Medford’s Payal (pronounced like “style”) Desai doesn’t have her sons’ lives planned out, but she does know a few things that won’t be in their futures: becoming somebody’s unempathetic gamer husband who expects their partner to do all the packing before a trip and believes that painting their nails makes them less of a man.
“As parents raising boys,” she says, “maybe we get to raise the bar, because they will reach it.”
Desai says she is raising her sons to become empathetic men who understand consent, reject toxic masculinity, take responsibility for domestic labor, know how to handle their feelings and hold other men accountable. She shares this with her 483k Instagram followers and 327k TikTok followers.
“When you pull off the expectations of what you want your kid to be, you give them that space to grow.”
She started posting online as a supplement to her teaching job, but when she joined in on the “Dusty Sons” TikTok trend in 2023 – when parents were posting things they taught their young daughters so that they wouldn’t fall for anyone’s “dusty son” – her page blew up.
“I restructured it so that it was more about raising boys with equity with domestic labor in mind,” she says. “It was taking what we do in our home and sharing it online. I was trying to share that you can raise boys to be empowered to be part of the household and carry emotional labor.”
Desai created 80 creative videos about raising the bar for her boys…
Choosing feminine hygiene products in front of my son so that periods aren’t a taboo/uncomfortable topic for boys to know & talk about.
Teaching my son to organize the pantry so no one has to stop what they are doing every time he’s looking for something that’s right in front of his face.
Teaching my son that facial hair on a female is perfectly normal so he never thinks it’s ok to embarrass someone for it.
And while setting these standards are normal for both her and her husband, it doesn’t mean they’re telling their boys who to be. In fact, it’s the opposite.
“What I always attempt to do is give our kids space to authentically become the people they are,” she says. “When you pull off the expectations of what you want your kid to be, you give them that space to grow. And there’s a really beautiful thing that comes from that.”
This isn’t the first time Desai has realized the beauty of leaving expectations behind. When she was pregnant, she began experiencing gender disappointment.
“I know it was rooted in a lot of bias,” she says. “I had the feeling that I was never going to be able to experience a close relationship with my son, that I wasn’t going to have anything in common with them and wouldn’t connect with them.”
But then she became a mother. “Through experiencing being a mom to boys and realizing that these truths I had set in my head were not actually coming to life, I was able to dictate the relationships I would have with my boys.”
Later, when she had built a small platform on social media, she decided to share those feelings. Moms flooded her DMs with their own experiences of gender disappointment and their guilt about saying it out loud.
Now a full-time content creator, Desai has designed her own merch, started speaking for local organizations and posts updates of nail days with her youngest son, answers to parenting questions and conversations with her boys reacting to videos that have gone viral because of a man’s bad behavior.
Recently, she showed her older son a video of content creator Zachary Willmore being harassed by another man in a public restroom for being “dressed like a girl.”
Her son was confused as to why Willmore was being yelled at, especially since he was just minding his business in the restroom. Desai encouraged her son to explore his feelings – instead of expressing what she thought.
“That’s not going to land,” she says. “I structure the questions around allowing him to do the talking and thinking. I want him to think critically about the fact that this person was in a bathroom minding his own business, and this is how he was treated. How does that make you feel? It’s a lot more rewarding and impactful for the child. It sits with them in a different way than if you just told them everyone should be accepting.”
And if one of their reaction videos ends up on her page, it’s gone through an extensive approval process with her son. “I have a conversation with him about, ‘What parts are you ok with me posting? Were you comfortable with that conversation? Is that something that, if one of your friends saw, would you feel ok about it?’”
Her navigation of these conversations with her little ones has been crafted over years in the classroom. And she’s quick to remind parents that this is a skill you have to develop just like any other.
“I’ve been trained,” she says. “Going back to my teaching experience, the most confident kids I came across were the ones who had a lot of love and support and acceptance around them. They were supported in who they were. So I’m going to always keep that as a core value of my parenting.”
And that value is catching. Desai has had more than one interaction with a follower who started as a hater and became a fan. She’ll get comments and messages saying “If I have a son, I will never allow that.” (Especially regarding her youngest regularly painting his nails.)
But then, she received a different kind of response from the same person: “Over the course of watching you interact with your boys, now I can’t argue with it and I understand it. If my son asked me to paint his nails, I would let him.”
“I think that’s so powerful,” Desai says. “Because it’s a very truthful comment. I’m just sharing the joy of allowing kids to be kids. That’s really special.”
