My two boys are very affectionate. Always have been. They are quintessential “mama’s boys.” In fact, in a room full of children, it’s usually my boys who are the most touchy-feely, and the most easily moved to tears.

While pregnant, I was worried about becoming a boy mom. I assumed that between the wrestling, sports and trucks, the tenderness I craved would not take shape, at least not to the level as the closeness between women. Oh how wrong I was.

Turns out… my assumptions were based on the world of men. Little boys are an entirely different world entirely. And yet… all men were once little boys.

It was so important for me to become a boy mom. The experience made me whole, connecting me to an entirely different realm I once distrusted and feared. It invited me to stop talking sh*t about men (more on that later). And it let me see, really see, how sensitive and loving these future men can be. I believe that that is exactly why I was gifted two boys.

As the mother of two sensitive boys, I see how society responds to our closeness. My son sitting on my lap, “Isn’t he too old for that?” Holding hands down the street. “He’s never gonna find a wife like that.”

These are things we never say to girls. We assume and accept that the closeness between mother and daughter is natural, and ever-lasting. We are very focused on how we treat girls differently than boys, but we do not speak often about how we treat boys differently than girls.

So let’s try. And let’s start with the concept of “mama’s boy.”

People say “mama’s boy” like it’s an insult. They act like caring for the woman who birthed you is some kind of moral failure. Like tenderness is contagious and must be mocked before it spreads.

But for so many boys, the lap of the mother is often the only place where they are allowed to be soft without punishment. She is the person who lets him break open without calling it weakness. She is the receptive ground where he can weep without someone calling him “gay” or “a girl” and using his tears as evidence against him later.

And even that one sanctuary, we shame.

We shame him for desiring it. For needing it.

And the separation starts early, almost invisible, often unintentionally, usually in the disguise of “toughening him up.”

At little boy reaches for his mother’s hand. Dad casually says, “Come on, buddy, don’t cling.”

At a playground, a boy cries and runs to his mother, another parent says, “You can’t baby him forever.”

Grandparents chime in, telling moms to “step back” so their sons can “build independence,” as if tenderness and autonomy cannot grow in the same soil.

We call this encouragement. We call this resilience. But what it often is (if we’re being honest) is an early emotional weaning that no one asked the child if he was ready for.

And a weaning from the one and only place, where he can still receive generously receive the flow of love.

We shame the softness. The bond.

We shame the holy place where a boy learns compassion before the world slaps it out of him, with fists, mockery, or alienation.

The seed is planted early. “Don’t be a mama’s boy.” Translation: don’t be gentle, open, and don’t let anyone see you lean into love.

Then, two decades later, we act confused when grown men cannot feel. When they cannot apologize. When they cannot name what hurts. When they sit next to their crying wife with a blank stare. When the only emotion they have access to is anger.

Of course they are angry, there were cut off from the mother before they were ready, their first source of nourishment. Then we blame them for starving.

And it’s not only the boys who suffer. The mothers grieve too.
They are told they’re “coddling” their sons, told to step aside, told their closeness is suspicious or harmful, even “dangerous.”

A mother’s natural instinct to comfort is treated like a crime against masculinity. She is asked, in countless subtle ways, to step back and betray her own child in the name of “making a man out of him.”

The mother knows he still needs her. The culture tells her he shouldn’t. She learns to withhold tenderness even when it aches in her bones to offer it. That is a wound that never fully closes.

And society? Society pays the price.

When you sever boys from the person who teaches them how to feel, you grow men who fear vulnerability. You grow men who struggle to parent, to partner, to empathize. You grow men who confuse intimacy with weakness, who armor themselves against the very experiences that make relationships possible. You grow loneliness, violence, emotional illiteracy, detachment, war.

Then we act shocked by the outcomes we ourselves created.

The mother was the one soft place, the invitation to be fully human. Then we ridiculed it and trained them to sever. We taught them that to be close to the mother is to be less of a man.

We exist in a culture so afraid of tenderness that it mocks the first and last refuge offering it.

And part of why the mother becomes the only refuge is because, outside of her, boys quickly learn that closeness with anyone else is dangerous. They discover they can’t lean on their friends without risking ridicule.

A boy puts his head on another boy’s shoulder and instantly hears, “Bro, that’s gay.” A teenage boy tries to talk about his feelings and gets laughed at or ignored. Even adult men will tell you (half-joking, half-aching) that their friendships consist mostly of sending memes back and forth and watching the game.

Affection between males is policed so ruthlessly that the mother becomes the sole safe harbor, the only place they can still be held without suspicion.

And when that one place is shamed or taken away too early, boys are left with nowhere to go with their tenderness except inward, where it hardens and metastasizes into numbness and fear.

The problem was never the boys needing their mama. It was the culture fearing what the boys might become if they stayed connected to the ones who taught them how to feel.

And here’s the part we whisper about but rarely name out loud: when boys are pushed away from their mothers too early, they do not simply stop needing.

The need doesn’t disappear; it just goes underground. And then, as grown men, they go searching for that lost softness in the women they date or marry. Not as equal partners, but as stand-ins. As emotional shelters they were taught they shouldn’t want, yet still ache for.

Women end up mothering men not because they want to, but because society forced boys to separate before they had learned how to hold themselves.

This isn’t love. It’s early emotional hunger masquerading as romance. And it leaves everyone famished.

If we want men who can love, we must stop ripping boys from the source that teaches them how. Letting boys remain tender is not weakness. It’s protection.

Connection is not a threat to manhood. It’s the soil from which healthy men grow. Perhaps we’d grow a world where tenderness is not a liability, but a legacy.

So let them cling. Let them sit on your lap. Let them be needy. Let them reach for your hand. Let the world roll its eyes.

You are raising boys who won’t spend their adulthood trying to recover what was stolen from them in childhood.

You’re raising boys who will know how to offer deep and generous love, because they were never taught to fear it.

Let them be mama’s boys. Encourage it. Celebrate it. Honor it. Cherish it.