Parenting: Do new parents need to freak out about their sons? Not like this.

I don’t have one. She describes with poignancy what a trial it can be to host a screen-free playdate when the boys involved end up “wandering around aimlessly, asking repeatedly when they can next play video games.” So many of the concerns throughout this book—loneliness, suicidality, alienation—seem as if they could bring readers of BoyMom together with the many conservative defenders of “boys’ rights.” But they won’t, for a couple of reasons. On the right, “Boys are disadvantaged at school and in culture, and it’s liberals’ fault” is an idea with a lot of power to politically motivate parents of boys who have right-leaning inclinations already—and there’s a correspondingly strong disinclination to accept that liberal parents of boys might have any overlapping goals or sentiments. Related From Slate The Women Who Had Five or More Kids on Purpose Think They Know Something You Don’t Writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton covered some of the same ground as BoyMom in the Cut earlier this year, in a very funny essay that starts with her discovery of an anonymously sketched “dick ’n’ balls” some boy in her house had traced in the grease on the top of her range. Whippman writes of the Trump era: “Although obviously there were still countless individual conservative women and progressive men, as a political class, females started to represent change and hope, while males symbolized the status quo, injustice and harm.” This may have seemed true to people with social-justice interests who opposed Trump, but it certainly didn’t to Trump supporters.