Jeffrey Leiken, who runs mentoring programs and has facilitated a boys’ group at a Northern California school for more than a decade, said well-designed boys’ groups encourage “empathy and teach conflict resolution, collaboration and tolerance. This is about life skills development.”

But the environment needs deliberate curating. “Boys get vilified if they say anything that comes out the wrong way or if it shows some degree of ignorance,” Mr. Leiken said. “It becomes unsafe to speak out, and they shut down.”

Opening up in front of other boys requires courage because competition, and the distrust that grows from it, is often central to male relationships. So, educators at the University School of Milwaukee were amazed when they started a boys’ lunch for the middle school football team members, and the constant blame and bullying that had become routine yielded to an “almost instantaneous effect of creating a better climate on the team,” said Will Piper, the middle school athletic coordinator, in an email.

Contrary to fears that when boys learn emotional authenticity they become too “soft” or “weak,” just the opposite occurs. “This hasn’t changed me as a person,” said Nico Petricone, a Sheridan seventh grader. “I’m still the same. But I feel emotionally stronger, more stable. Being in this group has given me more confidence about who I am.”

Such efforts go beyond middle school. In Chicago’s South Side, one of the most notoriously violent urban areas in the country, a program called Becoming a Man (BAM) is meeting with success at the high school level. In BAM classes, created and overseen by Youth Guidance, a nonprofit organization that provides outcome-driven programs to Chicago public schools, participating ninth- through 12th-graders meet for one class period, once a week, to develop social-emotional learning skills and to discuss issues with a counselor-mentor about the responsibilities of their burgeoning adulthood.

According to Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, a research institute tha t provides support to BAM, participating students are far more likely to stay in school and graduate, and they are involved in 50 percent less violent crime arrests. Perhaps most crucial, the relationship for many of these young men of color from disadvantaged, fatherless homes with their male mentors is central. Chapin Hall’s website says “the consistency of [this] relationship was essential to influencing who they want to become and increasing their self-confidence.”

As it turns out, boys do want to talk. Not so much about topics handed down to them during ubiquitous ‘advisory’ meetings but about the issues that confront them every day. Mr. Leiken says that translates into everything from how to garner respect from peers, parents and teachers to how to be a good friend to navigating relationships with girls in the #MeToo era. Ultimately, he says, “They need to feel that their life really matters. That they’re capable and needed in the world.”