| What Fathers Need to Tell Boys More Often | | | | | | “I’ve Failed a Million Times.” | To a kid, it’s easy to think that Dad never does anything wrong. A young boy needs to know from an early age that his father has failed twice as many times in hundreds of different ventures.
“The ideal masculine type, and what boys who are raised with flesh-and-blood fathers get to observe is all of the human failings of the man,” says Dr. Michael C. Reichert, psychologist and author of How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men. “The way we lose our cool. The way we’re scared. The way we’re in love with our partners. All that human substance is demythologizing the role. Telling your son ‘You know, I’ve made a shitload of mistakes’ is primarily to demythologize and make masculinity itself more real and acceptable and not some ideal unachievable standard.” |
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| | | | “Was That Really Your Best Effort?” | In moments where you see your son half-assing something, it’s important to call him out to ensure he’s putting forth his best effort. Even more important is how you go about doing so.
“In my research, I’ve found what enabled a boy to do his very best work is a teacher who knows him and holds him to high standards. A man who basically says, ‘That’s not your best, go back and try again,’ and refuses to settle for less. Those are the teachers that boys respect the most. Those are what we call ‘transformative relationships’ because the boy is pulled by the weight of the relationship to accomplish more than he would on his own.” |
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| | | | “Hurt People Hurt People.” | | This is more than just a clever phrase found all over Pinterest. It’s a good lesson for boys to learn at a young age. Hurt people do harm — either with words or actions — because they have been hurt. This, per Reichert, is known as “traumatic reenactment.” A father needs to teach his son that when a person hurts him, it’s just to transfer the pain from being hurt themselves. Understanding why a person might do something hurtful doesn’t make up for the pain, but it does put it in perspective. |
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