“It is easier to build strong children than fix broken men.”
When you have great strength, the lightest touch is true masculinity.
Why is there not more of a focus on how we treat our sons the first 5 years they are born?
I think disregarding the effects of physical and emotional abuse in the first 5 years is setting up the ground work to allow the dysfunction we see in our society.
The destruction of the family, the breakdown of masculine values, and the constant diminishing of a fathers importance seems to be a common narrative these days.
Today one third of children are living with an unmarried parent. About one in five are living with a single mother. I believe that children being raised by two parents and within a loving and healthy family will be the most important factors for a better future.
“Living in homes without dads is more correlated with suicide among teenagers than any other factor.” ― Warren Farrell, The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
So how can we raise strong, happy, and healthy sons?
I believe that we should raise our boys with a great balance in life. With power, strength, courage, confidence, empathy, patience, compassion, determination, kindness, and love. The old narrative that we need to be hard on our boys has shown to be a very destructive path. I think following an ideology that is not based on virtues will ultimately fail and I believe this is what we are seeing in our society. For generations we have conditioned our boys to be to hard, to obey, and to submit to authority. We have disciplined through hitting and created obedience through fear. You can not learn and grow from yelling, shouting, hitting, and being under constant control. If we want to help men we need to take responsibility as fathers. As strong and powerful men we need to protect our children and not be seen as a monster. We need to stop hitting our sons and raise them with virtue. We need to stop allowing pain from past generations destroy the bond between men. We need to come together and speak about important issues. We need to have difficult conversations about disciplining children, creating connection in our families, building strong bonds between men, showing our daughters what it means to be a good man, how men can support each other, and why we need more honesty.
We need to have a focus on how important fathers are in the family and share with each other the great things that were passed down to us from our fathers. We need to have self love and care about ourselves enough to heal, so we can be the hero to our own sons. We do not need super powers and a cape or the ability to slam dunk from the foul line, but we need to start taking responsibility for our own lives, eating healthy, exercising, reading books, meditation, creating good habits, practicing good routines, and continuing to become the strongest version of ourselves.
We need to create intelligent, strong, capable, compassionate, kind, and masculine men that will not have to spend their life recovering from their childhood.
