If you are raising a teenage boy in Australia right now, you could be forgiven for occasionally looking across the dinner table and wondering: is there something I should be worried about?
Recent headlines involving boys and young men, alleged sexual assault, sexual strangulation and degrading behaviour towards women have been confronting.
For parents of young boys like myself, these stories can land particularly close to home.
As a psychologist, parents sometimes ask me about changes they have noticed in their sons. He barely talks to us anymore. He spends hours online. I don’t know what he and his friends are saying in their group chats. He made a horrible joke about a girl. He’s suddenly secretive. He’s watching pornography. He’s become angry. Is this normal? Should I be worried?
Usually, some of the behaviours frightening parents aren’t the ones that most concern me.
A 15-year-old becoming monosyllabic, private, obsessed with his mates, embarrassed by his mother, interested in sex and desperate for independence isn’t necessarily a boy going off the rails.
Teenage boys can be strange creatures. Their bedrooms can become biohazards. They can communicate entire sentences through a grunt. They can say stupid and occasionally offensive things.
Adolescence involves separating from parents, testing boundaries and trying on different identities. One appalling joke does not make your son a misogynist, just as an interest in sex does not make him dangerous.
What interests me more are changes in character and I pay attention when disrespect becomes contempt.
There is a difference between a teenage boy saying something stupid to impress his mates and developing a pattern of talking about girls as though they are stupid, manipulative, inferior or simply sexual objects.
Parents shouldn’t panic at every ugly word, but nor should they laugh along with it. Boys need to know where the boundaries of their family’s values sit.
I also worry about how boys respond to the word “no”.
And this is something we can observe long before sex enters the equation.
What happens when your son doesn’t get what he wants? When you turn off the PlayStation? When he is dropped from the team? When a teacher disciplines him? When a girl isn’t interested in him?
Can he be disappointed, embarrassed or angry and eventually move on? Or does rejection produce humiliation, rage, revenge or a determination to punish the person who denied him?
We talk endlessly about teaching teenage boys sexual consent and of course we should.
But learning to tolerate the word “no” begins long before a boy finds himself alone with a girl at a party.
“I’m concerned when empathy disappears.”
It begins in childhood, when parents set boundaries and children discover that frustration is uncomfortable but survivable.
I become concerned, too, when empathy disappears.
When another person’s humiliation becomes entertainment. When a compromising photograph is something to share or when the distress of a girl is funny because the boys think it is funny.
One of the most important questions a parent can ask after their child has behaved badly isn’t simply, “Do you understand that you could get into trouble for this?”
It is: “What do you think that was like for the other person?”
There is an enormous moral difference between regretting something because you fear consequences and regretting it because you understand you caused harm.
hen there is the peer group.
Teenagers have always done stupid things in groups. What worries me is when the group becomes a boy’s moral authority.
“Everyone was doing it.”
“The boys thought it was funny.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
Those sentences should make parents curious because one of the most valuable things we can give boys is an internal compass sturdy enough to survive the approval of their mates.
After all, eventually we won’t be standing beside them.
They will encounter alcohol, pornography, sexual pressure, angry friends and opportunities to behave badly without us knowing.
And in 2026 pornography now deserves an explicit conversation.
Parents sometimes worry that discussing violent or degrading sexual practices will put ideas into a teenager’s head but the uncomfortable reality is that the internet may have got there first.
Then there is the peer group.
Teenagers have always done stupid things in groups. What worries me is when the group becomes a boy’s moral authority.
“Everyone was doing it.”
“The boys thought it was funny.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
Those sentences should make parents curious because one of the most valuable things we can give boys is an internal compass sturdy enough to survive the approval of their mates.
After all, eventually we won’t be standing beside them.
They will encounter alcohol, pornography, sexual pressure, angry friends and opportunities to behave badly without us knowing.
And in 2026 pornography now deserves an explicit conversation.
Parents sometimes worry that discussing violent or degrading sexual practices will put ideas into a teenager’s head but the uncomfortable reality is that the internet may have got there first.
That means parents may have to talk explicitly about things they would rather never discuss over the dinner table, including the fact that pornography is not sex education; that violence does not become harmless because it occurs during sex; and that another person’s body is never a testing ground for something you watched online.
But perhaps one of the things that concerns me most is when adults repeatedly explain away behaviour they know isn’t right.
“He’s a good kid.”
“That’s just how boys talk.”
“They were drunk.”
“He didn’t mean it.”
“He’s only 16.”
Of course he may be a good kid. But good kids can do bad things. Adolescents make mistakes and sometimes serious ones.
Our job isn’t to decide that a boy’s worst mistake defines his character forever. But neither is it to protect him from understanding the moral significance of what he has done.
We spend a lot of time telling them what kind of men we don’t want them to become.
Don’t be misogynistic. Don’t objectify women. Don’t be aggressive. Don’t succumb to toxic online influences.
On one hand these are all reasonable instructions.
But avoiding bad behaviour is not much of a blueprint for manhood.
Boys also need positive expectations: self-control, courage, responsibility, empathy, competence and respect. The ability to protect without possessing, to experience rejection without retaliation and to tell a mate that something isn’t funny even when everyone else is laughing.
There are decent men all around us and most teenage boys will grow into one. We should be careful that horrific behaviour by a minority doesn’t cause us to become suspicious of boys themselves.
The answer isn’t to raise boys frightened of becoming bad men.
It is to raise boys who know what being a good man requires.
