After reading the book Boymom by Ruth Whippman, my heart is breaking for baby boys.

They need infinitely more love and tenderness than they actually get, and the absence of that essential care leaves a lifelong scar on their hearts and souls.

Recent studies show that baby boys are born with measurably less emotional resilience than baby girls. In fact, their right brains, which are the mediators of emotional resilience, are about a month less mature than the right brains of baby girls. They are significantly more emotionally fragile, and thus more deeply and traumatically impacted by less-than-perfect parenting and adverse life events. It stands to reason that they need more love, more attunement, more attention, more cuddling than baby girls, but in fact exactly the opposite happens.

Right from the very beginning, boys are given less physical contact than girls. Their emotions are not responded to as often or as quickly as are the emotions of girls. Their parents, both mothers and fathers, use less emotional language in speaking with them than they do with girls. They are not referred to as ‘sweetheart’ or ‘honey’, but are called ‘buddy’ or ‘little guy’. They are roughhoused with more than baby girls, especially by their fathers.

Baby boys are not given the extra love, care and tenderness that they actually need to cope with their lesser resilience. On the contrary, they are related to as though they are tougher than girls and in less need of love, care, holding and attention. This double whammy or more vulnerability and less care results in baby boys feeling very alone as they try to navigate the confusing world of their own emotions. They experience the world and the people in it as unsupportive and unloving, and at a deep level this creates enormous pain, confusion, hurt and anger, along with an intimate relationship template that precludes the sharing of tender emotions.

Right from the very beginning, boys learn that their emotions and need for connection, both emotional and physical, are not going to be fully seen, valued or responded to. Instead, they learn that they have to deal with these things themselves, without sufficient love or support. They are forced into precocious emotional independence where their only option is to suppress and repress their emotional lives. It is too painful to keep being denied the love they need, so they start to lose touch with that need, and with their own hearts and tender feelings.

They also learn that rough and tumble play is a way to be valued and get connection – such as it is – which teaches them that they need to be physically tough and capable in order to connect. This is what matters and brings them approval.

These differences between boys and girls in both emotional resilience and in the way they are treated continues throughout childhood. At 5 years old, boys are 3 months behind girls in intellectual development and emotional skills, yet are still expected to be tougher and more capable. High school girls are some 2 years more emotionally mature than boys, but boys are expected to compete aggressively in sports and other activities while never showing their tender, soft, or heart-felt emotions, even though they have less innate capacity than girls for the kind of emotional maturity that can contain and process emotions when needed.

The model of maleness that is consistently shown to boys, both by their parents, their teachers and the larger culture, is the action hero, the loner who is tough, physical, capable of great feats of strength and endurance and always succeeds in his mission. He may ‘win’ a girl through his heroism, but he does not win her through his heart-felt relational skills.

Despite the inadequate support for boys’ emotional lives that results from parenting patterns and cultural conditioning, boys generally manage to maintain some level of connection with their emotional selves, and some level of emotional expression, until puberty and starting Middle School, which usually happen around the age of 12. This is the age when boys really start to take on the male cultural ideal, and to mercilessly tease and bully any boy who seems to show more emotion and less toughness than the ideal demands. The result is a marked shut down in boys’ emotional expression, along with significant feelings of loneliness and disconnectedness.

Any expression of the heart, anything soft, sweet, vulnerable and intimate, is seen as weakness. Any boy who shows such qualities is likely to be teased and bullied unmercifully by his peer group, which, like him has been thoroughly immersed in the cultural ideals of maleness. So out of bitter necessity, boys lock away their own tender emotions, eventually losing touch with them to a large degree, and create a tough outer shell of acceptable male demeanor.

The tragedy is that the various expressions of the heart are what connects us with one another, and a sense of connectedness is crucial for human wellbeing.

A multitude of studies attest to this.

Because the heart has been exiled, boys (and the men they become) are unable to connect meaningfully with others, and feel a profound sense of loneliness. They may share activities and superficial conversation with other boys, but there is no real emotional intimacy or connection. In their closest relationships, they feel alone.

But what is truly heartbreaking is that when they do feel safe enough to share their innermost desires, they discover that the thing they most long for is relationships with other boys where they can safely express their feelings. They long for this intimacy, yet assume it will not be accepted or reciprocated. So often there are two or three boys gathered together, each feeling painfully lonely, each one of them longing for the connectedness of emotional intimacy, yet each too afraid to start that conversation.

This pattern persists as boys grow up to be men, and often for the rest of their lives. Men in our culture are generally much more emotionally disconnected from themselves and others than women, have fewer close friends, and feel much more lonely. Understandably, they are also angry at being deprived of their emotional birthright. In addition, their disconnection makes it harder for them to empathize with others, and this fatal combination of anger and lack of empathy leads to a great deal of violence towards other human beings in the form of abuse, murder and war.

And it all starts with the way we parent our baby boys.

It’s clear that in order to usher in a time of peace and love on Earth, we need to help boys and men reclaim their emotions and their connectedness. We need a cultural ideal of manhood that embraces not just strength, but softness, sweetness and sensitivity. We need to allow them to be full human beings, expressing all their innate qualities. Only then, when they feel deeply connected and heartfully empathic, will they find it impossible to do violence to others.

Men are not currently clamoring for the right to embrace their heartfelt emotions in the same way that woman have been clamoring for the last 150 years for the right to be strong, powerful, autonomous and capable. But that is clearly what’s needed, not just for the New Age but for men’s contentment with life. Perhaps it will be the women who will lead this second revolution in the reclaiming of the full palette of innate potentials for all humans, regardless of gender.

This is a big project, much bigger than any of us. But the place we can start is with the way we parent our baby boys. Along with their strength and capability, we need to see their tenderness, their fragility, the sweetness of their hearts, and love them for all that they are.