These preferences weren’t limited to adopting parents. An article in Slate cites a study from the journal Reproductive Biomedicine Online which found that white couples preferentially select females through the increasingly common procedure preimplantation genetic diagnosis 70 percent of the time. (Patients using in vitro fertilization often use this procedure to vet their embryos for genetic abnormalities.) The article also says many fertility doctors observe that 80 percent of patients who are choosing their baby’s gender prefer girls.

What few of us seem to realize: The boys-will-be-boys behavior, which increasingly invites cringing, doesn’t originate with them. In “A New Psychology of Women: Gender, Culture, and Ethnicity,” Hilary M. Lips writes: “…parents tend to touch infant boys less often and more roughly than infant daughters and that daughters are handled more gently and protectively...” Research also shows that parents treat sons differently after they’ve suffered injuries than they do daughters, and another study, “Gender and Age Differences in Parent-Child Emotion Talk,” reveals that mothers use more emotional language with preschool-aged daughters than they do with comparably aged sons.

This imbalanced, man-card mind-set is part of our legacy because children ape the attitudes of the parent whose gender matches their own. In a Time magazine article about this study, Harriet Tenenbaum, a co-author, observes, “Most parents say they want boys to be more expressive but don’t know [they] are speaking differently to them…. These are learned stereotypes and we are reinforcing them as a society.”

The good news for boys is that men with a high emotional intelligence quotient don’t hand down these values. The bad news: Pressure from an unexpected corner makes such men gut-check their desire to embrace boys, not to mention their own emotional sensitivity.

A blogger on Vice, Chelsea G. Summers, thrills at how “misandry” — hatred of men — has become “chic.” She gushes that, in addition to a political agenda, this blanket antipathy promises some “great pop culture.” This has manifested itself, among other ways, through blogs and online essays and tweets that pillory and mock the growing trend of men crying — which, I know from my own and other men’s experience, can be the single act that most liberates and heals a painful past that devalues masculine sensitivity. Paradoxically, for some men, the third-wave feminism they embrace strong-arms them into muting the very sensitivity and empathy that opened their eyes to women’s plight.

Is it any wonder that some of us want little, if anything, to do with raising boys? The subtext bombarding us from many sides ultimately encourages us to abandon them, even as they founder beneath the chop of a changing world for which they lack the buoyancy. Yet men like me abdicate our responsibility by letting other men — the ones who don’t always encourage the broader, deeper humanity within males — raise boys. And we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to heal old wounds.

Of course we should empower our daughters, because gross inequality still exists. And, despite the callous, increasingly callow, pushback, we should empower boys — with the same emotional literacy skill set and expansive worldview we teach our daughters. It’s what they, and we, ultimately need.