Time-out time. I kneel down in front of W (age 6), eye to eye, naming my emotions and trying to foster empathy in him. “Let me explain why I am frustrated. I am frustrated because... blah blah blah...” His eyes wander, and he wiggles around, his arms searching for activity, automatically running through the taekwondo forms. Or his nervous habits appear: biting his nails, picking his fingers, blowing spit bubbles. This drives me nuts. Can’t you listen when I’m talking?

My husband’s brand of discipline works differently and is over a lot faster. W has to stand at attention, back straight and hands at his sides, like a soldier. K speaks to him firmly (“radiating his manly ‘qi’”), telling W something short and specific along the lines of “You had bad behavior.” Then K reaches out and grabs W, who laughs, knowing what’s coming. K picks him up, rubbing his head with his knuckles in a rough but affectionate way, wrestling with W until they both fall on the floor laughing. The lesson is over; W felt his father’s anger and love, and the emotional energy was expressed and dispersed. Even little M (age 2), an emotional stew-pot, who quickly becomes overwhelmed by his frustration and tends to get lost in crying jags until he can’t breathe, settles down quickly when his father simply tells him, “Stop crying.”

My friend Emily calls K “the boy whisperer” and suggests that children, like dogs, are pack animals, responding to signs of strength and leadership. This whole “whispering” phenomenon (horse whisperer, ghost whisperer, dog whisperer, baby whisperer) connotes some sort of mystical power wielded by a person endowed with the ability to connect, at a deep level, with those beings whom we wish to tame or with whom other forms of communication fail. But if you read the dog whisperer website or the baby whisperer’s book, whispering is not about some mystical ability but rather a person who has, through practice and training, found ways of deciphering and participating in the non-verbal modes of these other beings. K’s success with our boys, then, is not due to some mystical energy but the expression of confidence and certainty of an alpha dog. We all can be whisperers if we take the time to recognize and unravel the non-verbal codes of communication that shape relationships with these tricky beings.

I spend a lot of time watching men. Not to pick up; rather, I’m curious about what species of men my own boys will become. Watching K with our sons and trying to understand the language he speaks to them so fluently has led me to think about the ways in which men express their relationships and identities through gestures.

My initiation into Korean culture began in my first meetings with my then-boyfriend’s (now husband’s) friends, all, like him, Korean graduate students in computer science. Taking refuge from their demanding classes and programs, they met in smoky restaurants, clubs, or each other’s apartments to drink soju, chain smoke, talk, and sing rather loudly. Though I didn’t know Korean, I could follow the gist of what they discussed, which generally followed the formula, “Blah blah blah Java blah blah C++ blah compiler [drag on cigarette] CS237 blah shit blah blah...” Though largely uninterested in these conversations, I was fascinated to watch a different set of mannerisms emerge in my boyfriend as he communicated with his friends through 20 gradations of bows, the careful positioning of one’s glass above or below another’s during a toast, the turning of one’s head to drink when in the presence of an elder, and the careful ordering of who could eat, drink, or leave first. In this enclave of intimacy fostered by being strangers in a strange land, in all-nighters huddled over lines of code and anxiety about course schedules, they each turned to each other and to the comforting rituals of hierarchy and brotherhood. They largely ignored me (though I was an excellent designated driver), unsure how to act around me, as I was younger than them, ignorant of the language and rituals, and, to top it all off, largely agnostic on the question of C++ versus Java.

As the years passed, I lost sight of this gesture language, and my mental gaze turned toward the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and intonation of the Korean language. But after moving to Korea, I found that although I could finally understand what people said, gestural vocabulary and grammar, especially that of men, were once again unfamiliar and mysterious. Stroll around the streets of Seoul, and you see many couples holding hands, but these couples are usually single-sex friends rather than lovers. Male friends, colleagues, and even police officers hold hands and walk together. Men embrace and sit next to each other, touching affectionately as they get drunk and talk about problems at work, with their fathers, wives, etc. They go to the public baths together, sitting naked in steaming water and talking. My son’s soccer coaches throw him in the air, hug him, kiss him, and mess with his hair. The older boys in his taekwondo class do the same, kissing and hugging him, using their bodies and hands to move him into the right place in the line, carrying and caressing him when he gets hurt.

After growing accustomed to the ways in which this gestural language defines and expresses relationships between men, between boys, and between men and boys in Korea, when I return to the U.S., it is with a different kind of interpretive gaze. At some gas station between LA and San Diego, refueling after 16 hours of travel (air and car) and much vomiting, I find myself resting my stomach and checking out the exotic men of SoCal. Next to us in the Explorer is a dad wearing faded jeans, with a slow, smug, rambling slightly turned-out walk, his movement centered around the weight of his belly. Ahead of me is a sk8ter dude in skinny pants and flat sneakers who walks with a short stride, arms almost comically glued to his sides, rolling up into the toe with each step. My sons in the back are having an argument: “You died. I killed you with my lightsaber.” “No, I’m not dead! I’m Luke!” “No, you’re dead. You’re Darth Maul. I’m Obi-Wan.” Later, standing in line for coffee I listen to two college students brag about their romantic conquests. They throw out their “feelings” (“I’m so into her”) in loud voices but without making eye contact. I’m back in the U.S., dazzled by the bright sunshine (seriously, it is brighter here somehow) and fascinated by the strange markings on these creatures of maleness: the way they dress, move, and talk. By the way they clap each other on the back but leave an empty seat between them in the movie theater.

Describing gestures of affection in Korea, two paragraphs above, I cringe at writing the words “caressing,” “kissing,” and “naked” because in English, these words have taken on a sexual tinge. Accustomed to ritualized gestures such as bowing in addition to the overt overtures of affection in Korea, when I go back to the U.S., men seem stiff and awkward together, avoiding each other’s gaze and touch. The sexualization of touch in the U.S. makes me wonder and worry about what little boys are learning about what it means to be a man. Against the background of school shootings, ADHD diagnoses, gang violence, anxiety about single parenting, rising suicide rates 21 and steroid use among boys, boys have become a “problem” in the social imagination — a special category needing research and attention, with many solutions offered, including teaching boys emotional literacy, setting boundaries, and giving boys safe expression of energy and aggressiveness. I don’t have any problem with those recommendations; in fact, I follow them. But I worry that we’re decreasing the range of acceptable, safe physical expressions of affection available to boys while simultaneously increasing the emphasis on verbal emotional literacy.

But this very background of social worry implicates me in a way that I cannot ignore. There is a diagnostic sense to whispering; the whisperer finds and heals the troubled animal or child. Armed with my shelf full of parenting books, I now view and interpret my boys’ gestures and even their boyishness with a diagnostic eye.

As W jumps off the furniture and chews his toast into the shape of a gun, I wonder: Does he have ADHD? Does he have an unhealthy obsession with violence? I imagine him, in alternating moments, as a well-adjusted, popular, athletic, academically successful teenager who listens to his mother, then in the next moment imagine him locked in his room smoking cigarettes and reading about bombs on the internet. With the buzzword of “emotional literacy” being thrown around like a baseball, I interrogate W about his feelings: How do you feel about going to elementary school? How did you feel when Martin wanted to play with Darth Maul and took it from you? To which he inevitably answers, “I don’t know,” and I mark my failure as a parent to elicit the correct kind of emotional response from my son. The parenting vocabulary, standards, and scorecards through which I view him keep me alert, expecting signs of trouble, constantly re-imagining the future, and also a little estranged, as he is a member of this strange subspecies, The Boy.

Trying to get a better sense of his internal life (he is, after all, only six. Pathos and ennui have not yet entered his vocabulary) I also read W’s behaviors as a seismograph of the hidden strains and eruptions of our relationship. I have my good days and bad days as a mom, tending to unthinkingly transmit the stresses of city life and my own self-pressures down to my eldest son rather than protecting him from them. Here, boys aren’t supposed to cry; they are expected to fight, and they attend long hours of pressured and competitive academic instruction from a young age. When W starts to suck on his fingers, to blow spit bubbles, to bite his nails, I know I’m pushing him too hard and need to let up. His little nervous habits are the barometer that tells me the pressure is too high.

Perhaps, in the end, all this whispering is about hope and belief — the hope and belief that we can find meaningful ways to connect even when communication seems difficult or impossible. As a mom who is boy crazy — that is, crazy about my boys and driven crazy by them on a daily basis — I cling to that message. I talk about emotion, I make charts, and I reward good behavior in our Pavlovian home laboratory. But sometimes, I learn and accomplish the most in my encounters with those of different genders or cultures if I attend to the ways in which they flash their feathers and clink their glasses.