‘Boy mum’: The insidious flip side to the popular parenting trope

Growing Pains is a new weekly column on nine.com.au exploring the world of parenting – from the wins we publicly celebrate to the messy reality of raising a tiny human. Because despite what it looks like on social media, it’s not all aesthetic playrooms and effortless bliss.

I’m a pregnant mum with a toddler son. As soon as I tell people I’m having another boy, at least 80 per cent of them reply with, “Oooh, you’re a boy mum!” More than just a descriptor of the sex of my kids, it turns out a ‘boy mum’ is a whole identity shift. 

Like all controversial social media phenomena, ‘boy mum’ started as an affectionate shorthand for mothers raising sons, but has evolved into a distinct (and often polarising) digital subculture.

The least insidious part of the identity is being a rough-and-tumble type of parent, long-suffering and exhausted, but good-naturedly embracing the chaos of raising the embodiment of Taz the Tasmanian Devil. 

It also comes with a protective element, pushing the idea the bond between a mother and her son is uniquely intense and fiercely loyal – something mums of girls simply couldn’t ever understand. 

Many mums love to lean into the ‘boy mum’ aesthetic. I can’t escape the targeted ads for tees and hats proudly shouting ‘in my boy mum era’ that clog my social media.

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Now, I’m all for parenting stereotypes and subcultures, heavily identifying as a Type-C mum and with many elements of being a boy mum. Just this morning, I had a monster truck thrown at my head and found a mini basketball in the fridge. 

But as with everything online, there’s a darker side to boy mums. In recent years, the label has evolved into a sometimes unhealthy romanticised or possessive vibe, with mums centring their entire identity around being the most important woman who will ever be in their son’s life. 

For years, Victoria Beckham has been cited as a classic example of the archetype, sharing the tightly-knit bonds she has with her three boys.

This came to a head when her eldest son got married, and Victoria was cast as the overbearing mother-in-law. He publicly claimed his mother had disrupted his wedding to centre herself as more important than his bride, and the internet widely diagnosed it as classic “toxic boy mum” behaviour.

In the animal world, ‘boy mums’ are a thing too – in orca populations, mothers of sons have to sacrifice their own food and their own energy to raise them, with male orcas being much more reliant on their mothers than females. 

So is the stereotype just a socialised trend, or is it intrinsic animal behaviour?

Clinical psychologist Rachel Samson told nine.com.au that while boys and girls have the same needs, they’re treated differently by their parents from before their birth. 

Even if you’re adamantly trying to raise your kids with more fluid gender constraints, you can’t help the world we live in. For just one example, boys’ clothes and toys feature predator animals (dinosaurs, lions, sharks), while girls’ typically feature prey (lambs, bunnies, cuddly ponies).

Rachel says this dynamic is something parents need to be aware of, as it’s easy to accept these socialised differences and in turn, raise our kids differently. 

Parents who can note these social dynamics at play can “make an effort to communicate with boys and maximise emotional support, knowing the research shows mothers communicate less with boys than girls,” she recommends.

In fact, studies show mums of boys spend less one-on-one, quiet indoor time with their boys. Girls are more likely to spend time with their parents on activities like learning letters and numbers, drawing and telling stories - leading girls to outperform boys at school down the track.

The boy mum trope isn’t just a social media phenomenon, and has existed in some cultures for centuries. There’s the stereotype of an Italian mum never wanting to let her baby boy go, even when he’s fully grown and married; the Turkish son who has been raised to get away with anything by a mum who is overly possessive. 

There’s also the fact that in some parts of the world, there’s a much stronger (and well-documented) preference for male babies over females.

(Of course, the inverse is also the same. Chrissy Teigen admitted to choosing a female embryo while doing IVF, and another family has revealed they spent $100k to guarantee a baby girl.)

So, even before conception, we’re placing value on the child’s sex – even though really, it means nothing at all. 

Rachel says stereotypes are problematic.

“What I see often playing out is a confirmation bias, where we already hold gender stereotypes about boys and girls, and we look for examples that support our existing bias.

“Believing one is a ‘boy mum’ is to believe that boys and girls are inherently different, and that the process of parenting a boy is, therefore, inherently different to parenting a girl.” 

The reality is both the boys and the girls who experience this gender-based parenting miss out. 

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I have seen firsthand how raising my son is different to the experience my friends with daughters have. But who knows if that’s a sex thing or just kids having their own individual temperaments? I’m sure girls also throw monster trucks and leave balls lying around.

I’m also limited in my experience. I have no doubt parenting a teenage girl is infinitely harder than what I’m doing right now, and I’m secretly thankful I probably won’t ever have to deal with that.

I obviously love my son, but when it comes to being a ‘boy mum’, I probably fall somewhere in the middle – there’s no chance of me stealing the first dance at his wedding.