Caitlin Moran: "My 5 pieces of advice for parents of teen boys"

“If you were thinking of doing a murder, you would talk to me and Mum first, right?”

In the week after Adolescence scared the bejesus out of every parent in the world, a cartoon did the rounds: a concerned mum and dad, sitting on the sofa - their confused teenage boy between them - murmuring the above caption.

As with all the best humour, it was cleverer, and quicker, than most 1000-word think-pieces. Everyone wants to talk to their teenage boy about Adolescence, but - how?

When researching my book, What About Men?, I asked dozens of experts for their advice on bringing up happier teenage boys - who live in a world of online chatrooms where talk of depression can be met with emojis of nooses and knives, and boys are encouraged to mistrust adults who “don’t understand” the realities of their lives. Here are five things I learned.

1. Don’t sit on the sofa and ask them if they’ve thought of doing a murder

Amazingly, the sofa is worst idea here - not the question. Cornering your child, looking them in the eye and asking them a direct question tends to provoke either irritation or monosyllabic shrugging. If, when you sit next to them, they put their hoodie up, you’ve already lost them. They have entered a Privacy Booth made of fleece. You might as well abandon your talk right now.

All the advice is that you need to be side by side, doing something, instead. Take the dog for a walk, go fishing, wash the car. Getting in the car - you in the front, them in the back, on a long drive - is also good. You want to be forming a laid-back, conversational Chat Team as two equals - rather than sitting there like Victoria Derbyshire on Newsnight firing off questions. 

2. If you want to find out something about your child, ask questions about their friends

At this age, their peers are their world. 90% of their lives are based around school, their social lives and their phones. You are a dim, distant, shadowy figure, at best - like a Ringwraith in Lord of the Rings.

Accordingly, if you want to find out about your child, ask them about their friends. Because, when they talk about their friends, they’re often talking about themselves. “Do your friends think they should show Adolescence in school? Has anyone not seen it yet? Do they think the school is like your school? What bits aren’t realistic? Which bits are? Are there any boys being teased for being like Jamie? Is there a difference between the way girls and boys are talking about it? Whose parents are freaking out the most?”

You might be surprised how reassuring your child’s answers are. Anecdotally, I’ve heard, over and over, that being into the Manosphere, and/or being a fan of Andrew Tate, is something boys, by and large, grow out of. By the age of 15, many boys are dismissing him as “a bit of a dick.” 

“We’re actually past Peak Andrew Tate,” one feminist campaigner told me last week. Before delivering the rather more dolorous news that, in many schools, the new, big problem is the 'Nudify' app: boys turning photos of female classmates into AI porn. 

A question like, “Who do all the girls hate and why do they hate him?” will give you an idea of what your school’s most pressing problem is. Of course, this question will be ineffective in the most terrifying scenario: that your son is that guy.

3. What do you do if your son is the problem?

In What About Men?, I asked this question of Josh Spears - an educator and activist who works with boys at risk of radicalisation. His full advice is brilliant, nuanced and empathetic - but in short, he advises you resist every urge to dismiss or revile Tate. Instead, you should ask your son what he likes about Tate - why he’s useful - and then start a conversation about your own heroes and role models. 

All of us will have, at some point, admired someone who, later, turned out to be problematic - or just not relevant to us any more. It will often be genuinely new information for a young person to learn that being disappointed by your heroes - that learning to question them, before outgrowing them - is an absolutely unavoidable part of becoming adult. Indeed, it’s one of the ways you become adult. 

“You can’t confront [young men]. You need to offer them an off-ramp instead,” Spears said. 

In other words, you need to have an interested, engaged discussion about Tate. Watch Tate’s videos. Immerse yourself in his logic. Help your son analyse what he’s saying. Start kicking the tyres. Yes - it’s fine that Tate is suggesting you hit the gym, and try and earn some cash. But if he’s also saying that all women “belong” to men, how’s he going to explain that to his nan? It could make Christmas tricky.

4. Is it a crisis in teenage boys - or a crisis in fathers?

Research shows only 11% of boys came to their fathers for sex advice, dropping to 6% for advice on relationships. For mothers and their daughters, the stats were 66% and 68%. If men aren’t having long, frank conversations with their friends about relationships and sex in the way women do, then suddenly finding a way to do this with their sons, from scratch, will seem awkward or even impossible - as the stats bare out. 

If you aren’t modelling how to talk about these things, your kids are going to look online for someone who is. Hence, the popularity of the Manosphere. We can’t really expect boys to hit puberty and suddenly start talking, in informed detail, about love, sex, respect and consent if they haven’t heard adult men doing it first. Be the change you want to see.

5. If the crisis in teenage boys is a problem of culture and gender - which it is, obviously - then we do already have an incredibly effective way of giving young people the tools to analyse and solve their problems: feminism

When I see Andrew Tate fans being told that their best option, in an increasingly difficult world, is to become as fit and muscular as possible, conceal all their emotional problems in order to be admired, and make as much money as possible, it reminds me of the kind of stuff girls used to be told. Be thin, be pretty, get rich enough to buy designer handbags like the Sex and the City girls, and do not let anyone know how scared, messy or weird you really are.

The thing is, the last 15 years of feminism taught girls how to rebel against all that. Girls, I May Destroy You, Lizzo, the body positivity movement, Fleabag, Broad City, Everything I Know About Love, Beyoncé, Chappell Roan, We Are Lady Parts, Taylor Swift: girls now have an explosively expanded lexicon of heroes, of all sizes, backgrounds and sexualities, discussing every possible aspect of being a woman in a joyful and accessible way. There isn’t an aspect of being a women, or girl - from puberty to menopause - that you can’t find a book, blog, TikTok, movie, number one anthem, or TV show about. 

There are amazing male role models out there, talking about the things that teenage boys are concerned about. I highly recommend former Rizzle Kicks star Jordan Stephens, who has a genuinely inspiring TikTok account talking about mental health, drugs, sex and neurodivergence in a way that’s honest, amusing and often unexpected. He, for instance, rebels against the use of the phrase “toxic masculinity.” His book, Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak and Dogs is a blisteringly honest account of being a confused adolescent “fuckboi,” always on the search for drugs, but ultimately trying, and succeeding, to find a way to be productive and happy.

Of course, making a teenage boy read a book you think is good is another problem in itself: but, nine times out of 10, if you put it up on a high shelf, saying, “You are not allowed to read this book. It is too filthy, dark and dangerous. It is embargoed until you are 18,” they will almost certainly be reading it by 11pm.

About the author

Caitlin Moran was home-educated, and became a The Times columnist at the age of 18. Her 2011 book How To Be A Woman was a worldwide bestseller, and 2023’s Number One book What About Men? asked, what if you tackled the problems of boys and men in the same way we have with women and girls? There is also a chapter about how men's trousers have become too tight.