As a mother of three boys who runs a women’s news publication, I’m well aware of my responsibility to do everything possible to support them in becoming kind, caring young men.
But like most parents, I also feel the enormous weight of getting it right. Especially when it comes to phone use, screen time, gaming and social media. And also when it comes to various sources across the web telling us our boys are “lost” and will soon fall victim to the loneliness epidemic, and are one 15-second video away from falling into the manosphere.
I research the gamers and interests my boys follow to make sure they’re not watching the next Andrew Tate.
I talk to my boys about consent and the shocking allegations of rape that have come out of Sydney schools, with the alleged perpetrators being not much older than themselves. They asked questions, and got answers, about why the star of their AFL team didn’t play in the finals.
We discuss AI and algorithms and why social media isn’t reality. We talk about the gaming economy and how their attention is monetised, so it’s in developers’ interest to keep them online.
And yet it never feels enough.
The arguments about gaming continue, as does the stress of giving them enough independence without going too far, and deciding which games are better than others. The pull of screens – gaming, social media, addictive shorts – feels so constant and real and genuinely like a battle we’ll never be able to completely control. I know how addictive screens are for adults. And then you overhear one with their friends discussing the “kirkaversary” and end up down a rabbit hole wondering how kids that young in Australia are across such events, and how you missed this entire universe of internet culture when you literally spend all day online.
And I know I’m far from alone in having concerns about raising boys.
For the past couple of years on Women’s Agenda, we’ve been bombarded by mothers and grandmothers (and some fathers) of boys asking, “How do I get this right? What more can I do? How can I set them up to be the best men possible?”
The manosphere is one aspect of their concerns. But those concerns run much further into what the attention economy is presenting to all of us: screen addiction, and the pull of online content that’s more interesting than offline conversations with friends and family. The loss is of reading and writing skills, thanks to more time spent online and increasingly more such time with AI. The pressure to appear and act one way.
I’m also worried about friendship and connection, as I am for every cohort of society — and something we’ve examined extensively on Women’s Agenda, including our recent work on loneliness in motherhood). I’m concerned about kids turning to AI for companionship and even intimacy, and about kids being sucked into what recent research has described as The Grift Economy.
We want to support parents of boys who might be confused, concerned, and wondering what more they can do. We also want to learn from parents of boys who can show what’s going right.
That’s why we recently partnered with The Man Cave, Movember, and The Foundation for Positive Masculinity to learn more about how parents and carers are faring in raising boys in the algorithmic age, and the questions they have, via this survey here.
The concerns I’ve mentioned are just some of the reasons we’re keen to hear from parents and carers of boys for our national survey on how they’re going raising boys in the algorithmic age – including concerns about gaming, screen time, group chats and friendships – and also, importantly, what is going well in how they’re raising boys.
We’re not trying to frame a “save our boys” narrative or to buy into any idea that boys are lost. It’s girls who pay the highest price for the worst of what boys are being served.
Indeed, I don’t believe boys are lost. I do believe – like all of us – their attention is being farmed, by design and for profit, something I’ve written about previously here.
So if you’re involved in raising a boy—in any capacity, from parent to grandparent, coach, mentor, or teacher—we’d love to hear from you. Take the survey here.