Teach a boy to notice when a laugh turns to silence

Clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy tells parents that boys need practice reading other people long before romance enters the picture, and the kitchen table teasing is where that practice starts.

Her method begins after things calm down. Instead of saying, "Stop bothering your sister," she suggests pulling your son aside and saying he is not in trouble. Then replay what happened in plain language: his sister laughed, she seemed into it, and then she stopped laughing and looked at the floor while he kept going.

The next step is to name the lesson. Kennedy says people "are telling you what's going on for them with their body, not their words," so she asks the boy what he thinks his sister was saying with that shift. If he does not know, she offers a guess herself: "I wonder if she's saying, 'Please stop.'" The point is not to get him to confess, but to practice spotting when someone who was excited stops being excited.

She uses the same approach in smaller moments. When a son interrupts a phone call, she suggests asking, "Did you notice I was on the phone," and "What do you think that means about how available I am right now to do the thing you want me to do." And to make noticing a daily habit, she suggests giving a child a zone like the kitchen, with the job of noticing one thing each day and doing it, then praising the noticing itself.

Kennedy says that one day a boy will be hooking up with someone who "will seem into it, and then something will shift." A boy should not be practicing how to catch that change for the first time while sex hormones are running and alcohol or drugs may be involved.