask. And he ended up dropping the class because he realized like, I’m afraid anything I say or do could get me canceled. And that’s where I think that some of the self-loathing is derivative from is like, you know, I’m not sure. I think just maybe by virtue of the fact that I am male, straight and male in particular. I think I might be one of the bad guys just by virtue of that, know, not having perpetrated any crime, not having hurt any woman anywhere. I’m afraid I’m part of the problem. My best move is to step back and shut up and, you know, and self-loathing by and large comes from that kind of thinking. 

It’s actually, when you’re sitting across from these guys, Debbie, it is endearing. is, you know, but you also want them to really have a voice, you know, like, you’ve got a really important voice. Everybody’s got to be able to be part of whatever social movement is going on. Otherwise we have no movement, you know? So please be yourself, speak up, say what you want to say. But there’s so much reluctance and there is a lot of, you know, I don’t like who I am, I don’t really care whether I survive. So I’m not hearing active suicidal ideation necessarily in most of the boys I work with, but there’s this passive idea that, eh, if something terrible happened to me, I don’t know that I’m gonna do anything really remarkable in this world. A real belief in that. And 20, 25 years ago, that’s not what boys were saying. You know what I mean? A kind of a healthy sense of adolescent bravado about what they were going to be able to achieve. There was this idea that like maybe I’ll be president one day. I’ll be in the NBA one day. You know, like those wild idealistic dreams. Boys now do not have that. There’s a flatness to the way they feel that comes across like, you know, in sepia tone.

Debbie:

So one of the things that came up for me as you were saying that they, lot of boys, you know, just grow up with this idea that they are part of the problem is, is our parents, is this happening even without parents kind of saying anything, right? I think about girls growing up and there was this constant message of girl power, especially again, you know, maybe girls who grew up as millennials perhaps. and so is the absence of boy power or just kind of doing nothing as a parent, is that contributing to this feeling that coupled with messages they might be receiving from external forces?

Dr. John Duffy:

I think there’s an element of that for sure, right? There isn’t a kind of boy power messaging underneath what lifting our boys up, you know, in the same way that right now our girls have this moment, right? Where, you know, like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese are some of the biggest like sports stars on the planet, you know, where LeBron’s and Steph’s are kind of falling a little bit into the silence. And a boy was talking to me, a film major was talking to me about like all the great work now in my field is done by women. know, like men are not the creators, they’re not the filmmakers anymore, they’re not the movie stars anymore, they’re not the novelists anymore. Women are kind of leading that charge and couple that with the idea that from like second, third, fourth grade, an enormous number of boys have been diagnosed with something or medicated for something, right? You know, usually it’s ADHD or an anxiety disorder or something like that. So they come into the room by the time I meet them already kind of self-pathologized and diagnosed, really feeling like I’m not well, I’m not, you know, I take these pills because I cannot manage my own world in an efficient way, whereas by and large the girls around me they’re managing just fine. Despite the fact that we’re still making more money, there’s still a glass ceiling, the boys are cognizant of that, equity and equality have not been reached in any way, but they feel like they are many steps behind also in a lot of ways and that they are not smart, capable, competent, and resilient in the same way that their female counterparts seem to be. Yeah.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. And so, so there’s this kind of void, right? That you talk about the voice is kind of stepping into you talk about, you have a section that’s called the voice is recruiting. So one of the quotes that I pulled out is, I want you to be aware that there are voices other than your own that could be making an enormous impact on your son’s identity and that these voices are impervious to your parenting. So I’d love it if you could tell us a little bit about these kind of influential voices that exist, that these boys that we’re talking about today are really vulnerable to. 

Dr. John Duffy:

Yeah, so there are some entertainers people who show up in video games and show up in movies but mostly in podcasts that are incredibly appealing to boys and are there guys who are talking about sports and women and know like car racing and like stuff that really draws appeal and and these podcasts can go on for three or four hours so if your boys walking around wearing air pods. You might think he’s listening to his music but most boys that I work with they’re listening to these long form podcasts and I’ve listened to a lot of them and by and large they’re super entertaining they’re super fun I totally get if I was 15 or 16 years old I would be listening to these all the time and by and large the messaging is pretty upbeat and it’s pretty fun but every once in a while they’ll drop in something that feels like, ooh, you know, as an adult, I can listen and say like, that was a misogynistic little drop there or that was, you know, there was a little bit of racism dropped in there. You know, it was, was just a hint of it, but, and we moved on really fast, but it’s there.

And I can imagine and talking to the boys I know, they let me know that like, you listen to enough of this. You start to get indoctrinated into certain ways of thinking, right? And part of that is that we are being muted as boys and men and you know, something is being taken away from us that it is some birthright of ours. So if as parents, we’re not onto what our boys are listening to, we don’t know the names of the host and we haven’t listened to these guys we should sit down in my opinion and spend some time talking about like hey what messaging are you getting from your Rogans or your Petersons or your Tates or whoever it is that you are your guys and your bar stool guys, know, and there’s many, many more. Some of them, and again, by and large, the messaging is really, really positive, but you know, you want to know what your child is taking away and be part of that conversation. And what I run into a lot, Debbie, is parents who are like, I’m not really interested in that. And I don’t think we have the luxury of stepping away because we’re not that interested. You know, I think we have to know what our kids are exposing themselves to unwittingly. mean in large part you’ve if you’re 16 and you’re a boy if you’re not listening to a couple of these you’re out of the dialogue in a locker room or you know out with your friends at night you know so you really have to be paying attention in order to be part of any in-crowd you know so I don’t blame boys for listening to this stuff it is really fun tantalizing exciting content but it has its potential dangers as well. So I think if you engage your kids in a conversation and you’re a little bit informed about what’s going on, you have agency to either support what they’re hearing, provide a counterpoint to what they’re hearing, but what I find happens more often than not is we just ignore it because we assume, well, they’re just listening to whatever their thing is. They’re probably listening to their music and I’m not much for rap.

Debbie:

So just as you were talking about that too, I wanna share that I had Dr. Devorah Heitner on the show, maybe one or two years ago, we were talking specifically about when our kids go down internet rabbit holes. And so I’m gonna drop the link to that in the show notes page. It was such a good conversation. It ties nicely to this, but I think it is so important that we’re tuned into what our kids are consuming and also, like you said, be willing to have the conversations with them and in a respectful way, right? We have to ask our kids, what do you like about this? What do you think about it?

Dr. John Duffy:

Yeah, we have to approach it with a really open mind because our kids are really smart. They’re really discerning. It’s different than it was when we were kids. They’ve been exposed to so much. They know a lot more, I think, than we think they know. So instead of lecturing at them, which is not going to get us anywhere, to engage in discussion with them is actually really, really invigorating and it’s heartening because you realize, they’re developing their points of view at really young ages and they’re really smart. And oftentimes I see parents who recognize, I can learn something from him. Like he’s got something important to say. He stands in a really solid place here. So, you know, those are really encouraging conversations to have that, you know, I worry that parents don’t engage in it. And I, as the therapist get to have these rich conversations with these kids. And I always wish like, man, if only this were mom or dad who could hear this child talking like this, they’d feel so much better about where this young person is heading.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah. And I’m going to throw one other resource out there too that I’ll put in the show notes. And that’s Julie Bogard’s book on raising critical thinkers because it has some really good guidance for how to navigate these conversations. So I’ll put that in there.

Dr. John Duffy:

I’m inspired by both of those women and both of those, both of their work is excellent.

Debbie:

So I just want to just touch upon neurodivergence. So this is a bigger conversation than that. But I also am just curious from your experience, your thoughts on the perhaps heightened vulnerability of neurodivergent boys to kind of fall into some of these patterns, the hopelessness, or to really struggle perhaps with identity development, which is something you talk about in the book.

Dr. John Duffy:

Yeah, it’s super interesting to see how my neurodivergent guys take in this stimuli because as you know, no two people are alike, no two neurodivergent people are alike, but there is a little consistency and commonality I’m seeing in that a lot of the neurodivergent boys I’m working with are a little more discerning. They feel a little less hopeless because they, and I think they kind of approach a lot of the material that’s coming at them from a different angle. And so I actually am seeing, again, they’re going through all the things and sometimes then some, right? But I don’t see them as stagnated by the moment, know, cultural moment as I do some of the kids who don’t fall in that neurodivergent category. I was working with a young guy recently and he kind of refuses not to feel upbeat about the future, despite, you know, a lot of material that suggests he should. And he kind of has created this way of thinking about himself, the world and the future where he can be optimistic because he realizes that the pitfalls on either side of that are depression or anxiety or something awful for him. So he thinks very, very differently than most anybody I’ve ever met. And he realizes I am on this little precipice. I don’t want to fall off the cliff in any way. I’ve got to be, if I’m not optimistic, I know that the alternative is not good for my well-being. So, you know in a way It’s a strange thing to say but sometimes I think neurodivergence really works well for children that I work with and this is one of those Circumstances where I’m the whole not not necessarily to a man But on the whole I find that it tends to be they tend to be better off Emotionally than some of the other boys I work with.

Debbie:

It’s so interesting because I was thinking that, and I often say this, that our neurodivergent kids, because they often have to invest more in and spend more time learning social-emotional skills and just kind of like doing work on themselves, whether through therapy or other things, that they actually have a much higher perhaps emotional intelligence than their neurotypical peers. In the book, you talk about this emotional intelligence gap, which I thought was super interesting. You said, we raise our boys to be independent nearly every way, but we teach our girls to be cooperative and interdependent with one another. So that was fascinating to me and so true and shocking really that that is what we’re doing. And that’s a huge deal. But then as we’re talking about this, it kind of makes sense that perhaps neurodivergent boys maybe have an advantage there.

Dr. John Duffy:

I think you’re right and as you’re talking I’m thinking like why do we agree here? And part of it is I think that there’s this practice effect that neurodivergent kids have, right? You’re right that they had to work on social emotional learning and emotional intelligence skills. And so the pandemic didn’t throw them off because they’ve already been working on this stuff and then they’re gonna continue through it. Whereas a lot of the young boys I work with who are neurotypical, they’re new to any of this kind of work, right? You know, so if they’re coming to therapy, they’re coming to therapy for the first time and they are already experiencing symptoms of something that they want to repair, right? You know, and so we’re working kind of coming from a deficit to catch up to I think some of the neurodivergent kids who are already kind of like several steps ahead and learning those emotional intelligence skills and having those ingrained in your brain early in life gets you so far ahead in ways I think we really haven’t measured very well yet. But I mean, really in most every measurable way to create resilience and confidence and that willingness to be interdependent with one another and recognizing like, I work better with other people than I do just on my own, at least some of the time. That recognition, that self-awareness is so important. And our neurotypical boys, I think, still feel this steely need to be independent that sometimes works against them broadly.

Debbie:

Yeah, it makes so much sense. There’s so much that we could get into in your book. I just thought it was so fascinating, such a good read. And I’d like to, as we kind of wrap up to give a tool or two to parents, so parents who are raising boys, you know, you have a whole section in the book about what we can do, but can you share an idea or two of how we can start to if we’re of any role of influence in a boy’s life, how we can start to support this shift for them.

Dr. John Duffy:

A couple things. First off, I encourage parents to get into your child’s world. Like we were talking about with the podcast before, you know, we sometimes make these assumptions about our boys, about all our kids. But while I’ll focus on boys for the time being, that they’re lazy, that they’re just playing video games and that’s pointless. They watch pornography and that’s pointless. They listen to these podcasts, how stupid, you know, let’s make them not do that. Let’s punish them. Let’s create consequences and sure if you’re inclined to do that fine, but understand what it is that they’re ingesting all the time into their brains and work with talk that through with them and try to understand how they’re developing their point of view and weigh in. know, like even if you disagree, have a healthy debate with them. They will feel more connected with you and they’ll rely on you more, be more willing to share with you. Even if you disagree with them, they’ll feel respected that like, mom or dad actually recognizes that I have a point of view that carries some validity, that’s a big deposit in the emotional bank account you carry with your kids.

The other thing is I think sometimes as parents we make kind of lazy assumptions about our kids and you know what they’re doing motivates them instead of recognizing like they might be struggling and that’s why they won’t leave that room up there. That’s why they’re out with their friends all the time. Maybe that’s why they’re smoking or drinking too much. And so we move real quick to consequence. And I get it. I’m a parent and you’re a parent and that anxiety, it comes to us quickly. So I’m asking parents to do a pretty mighty thing by putting that in the backseat, at least for the time being, for a moment, and thinking about it like, I wonder why my child is choosing this behavior. And to see underneath the behavior to like, okay, what’s driving that? know, like what emotional stuff is driving that behavior, because there’s always something going on underneath the surface. And if we pay attention to that, then we can help our kids through these difficult years. If we don’t, then we become an obstacle to work around. And that’s where we get the myth that, you know, adolescence is a really difficult time and our kids are gonna hate us sometimes and you know, like I I’m not crazy about that thinking I don’t think that’s requisite or necessary. I think we can mitigate some of that by treating our kids a little bit more like peers or friends and a little less like, you know antagonists

Debbie:

Yeah, such good advice. you know, I just want to before we say goodbye, I want to make sure in addition to the book we’re talking about today, which is called Rescuing Our Sons, 8 Solutions to our Crisis of Disaffected Teen Boys, excellent book is your book that we had you on the show before listeners go back and check that out, which I refer to a lot. It’s called Parenting the New Teen in the Age of Anxiety. And you talk about I still remember reading about that, the emotional deposits that we’re making in our kids’ accounts and just so many great concepts and so much hope really in your work. So could you let listeners know the best way to engage with you and where you’d like them to check out your work?

Dr. John Duffy:

Yeah, yeah, so my website is drjohnduffy.com. Most everything about me is there. My sub stack is also Dr. John Duffy. So, and I write, I publish every Wednesday. So yeah, if you’re willing to sign up and I’ll drop some parenting advice there once a week.

Debbie:

Awesome. I’m going to sign up for that sub stack. I’m really into sub stack right now, so I will enjoy that. So John, thank you so much. I’m so appreciative of you taking the time in your very busy schedule to share all of this with us today. Such a great conversation.

Dr. John Duffy:

Debbie, thank you. I so appreciate the work you do.