This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Raising Conscious Sons & Daughters with Dr. Shefali | 434

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Society doesn’t just tell girls who they’re supposed to be. It tells boys who they’re supposed to be too. Different rules, different consequences—but they’re still boxes asking our kids to perform who they’re supposed to be instead of discovering who they actually are. In this episode of This Is Woman’s Work, Nicole Kalil welcomes back Dr. Shefali, world-renowned clinical psychologist, multiple New York Times bestselling author, founder of the Conscious Parenting Movement, and author of two new books, Raising Conscious Daughters and Raising Conscious Sons. And while there’s plenty to say about raising confident girls, this conversation spends significant time on what boys need from parents in a culture sending them increasingly confusing messages about masculinity. They explore: What parents are getting wrong about raising boys today What “integrated masculinity” looks like and why boys need healthier models of manhood How parents can help boys navigate social media, pornography, the manosphere, and toxic masculinity Why mentorship and positive male role models matter What boys may be seeking through video games, online communities, and bro culture How movement, purpose, contribution, and connection can support boys’ emotional health How to help boys experience and express anger without shaming their emotions or allowing harmful behavior How girls are still being taught to seek approval—even when it’s packaged as empowerment Why parents need to examine their own emotional baggage and achievement expectations Because raising kids who know who they are—and get to decide who they become—that’s the work of a parent. Thank you to our sponsors! Protect your loved ones without spying on them. Go to HeyPolo.com/work or use code WORK and get 40% off your first year Connect with Dr. Shefali: Website: https://www.drshefali.com/raisingconscious-daughters-sons/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/doctorshefali/?hl=en  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@doctorshefali  TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doctorshefali  Related Podcast Episodes FACTS About Raising Emotionally Intelligent Kids with Alyssa Blask Campbell M.Ed | 345 126 / The Parenting Map with Dr. Shefali 056 / A Radical Awakening with Dr. Shefali Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey there, I'm Travis Hoyum, one of the hosts of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. Each weekday on Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, we talk through the business news you need to know and the stories moving stocks on Wall Street. On weekends, we game plan personal finance strategies and dive into the industries shaping tomorrow and host the experts, authors, and executives that understand them. Tune in for insights and a long-term perspective on investing, and of course, stock ideas, plenty of them. To quote a listener, it pays to listen. Check us out and subscribe where.

wherever you listen to podcasts. If you love the show, the best way to keep it going is simple. Share it, rate it, and support the sponsors who support us. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. And for today, I'm going to keep this interest short because what really matters is the conversation we're about to have. Our guest, Dr. Sheffali, is a world-renowned clinical psychologist, multiple New York Times best-selling author, and founder of the Conscious Parenting Movement. She has two new books, raising conscious daughters and raising conscious sons, and she's back on the show for the third time.

So clearly, we're very big fans over here. Now, given the name and focus of this podcast, you might assume that we're going to spend most of our time talking about raising girls. We're not. I mean, I'll do my best to fit in a question or two about perfectionism, people-pleasing, comparison, and all the ways that our girls are being taught to look outside of themselves for their worth. because you know I have thoughts about all of that. But I want to spend more of this conversation talking about our boys because I don't advocate for women at the expense of men.

And while patriarchy certainly has benefited some people, I think we miss something important when we just assume it's been universally good for men and bad for women. Because society doesn't just tell women who we're supposed to be. It tells men who they're supposed to be too. And if the goal is to raise healthy, safe, confident, and generally happy kids, then our job can't just be preparing them to fit into the world. It has to be helping them to discover and stay connected to themselves while they're living in it.

So, Dr. Sheffali, welcome back to the show. And I'm going to dive us right in by asking, where are we just getting it wrong about raising boys right now? Oh, my goodness. So thank you, Nicole. Thank you for having me. I think what you're doing for working women is so important, and I love talking with you.

So what are we doing right? How about that? No, I don't start there. Well, the first thing is, you know that we have an adult male problem in the world today. Like something is really off, and we adult women have every right to be really turned off and upset with the adult males that we see in society

and read about. But that takes us nowhere. And that's why I chose to write this book. I'm going to hold it up called Raising Conscious Sons. I have one for daughters too. Because I realized that I was saying the same thing every day and calling all these men assholes and I was getting tired of it.

And I then realized, oh, these men were raised by women. So we can't like, and I don't want to call the women any name. and I shouldn't really just keep calling men like that and throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So what is really going on? And then I watched the Netflix documentary Adolescence and it all kind of came together in one way that if we want to save our women and children, our daughters,

we need to work on where it could possibly be helped, which is mothers and sons, fathers and sons. And culture is giving our boys, today's such confusing messages. One is, you know, be this intensely ridiculous caricature of what it means to be a masculine man and, you know, go to the gym and, you know, all this bro talk and looks maxing and manosphere talk. And then on the other hand, we're telling them to show their feelings and be vulnerable, but don't do too much of that either.

So what's going wrong is that we are not providing a conscious blueprint for an integrated masculinity, which is what my book dares to try to provide. And what we're not doing right is we're ignoring the problem. We're thinking they'll just figure it out on their own. We're not truly knowing what boys need, and I can say it really fast. What they really need is not to be treated like a girl.

They need to be understood for their testosterone. It's a very different hormone than ours, estrogen. And of course, we have, we both have testosterone, and estrogen, but the high proportion of testosterone in a boy needs to be reconciled and understood and reckoned with and contended with. They need movement and movement and more movement. Their emotions need to be processed through motion. They need space to do that. They should not be sitting in circle. They should not be sitting in front of a video game. They should not be sitting, period. And neither should our girls, but definitely not our boys. And four, they need to be

mentored by adult males who can initiate them into their sexuality and into their manhood in a way that this is not talked about in our culture. Yeah. And I think there might be some fear. I'll just speak for myself. I have some fear. Are there enough of these adult men who will do the mentoring and do it in a way that's really productive and helpful as opposed to what we're talking about earlier, that kind of bro culture that I see a lot when I look out there. So I want to go all the way back to integrated masculinity. How do you define that? What are we talking about? What might that look and feel like? Yeah, see, we all know how culture and tradition has screwed up our daughters. Why? Because we were daughters. We know the unconscious messaging and the stereotypes that we're

supposed to abide by what the good girl prototype is. But listen, what really came to me from writing these books is the boys get a lot of cultural messaging too. It's actually not even subtle. It's quite clear. You know, man up, wipe your tears, be a man. And they get it not just from subtle messaging from maybe their mothers or fathers, which maybe they're trying to be more progressive, so they kind of create undertones of these messages. But you go out on the school yard and they're friends who are raised by traditional parents give it to them. So there's no escaping this. And boys are confused. Plus, they're growing up in an education system, which is mostly led by female teachers and educators who don't understand male psychology and

biology. And they feel very degraded, you know, that they can't sit still, they can't talk. You see, girls, because they have left and right brain hemispheres connecting much earlier, they can talk about their feelings left to right. Boys cannot talk about their feelings. Yet all this pressure we're putting on them in social, emotional learning, is to talk about their feelings. And I'm not saying there's no place for that for boys, but I'm saying their primary vehicle for communicating is not words.

Their primary vehicle is through the doing, through their body, through accomplishment and competence and feeling like they have a purpose. but we're not understanding this for them, right? And so we are minimizing their needs. And so you're right, there is a fear that there's a dearth of these adult male models, for sure. But also what we need to understand is we need to start allowing men to step in more. You know how we women are. We're always over-correcting, over-managing, right?

We don't allow also for men to step in. So with many mothers I work with, I literally give them homework. Go to the local boys and girls club, find an adult male mentor, even if he is in his later teens. Your boy needs male energy. Yes, hopefully conscious male energy to usher him through. But certainly, women cannot take on this burden because they don't understand it. And boys are not looking to their mothers after 11, 12 years old. They're looking for these male role models.

And that's why the manosphere has swooped in. And, you know, what the Republican Party understood very well in the United States, that these young males are lost. Let's give them a prototype of what a man should look like. And even if it's toxic, the boys are going to get onto it. And so there's a real need. And it's being filled by adult content, by locker room, by broculture, by the mannosphere and by politics, ideological politics.

So we have to wake up as parents, and that's why I wrote this book. And in the book, I do provide a blueprint for conscious masculinity. Okay. You just talked about so many things that are available to our boys right now. And in the absence of conscious mentorship or like us as moms trying to find the right environment for them, how do we help them navigate through? the, and I'm just putting in air quotes, the mentorship that they are getting

on social media and from the brook culture. Like in the absence of it, they're getting it somewhere. They are craving it, clearly. And they're getting this ultimately, in my opinion, unhealthy and not sustainable or authentic messaging. How do we help them to self-discover

or to connect to their authenticity in the face of all of that? Yes. So first thing is that pretending like it doesn't exist or that my kid is such a good kid or pornography will not be enticing to my amazing nine-year-old because he has such a high discipline. Okay, please take your head out of the sand. Pornography is reaching your boy whether he likes it or not by the age of nine or 11.

His friends are being exposed to it. The man is fear is talking to them. So pretending like your boy is so special or your family is so enlightened that he's a man. You know, you're not. You know, he will not be prey to it is to be utterly clueless. So wake up with compassion. Number two, because it's coming and seeping through his conscious awareness, we need to be proactive. So we need to talk about it ahead of the curve, if we can, or while it's happening.

Definitely by the age of 11, presume your kid has seen some adult content and been influenced by the manosphere to some degree or his friends have. And so you want to be ahead of the curve. So six, seven, eight years old, you're starting to talk about this. I know it feels like, what the hell, which world am I living in? And then you at least by 11 want to get on board.

Talk about it. Watch videos with him. Expose him to it with you. You see, when you are there, I know and adult content, some of it, it kind of, like, you know how there's aversion to the stimulation.

You being the aversion and the stimulation being paired with you, reduces the whole dopamine effect. Okay? So take out the mystique. Take out the dopamine. Sit with your kids. Show him some porn,

whatever little bit. Ask him about it. Have you seen it? Talk about it if you don't want to show it to him because we don't want to open the floodgates. But what I'm saying to you is demystified. Listen to these Manusphere influencers. Ask him what he thinks.

Because some things what they say make sense. Okay? I've heard Andrew Tate. some things he says, you can say, yeah, I agree with you, right, about the matrix and how people are capitalistic and exploiting us. Oh, yeah, I can get riled up about that. But then if you listen close enough, very soon it torpedoes out of control. So you want to help your son appreciate the good parts. So that way he feels you are not just a nasiae, but then you're critically deconstructing it together. I want to talk a little bit about the first thing you said is this idea, my kid is

special, he would never. And I have to assume parents do that with their kids regardless. And one of the things my sister says to her son that I really love is she says, you're so special to me. Meaning he is the most special thing in the world to her, but she's not sending the message that he is, you know, special out in the world that everybody thinks he's amazing and special. Do you see what I'm saying? When you want to convey specialness, right, you can say you're so special to me. But Beth is so special to her mom and Samantha is so special to her mom. So everybody's special to their, to their own families. So we have to treat everybody the same, right? If you want to be special, everybody's equally special. Everybody wants to be special. So I always tell parents, the best way is to use sentences like that or to think to

yourself, my kid is unique, but no way are they special. Nobody is special, right? So either you say everybody's special or you say nobody's special, whichever way you like, but please have the perspective that your kid is not some untouchable, you know, Buddha, deity, that they are above dopamine, above testosterone, your son will fall prey to the same forces of dopamine and testosterone and addiction as every other man, boy out there. I mean, and porn, because it is so readily available, is a crime for children under the age of whatever, 20, 25.

I mean, who can resist that in? intense stimulation. And that's why our boys are dating less, having less sex than ever, because they're consuming all this virtual content, which makes them have such unrealistic ideas about life and women and relationships and sex. Agreed. And they're clearly craving something that they're not getting in real life that they're finding. So mentorship might be one of those things. What else are our boys needing and craving? They can't seem to find in their day-to-day real world? Well, they're craving dopamine

and they're craving the testosterone being expressed. So how did we do it in the past? We went to battle. We went to games. We played sports outside. We went on hunts in the park outside our house and didn't come home till 9 o'clock at night.

We snuck out of our garages at midnight and our parents didn't know. We made out at the back of the car in the driveway, movie theater. What did we do in the 70s? 80s and 90s, right? We got our instincts for dopamine and the hunt and to be risky, taken care of through our friend groups, being outside, just coming home exhausted. So we've taken all that away. And now the kid is sitting in front of a video game, only moving his forefinger

and his thumb. And he's having his adventures by never moving a muscle. That is not real dopamine. So that is artificial dopamine. And of course, dopamine, but it's not the natural way we were wired to express our dopamine. And so we need more dopamine. So we keep consuming more. And we need to move from digital dopamine to analog dopamine and provide our sons more opportunities to feel like a man, quote unquote, a man. So on the video games, he's conquering, he's hunting, he's alliance building, he's collaborating, he's planning, he's organizing. Do all that.

Analog, right? Help him, help him, you know, make the blueprint of a house in your backyard and make him bloody build the shed and get the materials and dig the earth

and find the missing tools and hide the tools, right? I tell parents of young boys, never let your kid do anything without it being a big scavenger hunt. If he has to start homework, let him go on a scavenger hunt for the pencil. If he has to brush his teeth,

let him go through an obstacle course to find the toothbrush. challenge, that is dopamine, that is testosterone. It's the hormone of pursuit and passion and adventure and risk taking. That's coursing through your boy's blood. So allow him to release it. That's why the video games are so addictive because they figured out this is in his blood. Let's give it through the video game.

So they made it so amazing with the ding, ding, ding and the clang, clang, and the levels and the money and the constant feedback. He's feeling like his, you know, feathers are. growing, you know, but we've taken it out from the natural world and put it in the virtual world. Let's talk a little bit about emotions. You said earlier that right brain and left brain doesn't connect as early for boys. And my guess is they probably experience their emotions a little bit differently. They're certainly told which emotions are appropriate and not appropriate from society. And I think sometimes we are leaning towards allowing for emotions, but not how people can navigate through them.

Like I often say it's okay to have your feelings, but your feelings shouldn't have you. Like how are we teaching our children, our boys specifically to have their emotions and also to work through them? Well, first, we need to understand that our boys will show their emotions through some physical way. They'll bang a wall, they'll bite you, they'll kick you, and they'll scream. What we have to understand, they have so much energy and their emotions get translated to that energy. So they don't know what to do with that energy. So it looks when they're young, very violent, very wild, very scary, right?

When they're four years old or 14 years old, mothers typically get very scared, fathers get very triggered. But understand, because they don't have words and because the energy is, so big. The two big peaks for testosterone is three or four and then at 13, 14. Big surges of testosterone. And because they don't use their words and because we women have exalted words as the only way to communicate, we're missing the beauty of the way our boys communicate. Yes, no one wants to be bitten and no one wants their wall caved. But he's showing you very clearly that it's out of control. He needs help. So what do you do as a parent? You take it outside. You take it

the pillows. You take it on the jumping jacks. You take it on the trampoline. You try to preempt it. Like I tell parents of sons, if you're not sweating every two, three hours, he's going to have a rage attack soon. So you have to preempt it. You know, you have to allow this to happen without judgment on the clock. And let me tell you, you know, like all women know who are married, and I'm not saying this, that is our responsibility. But we know that the minute their husband has sex, if they're straight, and the husband has some testosterone, the husband is a different human being for at least 12 to 15 hours, right? You're like, okay, I've calmed the beast, right? And I'm not saying that the beast shouldn't be calmed on their own, and I'm not saying

it's the woman's responsibility, and I'm not calling men beasts. I'm just trying to protect myself from all reactions. I'm just saying there is such a thing as testosterone. And testosterone is energy and physical. It's sexual and it's aggressive. have to manage it. We have to be ahead of the curve. And if you are, and if you're chasing your kid down the block, your boy, every three hours, you're going to have a calm boy. So emotion through motion for boys. Okay. So let's take that to when they're a little bit older, teens, young adults. I'm going to go specifically with anger because I do think we're seeing that a lot. And I do think politics is playing on that a lot. How do we help them navigate through their real feelings of anger?

when they're 17, 18, without causing harm for others and for themselves. So the first way is to allow it. Now, the second way is to allow it safely, but we must allow it. Because their anger at a level 50 seems so scary to us, but it's almost the same as our anger at 10. We just don't have the capacity to get angry at 50. We'll start crying, but we have the capacity to cry. cry at 150 million, right?

And you ask a boy, can you please cry like me for days and days and days and think about everything from the last 20 years? And he'd be like, are you crazy? I can't do it. So why are we calling our way of expressing so holy and so exalted? We're not. We can go on and on and on and on and on and on. So theirs is spikes, spurts, intense.

And theirs looks like violence. And that's why we get scared. But what if it's not violence and we allow it a safe container, then actually they feel heard, seen, and they themselves will see, oh my God, this is not good. Oh, shit, I just punched a wall. The boy doesn't even know his strength, you know? He doesn't even know, I tell fathers this all the time.

Do you see how scary you are? Can you please take your face to a mirror? Because right now you're like just glowering dragons and blood from your eyes. And he's like, no, I'm not. I'm like, yes, you are. And for a three-year-old, that looks terrifying. man doesn't realize. You know, you've seen men.

They mostly look like they're glowering when they get angry. And we, why do our children walk all over us, right? So many mothers will come to me and go like, what the hell? I can be crying, screaming, shouting. My kid just laughs at me because they sense our energy is so in the feminine. But men, and that's testosterone. It's not their fault. They're not bad people.

So we need to let our sons know you're not a bad person. This is testosterone. man, it can cause a lot of harm. So simply see, you've now ruined your computer, you've now ruined our wall, which you will pay for. And you see, if he doesn't see the limits, he will not believe you. So almost you want him to kind of go there

when he's 11 to 14 to kind of test out his testosterone and then create the safety. But the safety will always be in seeing it, honoring it, not shaming it, and then allowing it to run outside on the basketball court, That's why boys 11 to 25 should never be sitting at home. They need to be out there sweating. Otherwise, that testosterone is going to get them into trouble.

I couldn't agree more, both genders. I always think my daughter is 13. And as I think about high school, I'm like, I don't care what she does or what she's into, but she needs to be active. There needs to be some team or a club or a sport or something. The idea of a teenager being bored at home is what scares me the absolute most.

of anything. So let's talk the flip side of anger because I do think what happens a lot with boys is they're taught or they learn to stuff their feelings down or be stoic. And I just think at some point those feelings go somewhere. They do something. So how do we connect with a young boy who isn't expressing, isn't moving, isn't communicating, all the feelings have been bottled and stuffed? So you would think, you know, oh, create safety, help him. him to talk. That's wonderful, but that's number four and five. I think the first thing we need to understand is that he doesn't feel purposeful. And he needs a project bigger than himself. He needs to get out there, roll his sleeves up, take care of puppies, humans, buildings,

clean up stations, build towers. He needs purpose. And if you give a boy purpose, you channel his anger into service and contribution. Boys feel very, very, about themselves when they are competent. Girls feel very good about themselves when they are compassionate, when they are caring. And these are stereotypes and they can be used over sexes. But just in the main, we need to give boys purpose. They don't have purpose. The more easygoing our life is, you see, before we could send our boy and say, hey boy, hey son, I need a gallon of milk. Can you just run down to the store? Now we don't need to do that. We just Uber it or, you know, call it on the the phone and what is going on, right? So we're taking out contribution from both, you know,

both boys and girls' lives. And then we're calling them lazy, unmotivated, entitled. Yeah, they're entitled because they have nothing to do. Everything gets taken care of for them. So especially for our boys, it's, you know, boys do have that stereotype, you know, in them to provide, to protect and to procreate. But they also want to have public. They want to be, you know, perceptive. They want to be connected. So let's do all of that. So I would say purpose, movement, right?

Then safety and connection. So let's do other things first and then ask him to talk, please. I got to tell you, I really love that answer. That makes so much sense to me. Okay, I have to ask one question about our daughters. And I'm going to hone in on a very specific one. how do we help our daughters build confidence and self-worth when everything in the world is telling them to seek it externally,

to seek approval and validation and followers and all that? How do we help them build something internally that the world is telling them happens through external sources? Yes, yes. And, you know, you and I grew up like that. So imagine now, now it's called, you know, female empowerment, right? Put your makeup because it's self-care. Now their hypersexuality is called the women's movement, the modern women's movement. So, you know, wear a thong on the beach

and, you know, let your ass stick out. It's women's empowerment. Go on only fans. It's women's empowerment. And I think it's just another form of enslavement to external validation, especially from the males out there. It's just disguised and now we can make money of it, thank goodness. But it's the same kind of bondage to feeding the male appetite and we don't realize it, right?

So the men, so many men I talk to and asked them, what do you think about all these women on the beach in their underwear, you know, not even underwear? Okay, like basically nude. They're like, we love it. Right? Thank you so much to the modern female empowers. movement, we want this, right? It's like we're playing right into what they want. No problem, but don't think you're not playing into what they want. Like, you're thinking, oh, I'm not going to do

what a man says and a man wants and a man needs. Okay, you're giving him exactly what he wants. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do it because you don't want to give it to him. Just be aware that you think, you know, you're doing all this for yourself and you don't care about what men think. there is some part of you that may be doing it because you do care still about what men think. So you have to be really conscious of what motivation you have to be whoever you're being, right? And I think sometimes we women mistake empowerment for liberation. And yeah, yeah, we're empowered to be on Onlyfans. Yeah, we're empowered to whatever we want on the beach.

But is that really liberation? Yeah, I couldn't agree. it feels like old things just being rebranded so they sound better, but it's still very much the same thing. Okay, so my last question is just parenting in general. What do our kids, regardless of gender, need more or less from us as parents? And how do we know when we're guiding instead of controlling or buying into the, you should be this way or shouldn't be that way? So that was a very long-winded way of saying, what do they need more or less of from us as parents? What they need is for us to be always deeply connected, not imposing our emotional baggage,

doing our own inner work, reducing the achievement pressure, and truly celebrating them for their essence of who they are, not what they do. And your other question was, how do we know when we're guiding versus controlling? We don't know. And if you have a very good, compliant child, you'll never know because you could be calling it guidance, but it's literally walking all over them, controlling them. So the only way you would know is, you know, really stopping and asking, where is this coming from? Is this my motivation? Or is this really something that comes from them? And that takes a highly evolved, extremely humble parent. Who wouldn't even have to ask this question in the first place if they were already humble and evolved?

right? Okay, the other way you know is that your child is telling you, you're in daily battle, you're fighting, there's a conflict. That's how you know it's not coming from the child. Go get the books. Raising conscious daughters and raising conscious sons are out, available on Amazon or wherever it is you buy books, but let's keep our local bookstores in business. And I'm going to encourage everybody to get both. I only have a daughter, but I have ordered both books. So I just think it's so important for us to be engaged in both of these. conversations. And of course, you can also find Dr. Sheffali on all the social medias at Dr. Sheffali. We'll put the links and all the ways to find and follow her in show notes.

Dr. Sheffali, thank you, thank you. Thank you for your incredibly important work and for changing the world as we know it and for being here today. And I just want to say I have a podcast called Parenting and You. I have a coaching institute where you can join to become the most amazing parent and listeners of this podcast can get 500 off. So, Let us know that you heard it here. And, you know, there's a summit that I'm doing. So there's a lot of information on my website, Dr. Sheffali.com. Thank you, Nicole, for having me.

My absolute pleasure. And we're going to put all of those links again in show notes. So make sure you go check them out. Maybe our job isn't to give our kids better instructions about how to be women or how to be men. Maybe it's to help them build enough self-awareness and inner confidence that they don't need so many instructions in the first place. At the end of the day, I want daughters and sons who know their worth without needing the world to constantly confirm it, who can build healthy relationships, make conscious choices, feel their feelings without being ruled by them, and somehow learn to live authentically in a world that is constantly trying to tell them who they should be.

Frankly, that's the whole point of this podcast. You are always the decider here. And raising kids who know that they are too, well, that. is woman's work.