How to Support Boys Emotionally
Photo by Jonathon Reed
Damion texted me mid-afternoon on a weekday. “I’m locked inside a locker,” he said.
It was the latest incident of physical bullying that had been surrounding him at middle school since he started questioning his sexuality. Over the past weeks, his unnamed bullies had grown increasingly vicious. Damion had just gotten back to school after being suspended for dripping blood on the office floor.
“You need to tell someone,” I wrote back. “Call the school or text your dad, or just bang on the door. And report what happened.”
“I know what I need to do,” he responded after a few minutes. “I know that. That’s not why I fucking told you.”
A cowboy competes in the calf-roping event. Even though this is a much safer event, you can still see a safety cowboy in the background. Photo by Jonathon Reed
“Like rodeo clowns are for a bull rider, the pickup men are a bronc rider’s lifeguards.”
At the end of the summer in 2017, I hitchhiked with some cattle ranchers to document a rodeo in northeastern British Columbia. That’s where I first saw a pickup rider.
It was during the bronc riding, a stylized competition where cowboys pit their strength and agility against that of a bucking horse, attempting to stay on for eight seconds before hitting the dirt. The lean young competitors in blue jeans and leather chaps were the focus of the crowd’s attention and the announcer’s voice, so it wasn’t until one of them rode directly past me that I really noticed the Kesler-emblazoned pickup man riding beside him.
As they rode towards me, the shout of the Kesler pickup was lost in the pounding of hoofbeats. But I could tell that the cowboy heard him, because he wrapped his arm around the bigger man, flexed his weight, and swung free. The cowboy landed lightly on the soft ground, and I had an image inmy mind that would resurface just as I was considering Damion’s response.
A smoky small-town rodeo arena might seem like an unconventional place to situate an analogy about supporting boys’ emotional lives, but there are three main qualities of pickup riders that have become part of how I envision working with boys.
A cowboy carries the gear for the saddle bronc riding competition out of the arena. The juxtaposition of the masculine rodeo culture and a well-maintained pink dress shirt caught my eye—the lessons we learn as men are upheld and subverted in myriad ways. Photo by Jonathon Reed
A pickup rider is in motion.
For the cowboy, anything not moving is essentially an obstacle. At the end of the eight seconds, the pickup rider shows up alongside him. They’re not experiencing the bronc riding themselves, however—they’re in control of their own horse.
Immovability has a role to play in our work with boys, but too much of it creates rigidity and distrust. I know boys who are reluctant to talk to their parents about their mental health because they are afraid of being judged, ignored or losing control. I often wonder if those parents are attempting to anchor their boys, rather than moving with them. I get it. But I also know a hitching post is a hard impact when you’re moving at the speed of a bucking horse.
I showed up for Damion when he asked me to. Where I failed is that I wasn’t watching carefully enough.
A pickup rider is watching.
Their attention is closely tuned to the cowboy. They are constantly reading the body language of both the rider and the horse, and step in with the right response and timing.
One of the most important thing we can offer boys is empathy—and not just empathy but a determination to extend that understanding even when it’s hard. One of my guiding principles is a quote from Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson’s book Raising Cain. “It is vital that parents and teachers not take boys at face value,” they wrote, “even though they sometimes insist, furiously, that we do so.”
“What parents can do, must do, for their sons is never underestimate the power of listening to them, knowing them, and standing by while they navigate the rough waters of boyhood. Behind every boy who avoids being swept away in the current is someone who holds him—and believes in his ability to hold his own.”
This is where my response to Damion fell through, and it’s why he responded the way that he did. But I’ve been the target of enough boys’ angry words to know that it’s rarely about me—and rarely actually anger beyond the surface—so I took the opportunity to look closer. What would be the overriding emotion of a middle schooler shoved in a locker at the hands of bullies he couldn’t confront? Helplessness. And I had exacerbated that helplessness by trying to tell him what to do.
A good pickup rider is solid.
Being a pickup rider isn’t about rescuing the cowboy. If you get a chance to watch a bronc riding competition, you’ll notice that the cowboy always reaches towards the pickup, not vice versa. What the pickup rider offers is solidity.
Anyone who remembers their adolescence knows that young people ride some wild horses. Boys don’t always have the capacity to temper their emotional experiences with self-awareness, self-control or positive coping strategies. Cue the bucking bronco. That’s it matters for them to have a solid point of connection that they know they can rely on.
A cowboy takes part in the bull riding competition, ‘the most dangerous eight seconds in sports.’ Note how closely the Cervus bullfighters are paying attention. What would it mean to be this committed to boys’ safety and wellbeing? Photo by Jonathon Reed.
In the years since that locker conversation with Damion, I’ve stood alongside him through a legal battle with the school system, a struggle with self-harm, and a cancer diagnosis. Sometimes he swears. Usually he doesn’t.
I write and host a podcast on boys’ inner lives called Breaking the Boy Code. In one of the first episodes, I recorded a 15-year-old named Sebastian describing the experience of losing his best friend to the juvenile justice system. “I went to court,” he told me, “and it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.” His voice broke as he talked about how much his friend had meant to him and the pain he felt at the distance between them.
Society doesn’t really think of boys as having the kinds of deep friendships or feelings that I’ve heard about in my podcast or experienced in my work with boys. Boys are seen as competitive, hierarchical, physical. They’re like cowboys spinning smoking guns in the Wild West.
It’s a stereotype, but look: even cowboys have pickup riders.