Psychology Today | 07.01.2026 02:00Psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams wrote, "Some people feel so bereft of clear family standards, so unsupervised and ignored by the adults around them, that in order to push themselves to grow up, they hold themselves to idealized criteria of behavior and feeling that they derive from the larger culture. These standards, because they're abstract and not modeled by people known personally to the child, tend to be harsh and unbuffered by the humane sense of proportion.” This tendency is often associated with hypermasculinity, or calcified standards of manhood. So, boys often look to the heroic men of their surrounding culture to infer what’s expected of them.
