Boyhood Studies

The study on which this article is built identifies psychosocial factors that come into play when boys experience pain and, more specifically, how these particular boys attribute meaning to such experience. Twelve male competitive ice hockey players aged nine to thirteen years participated in small focus-group sessions. Pain from exertion/fatigue, acute pain, chronic pain, and pain from a head injury were examined. The older boys had a more advanced understanding of pain but all the boys engaged in sense-making strategies to play through pain. They were all well informed about concussions and many exercised a greater level of caution towards symptoms of a head injury compared to chronic pain or discomfort from exertion. Educating young athletes and adults about the implications of pain and injury both in and beyond the sport itself may help deconstruct the false sense of invulnerability associated with being a competitive athlete.

This article examines the present-day perception among boys and young men in West Africa that migration through football offers a way of achieving social standing and improving their life chances. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among footballers in urban southern Ghana between 2010 and 2016, we argue that young people’s efforts to make it abroad and “become a somebody” through football is not merely an individual fantasy; it is rather a social negotiation of hope to overcome widespread social immobility in the region. It is this collective practice among a large cohort of young males—realistic or not—which qualifies conceptualizations of youth transitions such as waithood that dominate academic understanding of African youth today.

This qualitative project explores the meanings young boys ascribe to sport experiences and how understandings and perspectives of sport differ between parent(s) and child. Thirteen five-year-old boys and their parent(s) (n = 17) took part in semi-structured interviews focusing on meanings associated with their sport and physical activity experiences. The boys undertook a drawing exercise as part of the interview to elicit their experiences as distinct from those of their parent(s). The seventeen parents were interviewed about their motivation for encouraging their sons to be active. The results indicated that the parents’ and boys’ constructions and understandings of the boys’ sport experienced differed in two important ways; the gendering of the sport experience, and the way in which the sport experience is conceptualized.

This empirical study examines sixteen- to seventeen-year-old heterosexual male cross-country athletes from a diverse, middle-class high school in California and how they express physical tactility and emotional intimacy in a culture of diminished homohysteria. Using participative and non-participative observations of the team, coupled with ten in-depth interviews, we find acceptance of gay men, and note a range of homosocial behaviors including bed-sharing, cuddling, hand holding, hugging, and emotional intimacy. We discuss the ways in which heterosexual boundaries and identities are maintained, and the process by which normalizing heterosexuality as the assumed sexual orientation contributes to heterosexism. Despite the reproduction of heterosexism, the relationships these high school athletes form with each other are not predicated on homophobia or hypermasculinity. Finally, we discuss adolescent expressions of masculinity in the transition to manhood and in the face of diminishing homohysteria.

Previous research contributes to our knowledge about young people’s motivation to participate in sports and athletic programs. In particular, scholarship has identified significant others (such as parents and peers) and internal drivers (for example, physical ability and skill, the desire to succeed, love of competition, etc.) as some of the forces that shape the involvement of young men in sports. The role of institutions and structures in influencing the decisions of young males to join sports, however, is neglected to some extent in the current literature. Given the history of race and gender marginalization relative to sports in the US, distinguishing an additional layer that influences motivations are important. Young black males face additional social pressures in society and in schools, in particular. In this article we suggest that schools use sports to control the behaviors and aid the character development of young black men.

This article examines the 1961 withdrawal by St. Michael’s College School’s hockey team from the semi-professional Canadian junior hockey league, the Ontario Hockey Association. The long-playing schedule, the heavy burden of the physical labor, and the emphasis on athletics over academics were all factors that led to the high school’s withdrawing of its team. St. Michael’s College’s experience was an early expression of concern about the exploitation of young athletes, concern that has now become increasingly shared publicly around the globe. The limited success of St. Michael’s College’s campaign for change lay in the difficulty of convincing society of this exploitation. The school’s withdrawal highlights the entrenched problem of institutions treating young male athletes as commodities.