At age 8, Eliot enjoys a life that is about freedom and wildness and innocence. (Calla Kessler/The Washington Post)
Eliot Campbell can burp the alphabet one letter at a time. He turns his eyelids inside out when he wants to show off. And when his neighborhood buddy comes to play, the boys grab toy guns, build a fort in Eliot’s bunk bed, then run outside for a stick fight under the canopy of their favorite tree.
Eliot is a boy. At age 8, he exists in that golden hour when life is about freedom and wildness and innocence — “just fun,” he says.
His parents, Brian Campbell and Bonnie Melton, would love to hold on to that magic a little while longer, but they know it soon will end. They worry when they hear the phrase “toxic masculinity.” They reflect on the violent proclivities of the male sex. They wonder what people think when Eliot grabs a Nerf gun or wears his Fortnite video game T-shirt.
They want to counter the elements that can so easily pull a boy off track. They are their child’s greatest influence at this young age, the most integral force in guiding Eliot, but freely admit that doesn’t mean they have it all figured out.
Brian and Bonnie, who live in Raleigh, N.C., are raising their son at a turbulent time, when the boy next door could be exposed as the next perpetrator of a Me Too moment or grow into the bully in the C-suite. How, in the words of Bonnie, can they make sure to “not raise a jerk?”
Such questions are close at hand but not always solvable. Especially at a time when the problems facing boys are mounting.
Girls are doing better in school from the earliest grades onward; they are graduating from college at higher rates than male counterparts. They have, with generations of effort, broken through the stereotypes that define girls.
Statistics show that girls have pulled ahead in the race for gaining societal encouragement and recognition, for self-esteem. Over recent decades, doors have opened for them: Girls can play sports, create art, win at science competitions, try to be anything they want to be. “The future is female,” their shirts declare.
Of course, women haven’t achieved equality in the workplace, in Congress, on college campuses. They still face discrimination, harassment, life-changing assaults. But girls increasingly are being groomed to form their own destiny.
Women’s college enrollment outpaces that of men
Women 71.9%
60 percent
Men 67.5%
54
40
37.9
20
0
1960
2016
Note: Chart shows percentage of recent high school/GED completers and their enrollment in college as of the following October.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics,
“Digest of Education Statistics,” 2017.
Women’s college enrollment outpaces that of men
Women 71.9%
60 percent
Men 67.5%
54
40
37.9
20
0
1960
2016
Note: Chart shows percentage of recent high school/GED completers and their enrollment in college as of the
following October.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, “Digest of Education Statistics,” 2017.
Women’s college enrollment outpaces that of men
Women 71.9%
Men 67.5%
60 percent
54
40
37.9
20
0
1960
2016
Note: Chart shows percentage of recent high school/GED completers and their enrollment in college as of the
following October.
Source: National Center for Education Statistics, “Digest of Education Statistics,” 2017.
What’s not really changed over time is the image of boys. They’re expected to be strong and stoic. They’re labeled as goof-offs in school. They can’t show interest in pink, nail polish or dance class. They’re told to man up, be the financial provider, not walk away from a fight. When the country summons its citizenry to war, it’s still mainly the men who march off.
Boys have been raised in a culture that puts them into a very distinct box, based on stereotypes that have persisted for hundreds of years, says Michael Reichert, a psychologist at the all-boys Haverford school in Philadelphia. “The boys are not the problem,” he says. “It’s the model.” Society ignores the fact that boys have complex emotions and a desire to live their own way, just as girls do.
“Boys can have battles and want to jump off of things and light things on fire, and still be emotionally complex and need to be held when they are upset,” says Rosalind Wiseman, a parenting educator and author of “Masterminds and Wingmen.” “Those are not mutually exclusive.”
Eliot, right, chooses to share a bedroom with his two sisters — 10-year-old Toni, left, and 7-year-old Lena, center.
It’s a chilly night in Avon, Conn., nearly 30 years ago. Brian Campbell is on the football field, a freshman in high school. His dad, Alan Campbell, is on the sidelines with the coaches. As Brian lurches for the ball, his finger gets stuck in a jersey and his hand twists. His hand swells and he can’t close his fingers. He runs to the sidelines and struggles to tell his father.
“What are you doing? Get back out there!” his dad barks. “The play’s not over!”
Brian tries to tell him he thinks his hand is broken, but his dad is telling him to go. Brian runs back onto the field and continues to play until his coaches realize he can’t tackle anyone — his hand won’t close. Sure enough, his hand is broken.
Brian has countless memories of a childhood built around meeting his dad’s expectations of masculinity. His father had dreams of professional sports careers for all three of his sons, and today, when asked about the broken hand from long ago, Alan’s response is simply “that’s what happens when you play football.”
Alan worked long hours as a nuclear engineer, and he expected his boys to have reliable jobs, like he did, believing being an engineer (or having a steady, high-earning profession like it) was a good way to provide for their families. That was the primary role he saw for fathers such as himself. It was an understandable way of thinking for a man of his generation, Brian now concedes.
“I wanted to go to, like, film camp,” he recalls. “But I had to go to football camp and wrestling camp and stuff. If my kids find something they’re interested in, I want to encourage them in that.”
When Brian finally told his dad he wanted to major in art or English, there was no conversation. There was yelling.
Brian studied English at Central Connecticut State University. He went on to get a degree in animation through a certificate program.
Today, Alan says he is proud of Brian and considers him a success. But Brian doesn’t hesitate to say it was his mother who loved him in a way that allowed him to be the sensitive, thoughtful man he is now. His father agrees.
Bonnie and Brian met in 2001, when they worked together in book publishing. Both had volunteered for Take Your Child to Work Day, and Brian was one of the few male volunteers who didn’t have kids. Bonnie noticed. And Brian noticed Bonnie’s intelligence, her drive, her desire for a career.
They married in 2008 and started a family, deciding that one parent would take the lead at home and the other would focus more on work, depending on what their lives were like at the moment. Brian knows it was different for him than it was for his father. He was lucky enough to have paid paternity leave with two of the three kids, something of which his father couldn’t have dreamed. And one of his brothers is a stay-at-home-dad with a law degree, despite “the stigma,” Brian says.
With each generation, he sees men and boys breaking out of their box just a little more.
At a time when more kids and teens are raising questions about the meaning of gender, Bonnie and Brian made a point of bringing up their children — Eliot and his sisters Toni, now 10, and Lena, 7 — in relatively gender-neutral ways. “It irked me when people said you can’t play with that because it’s a boy toy, or you can’t play with that because it’s a girl toy,” Bonnie says. They didn’t dress the girls in fancy pink baby clothes, for instance.
But no matter what Bonnie and Brian did, what happened looked a lot to them like nature taking over. The first time the family went to the local children’s museum, the parents laughed as 3-year-old Toni discovered princess dresses for the first time. She pulled them on with astonishment, as if to say, “Can you believe this?” Eliot, not yet able to talk, toddled away from her and right over to the train table.
“It’s funny,” Brian says. “I feel like I read stuff and listen to interviews with people that are like ‘Disney executives are driving little girls to want princess dresses!’ And I’m like, ‘Nope, little girls love this, and Disney’s making money off it.’ ” He laughs. “They just gravitated toward those things. They like what they like.”
Still, when the girls tell Eliot he can’t wear something because it’s a girl color, Bonnie reminds them “colors have no gender!” When Toni’s friend comes for a play date, the girls tell Eliot they’ll pay him $10 if he lets them dress him up and put makeup on him. He takes the cash.
Brian Campbell, bottom right, has been working overtime lately in his job as a video game lead animator, leaving him less time with his three children.
Eliot’s home is the chaotic, exuberant mess that a home with three kids should be. Eliot chooses to share a bedroom with his sisters, in which a half-naked Barbie and stuffed animals lie next to a toy gun on one of the beds. On this summer morning, the three kids are running through the dining room and into the kitchen, attacking their father with pillows in a game they made up with him called “Bed Fight.” Brian, 6-foot-2 with graying hair, is laughing and panting and needs to sit down.
He has been working overtime lately in his job as a video game lead animator, so it’s a rare precious moment at home with the whole family. He remains at the table amid calls for him to continue playing. “I can’t, guys. I need a break,” he says.
As much as he has tried to break out of the man box, Brian, 42, is aware of the parallels between him and his father. He recalls an evening about 30 years earlier, at another dinner table, when his dad called the family together.
Nicole Ellis interviews Joe Ghartey about how being a biracial kid in the U.S. and in Ghana helped him learn to accept his transgender son, Penelope. (Nicole Ellis /The Washington Post)
Alan was up for another job, one with more pay and more prestige. But it would require even more hours away from home and a move from Connecticut to Houston. He’d realized that he didn’t know his children very well, not like Brian’s mother did, and he struggled with the decision. If he took the Houston job, “they could have gone to the best colleges and do whatever they wanted to do because it was a lot of money,” Alan, 74, says today, but “I really wanted to get close to them.”
And so, that night around the table, he took a vote. They all wanted him to accept a job offer close to home. “He felt bad about it a little bit, not knowing us as well,” Brian says, mumbling with a smile: “I’m just guessing, I guess.”
Brian still works long hours and knows time spent at the office is important. There is a difference from his parents, though: Bonnie has multiple graduate degrees and works, too. That gives Brian the opportunity to consider this: “Am I money for my family or am I dad and husband for my family?”
Brian thinks about this when he drives to Cary, N.C., for another 12-hour day and reflects on his own boyhood. His conclusion: “I want it to be better” for Eliot.
In parenting Eliot Campbell, left with friend Junius Shannon, Brian Campbell and Bonnie Melton are wrestling with how they can make sure to “not raise a jerk.”
“Okay, guys. Let’s play outside,” Bonnie says on another hot summer day. “Let’s play ‘fling the baby.’ We can take the Cabbage Patch Kid.” She looks at Eliot, clad in his Fortnite T-shirt, hair already sweaty around the edges, and his neighborhood friend as they walk out the door. “You can bring your guns.”
They head to the patch of grass with the tree they love and start tossing the baby into the tree, a game with rules only the children understand.
Bonnie, 47, who grew up in Baltimore and went to St. John’s in Annapolis before getting master’s degrees in English and education, is spending the summer at home with the kids, between two jobs in instructional design.
Bonnie supports Moms Demand Action, which advocates for gun regulations. As for playing with toy guns, “That’s just what boys do. I have no issues with that whatsoever,” she says. Eliot “knows the difference between playing that something’s a gun and actually hurting someone.”
The girls play just as hard as Eliot, but they don’t bother with toy guns. Bonnie gives all three children leeway to get dirty and fight with one another so they can figure out how to “work it out,” as she says to them. The girls have been spotted, she says, sledding in sequin dresses, and on this day, it’s Toni’s idea to bury the doll in mud.
Brian’s a leader in Y Guides, a YMCA program similar to scouting, but formed to strengthen father-child relationships. At the spring outing, Brian and the other dads were setting up camp. The boys in Eliot’s group picked up sticks and started sword-fighting. As other groups showed up, the boys ran to the woods, formed two sides, and started a giant game of war.
For Brian, it’s like watching a kitten stalking something. It’s just natural boy behavior. “I think some people see that as an unnatural behavior in boys, that it’s somehow dangerous, especially with school shootings,” he said.
Are boys naturally boys? Are girls naturally girls? Will the aggressive parts of boys forever dominate their personalities? According to Judy Y. Chu, a Stanford human biology professor who has studied boys extensively, “They are capable of knowing and doing way more than we give them credit for.”
“We tend to overcredit nature, when what we assume is nature is their adaptation to society’s rules,” she said.
As much as experts plumb the questions of what makes boys boys — and how to raise them — parents will grasp for answers. “We don’t know if we’re doing it right,” Brian says one summer afternoon at the local pool after playing games with the kids.
“But we’re going to keep trying,” Bonnie adds.
For now, Eliot is simply part of an American family, during a summer afternoon before school starts. Before Bonnie begins her new job. Before Brian finishes working overtime until the next big push. Before Eliot becomes a third-grader and turns 9.
Before this sweet child discovers what the rest of the world sees when they see a boy with a toy gun or a stick or wearing makeup, even if it was only to earn $10 from his sister.
“That’s just what boys do,” Bonnie says of letting Eliot play with toy guns. “I have no issues with that whatsoever.”
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