Boys and men are languishing under a code of toxic masculinity that requires them to suppress emotions and deny their humanity, according to this searching psychological study.

Weaver, a retired marriage and family therapist, argues that boys have as much emotional capacity and neediness as girls, but are held to cultural norms—injunctions like “don’t be a sissy” and “boys don’t cry”—that discourage them from discussing their feelings. In extreme cases, she warns, they may develop “alexithymia,” a disorder that renders them “emotionally numb or devoid of feelings.” As a result, she contends, boys are beset by anxiety, anger, and depression; are twice as likely as girls to be expelled from school; and have higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, violent crimes, and suicide. Drawing on her experiences counseling teen sex offenders, Weaver elaborates on Norbert Ralph’s “prosocial model,” which helps boys understand and regulate emotions to head off bad decisions. She calls for an overhaul of social expectations for boys and men, one that will license them to cry freely and talk about their sadness, body-image issues, and sexual insecurities. The author suggests interventions to help boys open up about their feelings, from the Let Me Run running club that encourages friendly camaraderie to schoolyard “buddy benches” that gloomy young people can sit on to signal classmates to come and comfort them. Pitched at parents and teachers, Weaver’s treatise combines insightful dives into social psychology with self-analysis questions—“Do you find yourself giving more hugs and affection to your daughters than your sons?”—to get readers thinking. Her prose is evocative and down-to-earth in its depiction of the everyday psychic wounds of boyhood and the possibilities of soothing them. (“Instead of brushing off the event or simply flushing the fish down the toilet, he sat with his son and let him cry,” she writes of a dad helping his child cope with a goldfish’s death.) Traditionalists may bridle at Weaver’s vision of what manhood should look like. Among the nontoxic male role models she extolls is the South Korean pop group BTS, for its “neutral gender of masculinity” and “pastel hair colors.” Still, many boys and men will find her case for a more expressive, communicative, empathetic life to be compelling.

An illuminating, warmly sympathetic brief for replacing stoic, hard-bitten manliness with richly expressed feelings.