A new book by three alumni details how media perpetuates the myth of hyper-masculinity.

It is rare for me to gain an assignment as a result of maternal profiling, but this was one such occasion.

As the mother of two boys, would I be willing to write about a new book produced by three Harvard Graduate School of Education alumni — Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D.’89, Sharon Lamb, Ed.M.’80, Ed.D.’88, and Mark Tappan, Ed.D.’87 — called Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes?

Without hesitation, I signed on, with the hope of emerging from the process with a new, media-savvy skill set that would help me navigate my 9- and 11-year-old sons through boyhood intact. Still, as my list of questions for the authors grew, so too did my own queries surrounding whether my husband and I had instilled enough of the right messages in our children to counteract the growing tsunami of all the others around them. Would they remain kind to their friends and committed to their schoolwork, as we hoped, or move toward a more stereotypically masculine model that has been craftily — and expensively — manufactured and marketed to young men?

In pursuit of the truth, and armed with the book’s key points, I posed the first of many questions to my nine-year-old regarding whether he thought it was OK for boys to be considered “smart” in school.

“It’s OK for now,” he said, “but once boys get to high school, it’s not OK anymore.”

Before counting all of the ways in which I may have gotten lost on the parenting pipeline, my eyes were now fully opened to the fact that my own son was not immune to the multitude of external messages swirling around him. Whether they had been delivered by books, TV shows, or simply peer contact, I didn’t know, but it was clear to me that Brown, Lamb, and Tappan did, based, in great part, on what they culled from their survey of more than 600 boys from around the country on how they perceive their path to manhood as well as what may influence them along the way. As the authors note in their book, and despite the best intentions of parents and teachers, the influences of media and marketing are “far more pervasive and insidious” than most of us would ever expect.

“They are bombarded by a million different things,” says Lamb, a psychotherapist and professor of mental health at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, as well as the mother of two sons. “I’d rather say there isn’t one thing you are going to show your son that is really bad, but the inescapability of this is that the messages are all around them. There is a cumulative effect versus one seriously bad, problematic thing.”

Unfortunately for boys everywhere, that cumulative effect may be leaving its mark. While some experts, educators, and writers dispute the existence of an alleged “boy crisis,” calling it a myth at best, other experts and indicators tell a different tale, one that includes compelling statistics pointing to a downward, multiyear trend in young male achievement. Today, girls perform better in school, graduate at higher rates, and earn more college degrees. Boys, on the other hand, have a greater likelihood of being diagnosed with learning disorders and placed in special education classrooms. They like school less and drop out more.

Without question, the root causes of all the aforementioned issues have a multitude of factors and theories behind them, as educators and experts point to issues of race, socioeconomic background, and male brain structure. But what about the role media plays?

“In general, our culture has taken a laissez-faire attitude about boys, thinking that what they are watching and seeing isn’t going to hurt them,” says Tappan, a professor at Colby College in Maine and director of its education program, “but there’s a wider concern. Most people let their boys play video games, watch World Wrestling on TV, and don’t give it a second thought. Our feeling is they should give it a second thought.”