Navigating Health with Our Teen Boys

Willow Rose is focused on Women’s Health and it wasn’t originally in my lineup to write in-depth articles about men’s health. However, we women don’t exist in isolation, we have fathers, brothers, husbands and sons and we are often as concerned about their health as we are about our own.

Last month I wrote about supporting the health of teenage girls. Although puberty looks different for boys and girls, much of the foundation is similar. Both are building brains, bones, immune systems, emotional resilience, identities, and lifelong health habits.

My son is now in his mid-teens, and while he towers over me, he still needs my support as a mother and mentor. Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed how easily video games and a sedentary lifestyle can creep into the teen years. Teens nowadays don’t seem to have a lot of physical hangout places (especially in rural Canada in the winter) and so their hangout places are often online, gaming with friends. I’m not against gaming - I’ll talk in more detail about that later. But how can we help our teens - and in this article, particularly our teen boys - develop the capacities and vitality they need to be healthy, capable, resilient adults?

This question sent me on a search for more information about men’s health, and particularly teen boy health. I found much of the information online (especially on social media) is focused around what’s been called “Bro Science”: intense supplementation stacks, and a focus on testosterone levels and specific diets and exercise plans. What’s harder to find is how to support a teen boy so he can become the best possible version of his adult self.

I don’t believe the goal of adolescent health is to optimize hormones or maximize performance. It is far more important to create the conditions in which healthy physical, mental, and emotional development can occur naturally. What’s important for our teen boys as they navigate this period of development? Let’s take a look:

Sleep is the most foundational part of health. I know I’ve stated this in many articles before, but it is difficult to underestimate the necessity of enough sleep. For teens it becomes even more difficult to get adequate sleep since the demands of an adult-like schedule for school times don’t line up with a teens natural circadian rhythm.

Insufficient sleep can increase the risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, injuries, poor mental health, attention problems, behaviour problems. Having enough sleep is associated with improved attention, concentration, learning, emotional well-being, and academic performance1.

Sleep is not passive rest. It is an active biological process during which the adolescent brain consolidates learning, regulates emotion, supports growth, repairs tissues, strengthens immunity, and prepares the body to meet the demands of the next day.

“Adolescent sleep loss poses a serious risk to the physical and emotional health, academic success, and safety of our nation’s youth.”2

Adolescence is recognized as one of the most nutritionally demanding periods of life, second only to infancy. A teenager’s body is not simply maintaining itself, it is actively building an adult. Nutrition is the raw material for that process.

With the prevalence of social media in our world today, many teenagers, both boys and girls, are exposed to messages about losing weight, getting lean, six-packs, avoiding carbohydrates, intermittent fasting, and cutting calories. None of these are a healthy way to look at nutrition for a teen. A teenager is not a small adult, they are building an adult body. As parents, we need to ask the question: Does my teenage son have enough resources to finish growing well3?

Calories are not the enemy for teen boys (calories are not the enemy for anyone, but that’s a post for another day). Calories are simply energy. What matters is how much nutrition the calories contain.

“Adolescence is not a time to ask how little a growing body can thrive on; it is one of the last great opportunities to provide the nutrients needed to build a healthy adult4.”

A growing teenager’s body needs enough high-quality raw materials to complete one of the fastest periods of development in the human lifespan. Teen boys need good quality dietary sources (not necessarily supplemental sources) of protein, healthy fats, fibre, and micro-nutrients (calcium, vitamin D, zinc, magnesium, iodine, iron, and omega-3 fats).

This is one of the areas of health that I struggle with the most with my teen boy. Perhaps some of your teens are like this as well - he prefers to be in front of a computer. Gone are the easy days of “Go outside and play,” and “go for a walk” doesn’t seem to be an acceptable alternative - yet (perhaps when girls come into the picture that will change).

Movement needs to have meaning for this age group. For about five years, martial arts filled this role for my son, but recently the structure of going to a gym with a personal trainer to check in with occasionally has become more his thing.

The structure and discipline of sports, whether individual or team can really help a teen boy. He would have mentorship in the coach or Sensei, camaraderie with his team, and the positive experience of developing mastery in his sport.

Something to keep in mind is that many childhood developmental psychologists, such as Kim John Payne, have pointed out that our modern focus on extracurricular activities for young children, rather than letting them play freely and unstructured, leads to children being over-scheduled and play-deprived, and less likely to continue organized sports into later childhood years when the dedication would actually be beneficial for them5.

According to the AAP’s clinical report of organized sports and specialization6, there are both physical and psychological consequences to doing too much competitive sports and specialization, too soon; overuse injury, burnout, anxiety, depression and eventual withdrawal from sport. Specialization in one specific sport is especially flagged as risking injury in young children. Instead, the focus should be on fun and friends until the teen years, when specializing in a specific practice or sport can help a teenager develop competence, mastery and self-confidence.

This is one thing that I think many parents of teen boys (myself included) struggle with. We’ve heard so many times that screens are bad and we need to put limits on them, and if we don’t, we are somehow failing our children. Let me first say that I do agree with this when it comes to children under about age 14 or so. I’m an 80s kid and I do think children need to be able to play and not be confined to a screen. They need the stimulation of physical play for proper development. However when it comes to the teen years, things begin to change.

It would be nice - in an ideal environment - for a boy to transition to his teen years from playing with siblings and friends, to perhaps learning a trade side-by-side with his dad or trusted mentor. But we no longer live in this kind of world. Our teens are considered children until they’re 18-21, and many workplaces are unsafe for young teens. So what does a teen boy do to develop competence, mastery, and confidence? We have academics, structured sports, music, and… there’s video games.

Video games, with their gradually increasing challenges, measurable progress, and rewards for mastery, fulfill genuine psychological needs that teen boys may not be getting in real life. What’s the answer to the problem of a sedentary teen who prefers digital life and digital challenges to real life? In my opinion, it’s not to take away the screen or the games - assuming you’re a parent who wants to continue to have a relationship with your teen boy - but perhaps it’s to start providing real life challenges, opportunities, and mentors.

I don’t have a perfect answer to this issue of raising teen boys in today’s society, and I would love to hear from mothers of teen boys amongst my readers, but for us, we’ve introduced small things, tried out different ways of movement and challenge. Right now, the gym seems to be fitting that role for us.

Leave a comment

Yes, “touching grass” is important. Researchers found that greater exposure to greenspace was associated with lower stress, improved mental health, emotional wellbeing, increased physical activity, better attention, greater resilience, improved self-esteem, and greater life satisfaction7.

Time outdoors is more than recreation. It provides sunlight that anchors our circadian rhythm, opportunities for natural movement, exposure to living ecosystems, and moments of challenge, curiosity, and restoration. It strengthens many of the capacities that growing teenagers need to become healthy adults.

While the studies and analyses currently state that more research is needed into this field before making concrete conclusions, as any parent knows, getting your child or teen outdoors can significantly improve their ability to fall asleep at night, as well as their overall energy, health and well-being. The difficulty with teens of course, is finding a way to make “touching grass” interesting. (I’m still working on this myself!)

All of these help to support healthy development. But when we’re talking about development in adolescents, we’re not only talking about physical changes, teenagers also go through intense psychological changes and development. What does this look like?

By Sarri Rose

Psychology is the science of how the brain works and develops, mental processes and behaviors, and it is important to be aware of these mental changes as well as the physical ones. Throughout the years, psychologists have worked hard to understand how the brain works, especially in the years of peak development; adolescence. Theories such as Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, and Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development show that there is a lot happening in the brain for teens.

Although Erik Erikson’s theory has many stages from birth until death, the stages “school age”, which ages range from 5 - 12, and “adolescence”, which covers the ages 13 - 18 are applicable to teens8. In the school age stage, there is the crisis, or mental challenge, of industry vs inferiority, where finding something to be good at is crucial, otherwise the child will surely feel inferior and unhappy. In adolescence, there is a similar challenge, identity vs role confusion. In other words, they need to be able to figure out who they are to be able to proceed into adulthood in a healthy way.

Keep in mind that if these two challenges are not completed, and the child does not find something to be good at, or does not figure out their identity, it will continue to be a struggle and place of insecurity throughout adulthood until it is resolved, the window does not close after the ages mentioned.

Most of Jean Piaget’s theory on cognitive development applies to younger ages, as a child should progress through the sensorimotor and preoperational stages in infancy and childhood, until they reach the concrete operational stage. However in adolescence, the formal operational stage should really start to flourish, and it is important to provide mental stimulation to help that. The formal operational stage is all about being able to think abstractly and in hypotheticals, and challenges to spark this kind of thinking are important for growth9.

Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory is focused specifically on moral development, and is a bit more complex, with six stages and three levels10. During teen years, children will develop through the second two levels; conventional morality and postconventional morality, learning how their own morals relate to societal ones and then eventually being able to relate to a more universal set of ethical standards and rules. It’s important that the teen has good examples to look up to, and also space to figure things our and develop on their own.

Adolescent development is a complex picture, but fortunately the environment our teens need for healthy development is not. The raw materials: sleep, nutrition, movement, and time outdoors, all contribute to physical, mental and emotional development. And just like our girls, our boys also need supportive relationships with parents, mentors and peers.