Exploring Masculinity Stories: Building Positive Masculinity with System-Involved Youth

Mack Boyle

Training Description

This training helps participants examine how our culture’s narrow definitions of masculinity shape all of us, including system-involved boys and young men. Participants will reflect on their own socialization and consider how cultural norms that reward aggression, control, and emotional disconnection—and punish care or vulnerability—contribute to broader harm, including anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and gender-based violence. Together, we’ll identify how these restrictive gender expectations show up in efforts to support system-involved youth (SIY) and explore practical strategies to interrupt these patterns. We’ll also focus on ways to help SIY  build emotional awareness and develop positive, expansive understandings of masculinity beyond rigid norms.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

• Identify 1-2 ways their own socialization into rigid norms of masculinity impacts them & their efforts to serve and/or support youth who are system-involved or at high risk of system involvement.