Why We Must Raise Mentally Strong Boys — Before They Turn into Broken Men

This week, my dear friend of 20 years took his own life. He was just shy of turning 50.

Over the years, he had spoken to me in quiet admissions, often with visible pain, as though revealing something shameful. He told me of a mother who would rather tie him to a tree at the age of twelve than give him a hug. A woman who found it easier to criticise her children into exhaustion than to acknowledge what they were doing well, or gently encourage them to grow. “I just wanted a hug,” he told me once, his voice barely audible. Since hearing the news of his death, I keep returning to that moment.

His sister, the one who called to tell me, shared her own story. She had never felt enough. Never believed she was worthy of love. She had never been able to marry. Her relationships with their mother, their stepfather, even their biological father, had left lasting emotional scars. The blueprint was the same.

His story crystallised something I’ve quietly observed for years — not only as a mother raising a mentally strong son, but as a woman who dated grown men still aching from childhood wounds they couldn’t name. Men who mistook control for love. Men who stitched themselves into knots of duty, mistaking success for self-worth and disappearing at the first sign of their own vulnerability.

Men who had never been taught that being held was safe, or that being seen was not a threat. That to me, vulnerability did not make them less. It made them more: more trustworthy, more magnetic, more whole. But instead, they had learned to flinch from softness, to mistake care for control and to armour themselves with silence.

Shattering Pain

This loss didn’t just break my heart. It shattered it. As I write this, I am moving through immense grief and bereavement. I am writing this article as a way to process the pain, a mere 24 hours after receiving the sad news.

But even in its cruelty, my friend’s death has confirmed something I’ve long suspected, and which has emerged time and again in my neuroscience research: we are raising boys who grow into men unable to love fully. And it’s costing all of us more than we dare to admit. His death wasn’t sudden in the way accidents are. It had gathered slowly, like moss on stone. He had the outward markers of a ‘good life’. But inside, he was quietly unravelling, misunderstood, unsupported, emotionally exiled.

And his story is not unique. It is, tragically, common.

Men in their 50s, often at the peak of their professional power, are slipping into emotional collapse. We rarely speak of it, but it is shaping more than just their own lives. It is altering the emotional climate of our families, our workplaces and our society.

The Midlife Fault-line

Turning 50 used to mark a kind of summit: financial stability, grown-up children, professional standing. But for many men today, it represents a quiet collapse. Depression. Divorce. Health scares. A kind of spiritual fatigue that no amount of career success seems able to offset.

The British Heart Foundation notes a spike in cardiac events in men around this age, stress being a significant contributor. My father, a striking and quietly formidable man, had a way of owning a room had a heart attack in his 50s, a moment that left him not only physically shaken but emotionally deafened, too. He also lost his hearing during that time, an eerie metaphor for the inner noise so many men can't express and so few feel heard through.

But it’s not just about heart health. It’s about heartbreak. A particular kind that begins, often, in childhood.

For Boys, It Starts with Mum

The psychological blueprint for intimacy is first drawn not in adulthood but in childhood, and often, with the opposite-sex parent. For boys, this relationship with their mother shapes not just their sense of being lovable, but also how they will later give and receive love.

My late friend grew up with a mother who thought her life hasnt been able to show him affection. At the age of 12, she'd tie him to a tree or balcony rail as punishment. It wasn't the rope that left the deepest scar, but the absence of her tenderness. That gap became a chasm in his adult life: relationships that always fell just short of connection, a restless search for validation, unhealthy obsession with women who showed affection to him as they would become the mother-figure he never had, and ultimately an inability to truly receive love without suspicion.

We underestimate the emotional cost of mothers who cannot love their boys—or are too wounded themselves to express it.

The Myth of “Staying for the Kids”

Another common thread in emotionally fragile adults? Parents who stayed together “for the sake of the children.” We are only now beginning to grasp how harmful this can be.

Children are intuitive; they absorb not just what’s said, but what’s felt. A home filled with unspoken resentment, emotional distance, or performative civility teaches a child that love means endurance without joy or connection without safety. This false model often shapes the relationships they build later in life. I’ve seen this repeatedly: men stuck in emotionally vacant marriages, unable to leave because they confuse discomfort with duty, without undertanding, the cost thier children and themseves end up paying.

Sometimes, the kindest thing a parent can do is to leave, and find emotional coherence elsewhere. Because a child does not need their parents to stay together; they need to see their parents live in truth, and ideally, love, and to be sincerely loved. That’s how children learn about love and to value love in their lives.

The Forgotten Link: Fathers and Daughters

We speak often — rightly — about the importance of fathers in raising boys. But we rarely discuss their crucial role in raising women.

The emotional imprint a girl receives from her father often becomes the foundation of her self-worth. A present, emotionally attuned father teaches his daughter that she is enough, without performing, without shrinking, without permission. That reminder is effective even via a zoom call. Or even a text.

Many women who struggle to ask for the raise, to speak up in meetings, or to choose partners who respect them are not lacking corporate empowerment programmes. They are carrying the emotional residue of early years spent feeling unseen by the first man who was meant to adore them. And no amount of DEI policy can fully compensate for that kind of foundational deficit.

What changes the story? An emotionally healthy father, who himself is whole and in a loving relationship. One who validates, encourages and models what safe masculine presence looks like not as dominance, but as steadiness.

And crucially data shows over and over again: this doesn’t require staying in an unhappy and unfulfilling marriage. As many adult women will attest, they would rather see their father happy in a new relationship than performatively loyal to a miserable one.

A loving stepmother can be more emotionally healing and inspiring to a young girl than a biological mother who is emotionally absent. What matters most is emotional integrity — not biology.

What Does It Mean to Raise a Mentally Strong Boy?

To raise a resilient man, we must raise an emotionally supported boy. That begins with his mother — not perfect one, but emotionally available one.

Mental strength isn’t about suppression. It’s about flexibility. It’s about helping boys name their emotions, understand them and feel safe enough to express them without fear of ridicule or rejection. It means holding them when they cry, teaching them that boundaries can coexist with tenderness, and allowing them to witness emotional expression in fathers as well as mothers.

A mentally strong child is not one who suppresses his feelings but one who learns to navigate them and trusts that mother's love is something stable, not conditional.

When the Wounded Boys Become Leaders

Many men reach their professional peak around 50, a time when they hold immense power over others: in boardrooms, governments, families. But what happens when those decision-makers are emotionally bankrupt? When childhood wounds, long repressed, silently drive adult choices?

It’s not just personal relationships that suffer when men are emotionally starved from childhood. The impact seeps into the professional world, quietly, but with unmistakable weight. Many leaders, particularly men who have pushed past early emotional pain without ever addressing it, carry an invisible field of tension into every room they enter. They are often high-functioning, competent, even charismatic but beneath the surface, something remains unresolved. And it shows.

When a man has never been allowed to fall apart safely, he will do everything in his power to hold himself together. That grip — tight, strained, unrelenting — becomes his leadership style. He controls, he commands, he copes. But the emotional cost is profound. Teams around him often sense the undercurrent: a lack of psychological safety, a reluctance to show vulnerability, a fear of failure that masquerades as perfectionism, speed or harshness. These men may speak of ‘resilience’ and ‘standards’, but they rarely model genuine ease, empathy or openness which are the very traits that foster trust and creativity in others.

And when that internal grip starts to slip, as it inevitably does, the response isn’t to soften and welcome affection. It’s to clamp down harder. Rather than attend to what broke them, they build stronger walls. They retreat further into control. Emotional disconnection becomes a badge of honour. Work becomes the drug, success the sedative, duty the prize.

But what they don’t realise is that their inner fractures radiate outward, in meetings, in decision-making, in the subtle dynamics of power and approval that shape organisational life. Unhappiness at home or worse, unprocessed childhood wounding doesn’t stay neatly tucked away behind a front door. It leaks into boardrooms, into performance reviews, into company culture. It sets the emotional weather of entire teams.

And no amount of DEI initiatives, leadership training or coaching interventions can truly heal that unless we’re willing to talk about the root problem. Which is this: many men in positions of influence were never loved in the way they needed to be.

And instead of healing, they learned to manage the damage.

That damage is now managing all of us.

We risk building societies led by men who mistake control for connection, and performance for worth. By ignoring male emotional health, we don’t just hurt the individual, we imperil the systems they lead.

And we overlook another critical truth: emotionally unwell men raise uncertain women. And uncertain women, in turn, raise sons who search endlessly for affection outside themselves. And so the cycle spins.

The Neuroscience of Emotional Regulation in Leadership

Emotional regulation, the ability to manage one’s internal state without either suppressing or spilling it, is a core function of the brain’s prefrontal cortex. It governs how we pause, reflect, assess, and choose our responses rather than simply react. In healthy development, this ability is shaped early in life through secure attachment, consistent emotional feedback and the mirroring of calm, attuned caregiving typically by a parent or adult who models safety through connection.

But what happens when a child doesn’t get that?

When a boy grows up with emotional neglect, criticism instead of comfort, or coldness in place of connection, the brain’s stress pathways adapt for survival, not intimacy. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm system becomes hypersensitive, while the neural circuits responsible for calm decision-making and empathy may be underdeveloped. The result? A leader who may appear decisive, focused, even dominant but who is often running an invisible background programme of threat perception, self-protection, and emotional isolation.

In such individuals, emotional regulation is a tightly managed performance. And that costs. It costs them the ability to foster psychological safety in teams. It narrows their window of tolerance for dissent or failure. It constrains creativity, spontaneity and trust. And when under pressure, particularly in moments of conflict, rejection, or perceived loss of control, these leaders are more likely to default to reactive behaviours: shutting down, lashing out, micromanaging, withdrawing. They may even view empathy as weakness, mistaking emotional attunement for loss of authority.

What neuroscience now shows us is that without early emotional scaffolding, leaders must learn often later in life and through pain how to regulate themselves consciously. Emotional self-awareness, interoception (the ability to feel what’s going on in the body) and mindful presence aren’t soft skills. They are hard-won neurological rewiring.

The good news? The adult brain is capable of neuroplasticity. With the right support, men can rewire these patterns. But it requires a cultural shift: one where we stop glorifying stoicism and start honouring emotional awareness, as a path to competent leaders.

Breaking the Silence

It is time to rewrite the script.

• To raise boys who do not grow into men who break down at the height of their responsibilities.

• To raise daughters who do not shrink from the table because they were taught to feel like guests in their own ambition.

• To stop assuming that mental strength is forged in silence and solitude.

• To recognise that emotionally fulfilled fathers raise confident daughters — and emotionally healed mothers raise available sons.

  
  

My friend didn’t need saving at 50. He needed holding at 12.

Many women I know didn’t need therapy at 35. They needed to feel seen at 5.

The way forward is to start earlier, love better and speak more honestly. Not just for the sake of the child, but for the adult they will one day become.

Always,

Hug your daughters.

Hug your sons.

Much love,

Clara

In loving memory of my dear friend — whose quiet strength, deep pain and untold story now find voice through these words. May your story light a path for those still silently carrying the weight.