Relationships are Key to a Boy’s Development
Boys are best able to meet challenges when they are confident that they are known and loved.
January 2023
About 15 years ago, a study conducted at the University of Virginia asked subjects to stand at the base of a hill and estimate how steep it was. While the hill actually had an incline of 26 degrees, the guesses of participants varied significantly, with one of the most influential study conditions hinging on the presence of friends. The people with friends were much more likely to underestimate the hill's steepness.
As unremarkable as this finding may seem, we are also aware that the world at large is shot through with forces acting against these deeply human needs and it seems that one group in particular—men—is the most likely to struggle with building and maintaining friendships. In recent years, polls have concluded that one in five American men have no close friends, that five times as many men describe themselves as having no close relationships as did men 30 years ago, and that the number of men reporting that they had six close friendships has fallen from 55 to 27 percent in that same period. The reasons for this struggle are myriad—the cultural messages which sometimes render boys’ emotional intelligence and social skills dormant, the potentially isolating effects of online gaming and social media, an overreliance on girls and women to create social plans and networks for boys and men, and so on—but the upshot is an pronounced dearth of authentic social connectivity for American men.
"The world will continue to benefit from the intellectual, artistic, and athletic excellence of Browning boys—and Browning boys will always benefit from relationships they forge in developing that excellence.”
This can be unnerving, but this is also the very set of concerns that Browning exists to address. We know that boys are best able to meet academic, artistic, and athletic challenges when they are confident that they are known and loved by their teachers, and connected with and concerned for their peers. In addition, Browning uses its programming (both academic and extracurricular) to foster the kinds of skills and dispositions that are essential to meaningful friendships, qualities like honesty, deep listening, emotional literacy, curiosity, patience, and a generous sense of humor. These are qualities which the culture at large too often diminishes as not sufficiently “masculine,” but they are decidedly necessary to flourishing relationships, and are the result of putting boys into teams and on collaborative projects, of texts and artifacts which allow boys to imagine and appreciate stories that are not their own, and of designing courses which directly address boys' need for interpersonal trust, relational stability, and expansive understandings of masculinity.
What would our boys’ lives be like if we helped them to understand that their intellectual growth and academic achievement could be supercharged by emotional wellbeing and social openness? If we worked to ensure that every boy in our care felt confident in his skills to develop, maintain, and extend meaningful relationships with his peers and with adults alike? It seems to me that this would be a group of young men who feel—rightly—that with their friends at their side, they could summit any number of hills that life’s journey might place in front of them.
The world will continue to benefit from the intellectual, artistic, and athletic excellence of Browning boys—and Browning boys will always benefit from relationships they forge in developing that excellence. This is one of the many things I love about our community, and it is what I look forward to continuing to see in the future.
