In this episode of The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, we explore the psychology of raising boys in today’s cultural climate. I’m joined by clinical psychologist Dr Matt Slavin, and together we discuss masculinity, misogyny, adolescence, identity, belonging, and emotional development. We explore why polarising narratives about manhood can feel so compelling, how fear and shame shape behaviour, and what parents, clinicians, and educators can do to support boys to grow into emotionally strong, compassionate men. We discuss attachment, aggression, peer influence, incel culture, parenting, sport, curiosity in therapy, and how to respond to challenging views without judgement. This episode is relevant for aspiring and qualified psychologists, parents, educators, and anyone interested in mental health, masculinity, and developmental psychology.

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Right now, boys are growing up in a world where often the loudest messages about masculinity are coming from influences who profit from fear, dominance, and division. And the really scary part, those messages land because they speak straight to the insecurities that boys often don't know how to name. So today I'm welcoming back Dr. Matt Slavin, clinical psychologist, and we're asking the big question, how do we raise boys and young men with emotional strength, healthy confidence, and compassion in a culture that often seems to reward the exact opposite? Hope you find it so useful, and if you do, please like and subscribe for more. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, and I am joined here today by Dr. Matt Slavin, who is a fellow qualified clinical psychologist. Welcome back, Matt.

Thank you so much. Lovely to be here.

So we have met already for another episode where we're talking about the way that our brains kind of work and how they were geared up for living many, many, many years ago. So if people want to check that out, they absolutely can. I'll link that in the description. But today we are talking about raising boys or working with boys or men. When there is such kind of a narrative around and available for them, which might be misogynistic. Can you tell us how your interest in that development? We've

All got our ... Depends how deep you want to go on this one, because we've all got our reasons why we help others. And I know that I felt very lost as a teen, as a young adult, and I don't think I was ever told these messages or signals. I think you just absorbed them living in the UK as a boy, being a young man, is that I didn't feel like I understood what was going on in my head, and I didn't understand how to communicate that, and I felt very scared of what was within. And particularly scared about being something I didn't want to be, being bad to be aggressive. Maybe there's something wrong in some of these primal instincts we all have within us. And my career ended very early on working with young offenders and working with young men who'd been through hardships in their teenage years, particularly chronic ill health, which meant a lot of these teenage boys worked with a lot of young men, been through the fostering system, through the other side, where they hadn't had the kind of experiences that help them understand their inner world, not be afraid of their inner world.

And if you don't know those pieces, then we go back to some our primal fears and violence becomes a great way to manage this world, that aggression comes out because it's also a cover for fear. And we know that there's something in us that can feel safe with some very black and white thinking or some very binary rhetoric. They're the wrong ones, we're the right ones, better to feel strong than to feel weak. And I think in today's modern age, it's very engaging and very easy really to fall into some of the less kind political narratives being put around to this world, particularly around what it means to be a man and what it means to be in this world.

Yeah. And I think there was kind of people really began looking at this in closer detail when Andrew Tate started being very vocal on this, but also more recently with the hit Netflix show adolescence, which for me actually, my husband and I didn't like it as much as everybody else because we felt like it touched on some very important points, but never really seemed to conclude on them. I felt like we wanted more. And if they'd made it like an eight part series, we might've got more of the depth that I was looking for. But this whole idea of incel, which is involuntary celebracy, and like you said, that narrative of us versus them. And yeah, it's ... I don't know, as a mother of two boys, one of them, one of whom's in end stages of primary school and one of them's in secondary school, it just feels like a heavy load.

And like you, I've worked in youth prisons as well. I can see where things have gone well with people and where things have gone less well, often through no fault of their own, thinking about complex trauma and all of that stuff. But there are always still choices you can make. And I do understand that peer pressure can be very difficult to guard against and that often people will try and entice you in to their club. And if you then feel valued and respected, it can be ... It's almost like leaving prison, isn't it? It's hard to go and do something different when all the people that you already know are doing all of these things. It's hard to be independent and by yourself. So I do definitely have empathy and a lot of thought for what it's like to grow up as a male and a young man, but also I have fear as a woman, but also as a mother to boys.

And there's some natural things here that are very helpful for us to understand. I think perhaps being a psychologist or understanding systems, understanding development helps you understand some of it doesn't mean you can always avoid it, but there are things like when we have a primal need to belong and so places of belonging become extremely attractive and there are definitely there is that I remember learning in my masters, my child and adolescent psychology masters. I remember learning about the key psychosocial tasks of adolescence. There are things you need to do at some point in this life. If you don't get it done in your teens, you'll do it later in your twenties, but you need to do them, which is finding group membership, exploring identity, which is leaving your parents and finding a peer group who are more important socially to you than your parents, finding partners or those extra things, exploring sexual identity.

Well, that's part of it. So knowing that it's like, well, this is all part of what men are meant to do, is to go and find these groups and find your tribe. But I suppose one of the things I'm very mindful of, I've got a young young boy, he's three years old and he has big, big feelings, my little one, big feelings because he's three years old and he's very loud, the loudest member of our family. And there always will be. He feels things strongly and he has a short fuse. He's three years old, but that's also part of his personality. You can see how kids are shaped very early on that I think one of the great gifts you can try and give your children that we're trying very hard, I'm not sure we'll do it, but we're trying very hard, is to provide those two ingredients which might help with this later in life, which is one, the skills of emotion regulation, so teaching kids how to feel and what's actually going on.

So feel and deal, to feel it and to deal with it, and to feel loved just for who they are, that one may, we hope, may protect about going with groups where they feel lost and isolated so they'll take them away and that will be their tribe. And that two, that there's always, and we hope this is the case, we try our very, very best as parents. This is what I do in my parent work with parenting for adoptive families, is that we try and help them provide a home environment where the adults are the safe figures. Parents are safe figures so that secure based safe haven, somewhere to go out from, but ultimately you're going to make mistakes as a kid, you're going to make mistakes as a teenager, as a young adult, and don't we want parents who say, "Don't we want kids who think parents are the people to go back to and talk about it with?

That's what I want for my

Boy." We absolutely do. And it's reminding me of a really lovely book that I listened to by Gabor Mate called Hold Onto Your Kids. And it's exactly what you're saying actually. And there's very interesting chapters even on sexualization and sexual contact and that actually people are more likely to become engaged in sexual contact if they feel like they don't feel like they've got value elsewhere and it's very, very interesting. So anyone listening to this or watching this, if you like this conversation, I think you'll probably also like that book. But for me as a parent, it really reinforced that I want to be able to do my job well and have my children individuate themselves from me in the way that I've individuated myself from my family, but that I would love for them to still choose to have me in their life, not because they need me in their life, that they're not still, they can't be functional, they can't get things done, but they would choose to say, "Actually, I'd love to meet my mom for a coffee." She doesn't drink coffee or my kid in a herbal tea, or that I would really love to go out for dinner with her and my girlfriend, and maybe dad will come too.

You know what I mean? That they will want to have me in their life, and that's when I feel like I'll have done a good job. What are your thoughts around that?

Wouldn't that be lovely? Wouldn't that be lovely? My wife and I often, my wife's a paediatric OT, sensory integration OT. So she often thinks about ... We think too much sometimes about our kids.That's also not so helpful. By no means are we great parents. We try to be good parents. We think a lot about this, and we wish for our children that they want to be with us as the girl. We're at that lovely gift of life where my son is three, my daughter's five, where we are their worlds and they want to be with us. We're very aware that won't last, and actually we don't want it to last forever. We'll have to find a poem, maybe I'll link it with you, but there's a poem that's on children or on parenting, which the essence of a part of it is that your children are not you.

You don't own your children. And that one of the greatest things you can do is to give all the skills for your kids to feel confidently to go out into the world by themselves and to have their own lives. And they didn't ask to come into this world. So we want very much for our kids to have a great life on their own terms, but we're very mindful. There are things we could be doing now, things parents can do now about being safe containers, about being good enough. I love that book on The Power of Showing Up by Dan Gilbert and Tina Payne Bryson on if you can give children to feel the four S's, safe, seen, soothed, and secure, those things are the great protectors of mental health and criminal activity and later life, but also the great protectors of holding onto good relationships in life.

We try to. We try our best.

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I will check that book out. I think I've read one, a couple of one by Dan Siegel, but I've not read that one, so I will definitely check that out. I tried to not Google the term Andrew Tate, but I did. I did before our meeting. And actually, I was surprised at how relatively normal the freely available, generally understood background to him is. So I don't know how much you or our audience will know about him, but he was born in the States and he moved to Lewton when his parents split up. I think he was around age 11. So then he was raised in Lewton. His dad was a very competitive, successful chess player, and it's been suggested that he was largely possibly personality disordered. He was certainly a little bit grandiose and narcissistic at times, but his mom was, I think it said like a care worker or something.

So in terms of the level of ability or level of high performance, for me, it was stacking up as actually dad is the high achiever, world chess champion, mom, mom not so much. So maybe that's where it started, but I don't know what I was expecting.That's not what I was expecting. Maybe it's actually the people he was around in Lewton. Something or a series of some things have contributed towards him developing the views that he has developed. I've never watched one of his videos. Maybe I should. Yeah. Our history doesn't have to define us, but what we will learn about what we believe as psychologists is that formulation and kind of learning about our developmental experiences can be key in understanding why we have the beliefs, the worldviews, and the behaviours ultimately that we do. And also the fact that he didn't just keep these viewpoints to himself, did he?

He went out there very publicly with it and has made a lot of money from social media and kind of talking about this. What do you think,

Matt? Where you come from matters. So I think understanding your lived experience is a key part of all of our lives. I think everyone should go through therapy so they can understand themselves. Not that anything wrong in particular, but you have to understand yourself. I remember being offered some posts in Lewton and being said, there's a lot of social inequality in Newton, sorry, and it's a tough place to be. So there's a lot of that that happens. So maybe it's something around there. And I would say he's very attractive in many different ways because high performance is very attractive. The clear narrative is very attractive. He's very confident. He's very muscular and good looking in those ways. There's many qualities which many men won't want, boys might want to aspire to. And I think what's really tricky is to balance, again, we'll come back to primal needs is the two primal things about our tribe is competition and collaboration.

I want to raise a boy who is, "I want to raise a boy who goes to martial arts."That's absolutely key for me. I went through martial arts and I think I learned all the right lessons about how to be aggressive in a controlled way, how to be physically strong and then to not need it. And all those things about brotherhood and I think are very important, but at the same time, then also how to live in this world in collaboration, to not think about yourself as better than others, to be able to meet anybody and just have genuine compassion and respect and curiosity about their love story and where they come from. I think that takes a little bit more internal confidence and self-esteem to do, otherwise we get into hierarchies. And once we get into labels, hierarchies, dogma, then it's very easy to not treat people like humans with really detailed lived experiences and interesting stories.

Labels are always shorthand and people are far more interesting and complex than we can possibly put down to a few words. And so we wanted to give people the time. I want my boy to give women, men, anyone in his world, the time to really see people beyond what he immediately sees.

But it's interesting when you drew out his key features that people might find attractive or compelling, because actually I think you have all of those features as well, and yet you are living a very different life with very different values and you talk very differently about how you would want your son to be and how you'd want your daughter to experience the world. So those features alone can't be enough to predetermine that. Something must have reinforced this belief for him.

It's hard to know why. Now, actually, I think as a clinical psychologist, the one thing we don't do is that we don't make too many assumptions. We try and make inferences and hypotheses, but you've got to know someone to really understand the lived experience. And I don't know that for him. But I think one thing that's very compelling, perhaps what's driven him, but I don't know, is there is something very compelling when you are scared in this world is to put fear out into this world or when you feel not good enough is to project that into the world. We might go back to some odd psychoanalytic terms here that I remember putting a post down not that long ago, a social media post around hate and how really hate is governed when we project hate out and we say we don't like these things about people, about immigration, about the colour of someone's skin.

Really, we're looking within and we're finding qualities in ourselves that we don't like, that we're fearful of. So maybe it's our own weakness, our vulnerability, our fear of poverty, our own fears. And we project that out and then we put them onto another. And then we can hate something else because it's like we can annihilate it in another rather than actually fear it in ourselves, far more vulnerable to say we fear in ourselves. So I put a post like that and probably one of the most commented things I've ever put out into this world. And most people, I had an unbelievable amount of hate put my way in that conversation. Very, very degrading messages were put towards me. I had things like about what I said, for sure. But I had three or four messages about the way I looked, the way I spoke, and I thought it was so interesting that in the very post I was putting out about actually how easy it is to ignore ourselves and to displace our own fears and dislikes into others, project it into others, that the conversation of that invoked, and it was men who were commenting, invoked saying to me that shave your neck was one of the comments I got, how disgusting, shave your neck.

Yeah, I don't shave my neck, so I wear a natural beard. And I think I don't know why. I don't know this man personally. I don't know his history, but I think there's something in us, particularly men, that maybe if you're not secure enough in where you are, you're going to lash out and fight and attack others. And I don't think that comes from a secure man.

Yeah. I think you're probably right. But like you said, we don't know him and we've never therapized him. But I watched, I think it was a Panorama show that was on recently about the fall of Prince Andrew. And as part of that, they were interviewing obviously old footage of Virginia, who's been a co-author of the book. She's suddenly along with us. But they were talking about what they saw in this production as being raised to be untouchable and being raised to be thinking that everyone else is below you really. And I think it's some of what you just spoke about really is that we're raising people to believe that they can take whatever they want. They can do whatever they want. I tried to get hold of a copy of that book, but it was sold out. So I am definitely intending to read it for my own knowledge.

But yeah, I think now we're more mindful and more switched on and more able to hold people to account. We see this in the media, don't we, is that actually the BBC won't touch anyone that's not robust anymore and not kind of bulletproof. And even people that have been sacked, Gary Linica for having an opinion. And rightly so on a number of topics, like he was told, "No, that's not okay." But we're more moving towards people having to be accountable for their actions and that's catching people out when that's not the way that they started their career or started their life. But again, it's just really interesting food the thought for me as a mother of boys. How have you watched that unfold?

It's scary as well as the other part of it that it's scary that you need to be, well, you need to be mindful of what you put out to the world. And I think what's scary is that when I remember being a teenage boy, and I remember at university, I think we all made mistakes or did silly things, but not many things that was recorded or my opinions I didn't tweet at the time about things as you're discovering yourself. So I think it's important to remember being a teenager, being a young adult, you're trying things on for size, trying political views, you're trying on your worldview. I remember someone talking about it to me like, you're trying on many different outfits, you're trying all those different outfits and eventually find the one that feels the most comfortable. Hopefully when you try all the outfits on, you're not hurting people in the process, you're just trying on for yourself.

But I know that the data says that many men are, or young boys, they are being very scared and mindful about what they do in this world. So there's far less drinking culture than there was. There's far less sexual activity because of the fears of it. And I think part of that is in the right direction of helping people understand their actions have consequences. But we also know our teenage developing brains, the last piece of the puzzle to really develop is the part of our brain that can really think about inhibition control and to think through the consequences of our actions. So I think when I think about raising my boy and I raising teenagers, I think there are some core aspects here that we all need. I think all men need a way to channel their aggression. I think there's ways that boys and men all need to have ways to challenge one another.

I think there's an area here where they need to play with the idea of dominance and submission and play with the idea of aspiring and achieving in life, all those things which are kind of primal drivers, but healthy ways to do it. So I think sport becomes a wonderful way, sport where there's a group mentality, sport where your men are going to hold you to account. So there's certain, I always think, I've always been a big proponent of martial arts because I think in those communities and most of those communities, you have people who you just can't have too big of an ego and they'll chop you down. And you have to be honest and you have to be honest with yourself and your limitations. And there's a vehicle there to get out aggression and to play with challenge and to play with what it means to assert yourself and to feel that you're not as powerful as you perhaps think you are.

Once you're in an echo chamber and you only hear your own voices as if your voice is the most important thing in the world. That's not the case. I don't have all the answers. I wish I did, but I think knowing what we're compelled to do, those some of those drivers and finding good, healthy, creative outlets are important. But I'll add this in as well. When I went to university, I didn't study politics to start with. I studied geography and I went to a place that all of geography, as human geography, all of my modules were things around deconstructing narrative. So it was about feminism, geographies of power, geographies of race, geopolitics, thinking about the philosophy of thought and science, helping have the tools to deconstruct narrative and deconstruct what's going on in this world, the scientific method or other ways around that, I think are the kind of things we should be teaching young men so that they're able to then not just see what comes out as a truth, see what comes out as something just to wear as a great label or a great identity, to have the skillset to be able to challenge and make their own mind up.

That's maybe a skill we don't do enough of in school, but I think is key part of this actually.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And even last week they were talking about adding mortgage understanding and finances into education. And I think there's definitely something more that needs to change. It isn't just financial literacy, is it? It's really difficult to be a clinician and sometimes be offended or really very much disagree with the viewpoint or worldviewpoint of the person that you're sitting with. And of course, our audience might well be finding themselves to be in a clinical situation with someone who maybe is starting to voice more kind of misogynistic narrative. I know this is a big question, but how could we begin to respond to that?

With curiosity, we start there. We start by being really interested and curious. There might be a compulsion to explain and to help them see differently, to retrain for thought. But I can only imagine what we know about the way our brains work is that it's going to make somebody be more defensive. Maybe they won't come back. Maybe they don't want to entain this. They feel spoken to, they feel lectured at. Maybe the very reasons why they're looking for those narratives in the first place. I think curiosity is the great way in this. And like you say, you do this so well when you talk about work with your clients is you really go layer by layer, by layer, by layer, down to the depths. And I think if people can really understand themselves better and we are allowing ourselves to be curious with them because they may not want to be curious about themselves.

I mean, I think that is part of it that most men, I'd say this, I think a lot of men are fearful of being curious about themselves where it might take them, that that's going to lead them to the path to be open to have the kind of conversations they don't let their brain do so often, where they come from, what was it like growing up in their family home, the kind of lessons they learned, because these are all lessons we learned. Some of CBT is helpful in having shorthand for things like assumptions for living and our core beliefs, helping people understand this was taught to us. We learned this in life.

It's not just what we've got, we've learned this somewhere. So I think being curious with somebody, saying that you want to be with them, even people you disagree with, I think especially important to be with people you disagree with and to be open to be curious what it means for you as well. None of us are right. None of us are all right. I would say that's where you've got to be, including when you find it offensive, including when you find it personally attacking, that maybe one of the great skills is to be able to not accept or to say, "I agree with you, " but to stay with them long enough to find out where it comes from. If we think about behaviour change, deep rooted identity change, I would argue that's probably the only way you're going to make significant change.

And you so nicely remind us actually that if someone is telling us what they think, this is a really privileged position to be in and it's a chance to hear them, but also it brings me back to some of the systemic literature about potentially thinking about this as a single session intervention. If this is the only time I'm going to see this person, how can I impart the best possible intervention here? So rather than thinking, "Oh, I could do this in 10 sessions," it's actually, they might disengage, they might never come back. So it's giving us up a mission to be as effective, as powerful, to potentially be the difference that makes the difference as soon as you can, because you might only get one chance. And also with funding restrictions in different mental health provisions as well, as long as you're going to get three or four sessions, that's going to be it.

So we're going to need to really think about doing our best stuff. Yeah, not an easy topic that we've grappled with, but I think we've done all right. Is there anything before we finish that you think we've missed out on that we should kind of finish with, Matt?

Maybe what I'll say as well is in the data we've got and my personal clinical experience that engaging hard to reach men, maybe the men who won't come to therapy, because we only know about 36% of referrals in the NHS for psychological therapies are men, that we need to speak the language that's going to attract them, so that's important. And also go to places that will attract them. And so working out nature, thinking about creative ideas for groups or therapy is really important to even get to see the kind of people who we're trying to reach. And so that's why I spend so much time outdoors with men, fathers and sons and adults. So speak the language and find the right place where people will be welcome and feel welcome.

Wonderful. Dr. Matt Slavin, where can people learn more about you and your work? You

Can go to my website, Dr. Matt Slavin, S-L-A-V-I-N dot and find out all about me. I will do a weekly newsletter. You can sign up and hear my words each week. I'm on LinkedIn under the same name, Dr. Matt Slavin, or you can find me on Instagram, mental.advantage.

Amazing. I'm definitely going to join your mailing list because I have so enjoyed both of these conversations. Wishing you well. If I can help with anything in future, do let me know. But thank you so much again for your time.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Well, how lucky am I that Dr. Matt commented on my Instagram and I followed him back and we got chatting because I think that was a fascinating listen, watch. I love being part of it. I hope that you loved receiving it as well. So yeah, I'd love your thoughts. What's this resonated for you? Do let me know in the comments if you're watching on YouTube or if you're listening on Spotify, you can drop a comment as well. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, you can rate and review the show. You can give me your feedback about episodes in that way as well, or come and follow me on socials where I'm Dr. Marianne Trent everywhere. If you would like a chance to support me in a kind of Patreon sort of way, but that I give you something back as a bit of a thank you, then why not consider becoming a paid subscriber to my YouTube or my Spotify or my Apple podcasts, which you can do by checking out all the details in the show notes or by clicking any of the links in my social media.

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