Just taking this one example under consideration, maybe the boy has expressed interest in fishing, and the mom knows that this neighbor is into fishing, and she emphatically isn’t, and she feels like her son might benefit from that kind of bonding experience.

From a more broad-based perspective, it doesn’t have to be a gendered conversation, but for a lot of young people, they look to adults for guidance and for ways to understand and express their gender, and it’s healthy and helpful to have an adult that they can pattern their own gender expression off of. I didn’t have a lot of present male role models as a young boy, and so I found myself reading and watching a lot of science fiction and asking myself “Is this the kind of thing that Captain Picard would do?” It wasn’t a perfect replacement by a long shot, but it was something, and it was something that I didn’t even fully realize I was looking for until I went back and looked at my own developing sense of what it was to be a man, much later in adulthood.

Can a child learn healthy gender expression from an adult of any given gender? I don’t know, maybe. But I do know that as a boy, I really wanted an adult man to help me construct my own identity, and I went looking for one, without even fully knowing what I was doing or why.