About this item
Based on a two-year study that followed boys from pre-kindergarten through first grade, When Boys Become Boys offers a new way of thinking about boys’ development. Through focusing on a critical moment of transition in boys’ lives, Judy Y. Chu reveals boys’ early ability to be emotionally perceptive, articulate, and responsive in their relationships, and how these “feminine” qualities become less apparent as boys learn to prove that they are boys primarily by showing that they are not girls. Chu finds that behaviors typically viewed as “natural” for boys reflect an adaptation to cultures that require boys to be stoic, competitive, and aggressive if they are to be accepted as “real boys.” Yet even as boys begin to reap the social benefits of aligning with norms of masculine behavior, they pay a psychological and relational price for renouncing parts of their humanity.
About the Author
Judy Y. Chu, Ed.D. is an Affiliated Faculty member of the Program in Human Biology at Stanford University, where she teaches a course on Boys' Psychosocial Development. She earned her doctorate at Harvard Graduate School of Education where, supervised by Carol Gilligan, Ph.D., her research explored boys' gender socialization, relationships, and development during early childhood and adolescence. Focused on boys as active participants in their own socialization and development, Chu's studies examined how boys negotiate their identities, behaviors, and relationships in light of cultural constructions of masculinity that manifest in their everyday interactions. Her work highlights boys' relational strengths and aims to help foster boys' healthy resistance against societal pressures that can constrain their sense of integrity and hinder their relationships. She is the author of When Boys Become Boys (New York University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Adolescent Boys: Exploring Diverse Cultures of Boyhood(New York University Press, 2004). She is also the mother of a ten-year-old boy.
