Global Boyhood Initiative

Unhealthy ideas about boyhood and manhood are reproduced generation to generation around the world in families, schools, athletic and community programs, and in media.

The Global Boyhood Initiative is designed to break this pattern.

Core Principles

1. Boys have the potential and deep need for relationships. Harmful, restrictive norms related to manhood often keep boys from having these relationships.
2. We view boys from a positive, non-deficit approach – they are not walking problems, but full of relational and empathetic potential.
3. We must allow boys to have and keep deep friendships with those who support them to be themselves and push back on the norms that often restrict these very friendships.
4. We must model and teach healthy, intimate relationships and healthy sexuality for boys and all children. We must use these spaces as opportunities to break harmful gender stereotypes and promote healthy versions of masculinities.
5. We must empower boys to resist harmful ideas about manhood by helping them judge what are positive aspirations of manhood and which are negative and to think critically – along with girls and all children – about how gender norms work.
6. We must help boys be emotionally literate, to understand their own emotions, how they react to them, how they can feel and to seek help when they need it.
7. We need to help boys filter and critically reflect about what they see in media – from TV, streaming, platforms, video games, and pornography.
8. We need to help boys embrace the diversity of human sexuality and intimate relationships breaking out of homophobic, transphobic, and heteronormative ideas.
9. We must help boys be active bystanders by speaking out when they see other boys (and girls) cause harm.
10. We must engage boys to see caring and caregiving as part of who they are.

Resources

Resources include practical tools and strategies for parents, researchers and educators to help them support the boys in their lives. Access tip sheets, reports, and research articles that delve into the latest research on the development of boys and their emotional and social growth.