A Wall Street Journal article popped up the other day that caught my attention: “Boys Are Struggling. It Can Take Coaches, Tutors and Thousands a Month to Fix That”
The bright folks at the WSJ are far from the only people to notice boys are struggling. It seems like every week a new book, a new article, or a new study comes out telling us what we already know: adolescent boys and young men are not doing well academically, socially, economically, mentally, emotionally and in any of the other -ly’s you can think of.
I don’t want to completely dismiss the idea of turning to experts, coaches, tutors and others like them. They do good and do attack some of what is hurting boys today. They say it takes a village to raise a child after all. But instead of buying that village at the cost of thousands of dollars a month, what if we… you know… just build that village instead?
Tying Generations Together
We live in a time of not only atomized and alienated individuals but also generations. A hundred or two hundred years ago, they didn’t name generations like we do today because the same culture and upbringing could dominate across vast periods of time. But Boomers, Gen. X, Millennials, Gen. Z, etc. all grew up in very different worlds with each generation experiencing reality differently from those who come before or after them. When it comes to family life, and raising boys in particular, this means that if our lives are defined primarily by mainstream culture, the worlds of a father and his son are irrevocably estranged from each other from the moment the son is born.
We now expect the angsty, rebellious, or wayward teenager and think it normal. But this is only normal behavior when generations are estranged from each other. Post-apocalyptic fantasies always focus on the loss of societal comforts, infrastructure and the death and despair that brings. But even though we have electricity and operational grocery stores today, we’re in fact already in a post-apocalyptic hellscape because the “transmission lines of civilization are downed”1 between father and son. And the effects of this apocalypse are all the “-ly” problems that we’re noticing with boys,2 up to and including literal death and despair for males of all ages.
Reclaiming Childhood
The first step in building a village is to reclaim childhood, which we now largely leave in the hands of the state: the state’s educational system doesn’t form men so much as it waits for them to grow up. As one writer put it:
“We have a public imagination that cannot conceive of what exactly to do with children… we have engineered them to be useless, and so they shuffle through a decade of busywork. Partly, the length of schooling has increased simply because it could—because we no longer need children to work, yet need them to do something while the adults go do theirs.”3
Childhood is more than a decade long waiting room! Cultures in times past understood that children were the future and needed to be integrated into the adult world from a young age in order to succeed. Integration into the village is the true purpose of childhood. What this integration looks like changes as the child ages. Small children may be given small tasks and responsibilities but for them integration is largely a matter of peace and rest; of feeling that their parent’s world is whole and coherent. I could relate to the recent observation of one Irish-Catholic writer remembering the little things that gave his childhood world a security and a reality that his own children now lack:
“I’ve taken my children to Ireland, but they’ll never see, as I did, a driver in the west of Ireland sincerely and unselfconsciously make the sign of the cross upon passing a Catholic church. These things are small and yet, the [other adults] somehow conveyed to me the reality of life in this world, attended by hard workers and angels both.”4
In this frame, a successful childhood is not marked by high individual achievement, or by academic progress, or by a packed schedule of activities and practices, but by the opportunity for a child to notice, feel safe in and gain confidence within the communal world his parents participate in.
And indeed, a unique challenge to modern parents is the modern boy always has a choice to try to find rest elsewhere in any number of things and interests, no matter how dysfunctional those interests are. Parents are left with no choice but to be very intentional about the world their boy grows up in. Not in a “helicopter parent” way, trying only to avoid all the bad things, but from the perspective of design and creation of the good in their son’s world. Attention is key.
“It’s the power of attention that ultimately rebuilds community, rebuilds village. But we’re so scattered. We’re so atomized right now that we really have to start from the basics… to really take ownership of your power of attention… [which] is a creative act. And so, if you don’t feel at home, then maybe it’s time to direct your attention differently.”5
This is where alignment, friendship and community amongst the adults come into play.
Deep Friendships Build A Village
In practice how many parents today have a deep friendship with other parents? The kind of friendship where parents could almost interchangeably parent each other’s children? This might be true for some mothers but in my experience it’s rarely true amongst fathers who all too often count the dads they nod to across the room as their closest friends.
And this is a terrible shame, because to be a village appealing to boys, men must participate and a have role.
A deep friendship with other parents is, in my mind, marked chiefly by 3 things.
Trust & Alignment: Knowing that on all the important questions, and maybe even many of the unimportant ones, the parents think with one mind. Trusting the other parents to teach, correct and protect your kids as if they were theirs and vice versa. This kind of alignment is extremely difficult to find in the wild. The best place to look for it, or at least the start of it, is at church.
Multi-Context: But this goes beyond church and morals. The deepest friendships usually exist across multiple contexts. This means the other parents should be the people your son sees you work with, live near, go to church with, coach little league with, homeschool with, perform service with and have parties with. Or some combination of these things.
Consistent: Deep friendships endure over time, a difficult thing to achieve when the average family moves every 5-7 years.
Deep friendships not only allow smaller boys to grow up content and at peace with the adult world in which they play, it also builds something that the older boys will want to join and mimic.
Opportunity Knocks Within A Village
It's natural and necessary for adolescents to want to have some measure of independence from parents. But modern teenagers experience this independence insecurely and without vision of their future – quickly abandoning childish habits and naiveté in favor of coldness to family and a total embrace of peer or pop influences.
Small villages of parents can counter this modern insecurity by embracing rites of passages and apprenticeships. The importance of rites of passage and ritual cannot be understated here because this is how a young man learns that he is a grown man. It’s just that now the rites of passage are virtual and consumer oriented and they communicate nothing clear to him about what manhood actually is.
But rites of passage in your village should be formal, difficult and in order to make them real, the rites of passage must also be valued, discussed and participated in by the adult men. Men who serve as mentors and leaders along this path should be praised for this work, done outside the walls of their home.
The creation of deep male friendships within the village creates an opportunity for training, mentoring and apprenticeship. The young man who apprentices, learns from and makes discoveries with other men can achieve a healthy and mature independence. The presence of other trustworthy men who allow a boy some distance from his parents but who reinforce their values and principles is in the end, what most parents want from their village community anyway. And the young man who experiences this is a young man likely to be integrated, to feel like he’s done something good and worthwhile. That he too is a man now.
Villages also create opportunities for mastery. Teenagers in generations past had the ability to innovate from a young age, while their minds were not yet full of too much information. They may not have known the ins and outs of Trigonometry or Calculus, but they could still develop a legitimate genius because they had the chance to do and do some more. Doing was their life. Many famous inventors invented in their teens. We’ve
“come to inadvertently believe that skill and knowledge transfer are primarily the domain of school rather than a normal consequence of meaningful work. The purpose of education is to develop agency within a child. Purposeful work and achieving mastery are tools to getting there. They aren’t the results of learning and imagination, it’s the other way around—learning is simply the consequence of doing. To understand this is to understand the ecology that fosters genius and talent.”6
The Challenge
In the previous post I wrote about how modernity dissolves the coherence and rationality of religion. This doubles the need for parents to create a coherent world for their boys. Only then can they act with confidence as they grow.
They need to be taught how to lead and be strong. But they can’t do this without first being integrated into a village where their fathers and other men lead and are strong. No matter how talented the expert, no matter how smart the tutor, they can never replace the meaning the village carries.
This stuff is hard. But if we want to tackle the problem that we all see with young boys, if we want to save our sons, building community with other parents is unavoidably an essential part of the solution.
As a friend of mine wrote,
“If you see with ruthless clarity what needs to be done for you, your children, and grandchildren to thrive as free and flourishing adults or even just for your children and grandchildren to all exist, you can see that it will take all your ambition and reckless passion and cold will and authority and frolic and delight to succeed, and glory awaits.”7
Gordon Neufeld, Hold On To Your Kids, a good book about the dangers of peer attachment and the necessity of parental attachment for proper childhood development.
This impacts girls too but in different ways and that’s not the subject of this post.
School is Not Enough, Simon Sarris, Palladium Magazine, June 6, 2023
Michael Brenden Dougherty, Things I Couldn’t Conserve, National Review, October 11, 2023
Charles Eisenstein, On Creating Culture, September 26, 2023
School is Not Enough, Simon Sarris, Palladium Magazine, June 6, 2023
From the writer, G, Protect & Provide, Junior Ganymede Blog, June 21, 2023
In the koryos model, a village is exactly the opposite of what young men need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*K%C3%B3ryos
It's consistent with the 'rite of passage' model though. I just worry that as long as boys know their parents/elders are within reach the rite of passage can never be hard enough.