When therapist Allison DuBois was pregnant with her second child — a boy — some women told her, “You don’t know love until you’ve had your son.”
“It just was kind of mind blowing to me,” she tells TODAY.com. DuBois had already given birth to a daughter and was certain that she did, in fact, “know love.” She says, “My daughter was such a source of joy and love for me that I couldn’t imagine anything topping that.”
Because that boy-focused comment stuck with her — even now that son Apollo is 10 months old and daughter Serafina is almost 3 — DuBois decided to research the psychological roots of “toxic boy mom” culture in a popular TikTok video.
First, DuBois broke down the theories of famed Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud.
In his well-known “the Oedipus complex” theory, sons develop an attraction to their moms and rivalry with their dads. Perhaps more relevant here is his theory of “the Jocasta complex,” which suggests that some mothers can become overly attached to — or emotionally possessive of — their sons, viewing them as a substitute for the connection they want from a partner.
“It can lead to blurred boundaries and an unhealthy dynamic — as you can imagine — where the son becomes the emotional center of the mom’s life,” DuBois said in her video.
Though DuBois said that Freud has been “largely discredited,” she noted that he had some “good insight into how family dynamics can shape relationships.”
DuBois tells TODAY.com that “boy moms” in heterosexual relationships may turn to their sons rather than their partners when they’ve had a bad day. They may add “#myking” to social media posts about their sons. They may pressure their sons to spend time with them when they’d rather be with their friends.
None of these examples are a problem on their own, but when they fuse together in a pattern of what DuBois calls “emotional enmeshment,” the boundaries between parent and child have the potential to get blurred in an unhealthy way.
Moms may turn to their sons for validation if they have needs that are unmet by their partners, if they have some trauma in their past or if they’re influenced by cultural behavior. And of course there’s the thousands of years of society placing more importance on sons than daughters.
In fact, our cultural norms might be the biggest problem, according to Dr. Sylvia L. Mikucki-Enyart, a family communication expert.
“The ‘boys will be boys’ mentality that a lot of moms (and dads) uphold in their parenting can lead to a lot of learned helplessness among boys and young men,” she tells TODAY.com. It can also lead to “unnecessary competition between the mom and potential daughter-in-law or girlfriend.”
Wondering if you’re a “boy mom”?
It can be tricky to figure out if you’re placing too many expectations on your son, DuBois says. She explains that there’s a subtle difference between reaching for a hug from your toddler when you’re upset and guilting your teenager into getting ice cream with you (instead of their friends) when you’ve had a bad day.
“Kids should not be responsible for fixing our feelings,” she says.
DuBois found the comments on her video fascinating because “people know the typical boy moms, so it was mostly people who don’t want to associate themselves with that.” She suspects that women may not realize that they are “boy moms.”
Comments include:
- “My daughter is my oldest. When I got pregnant with my son, I remember THREE different people telling me, ‘Now you’ll know what true love is,’ and I was FLOORED. It still makes me livid.”
- “People are like, ‘This will be your biggest heartbreak when he grows up.'”
- “My mother-in-law is definitely a boy mom & has literally asked her sons to marry her.”
- “Some boy moms making us look bad. We are not all crazy, I swear.”
How to NOT be a “boy mom”
Mikucki-Enyart recommends setting healthy boundaries by “letting your son know you’re always there for him, but also letting him figure things out on his own, calling out bad behavior and not letting him get away with things deemed as ‘boy behavior.'”
She also cautions women against investing their identity in being “a mom” rather than being “a person who happens to be a mom.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to see it when we’re in it, you know?” DuBois says. “The family system is a very delicately woven entity, and when you start to pull on one of the strings it, it feels like the whole fabric is falling apart.”
