Boys are not idiots. Boys are not goofballs. Boys are not practitioners of “toxic masculinity” by virtue of being boyish. Boys are made by God. Boys are filled with wonder. Boys do not fundamentally need drugs, gelding, or feminization. Boys need to be challenged, shepherded, and discipled in the name of Jesus Christ. As sinners, boys need God. As humans, boys need a father and mother.
Much that I just said is profoundly controversial. In our age, it is not just aberrant manhood that is considered “toxic,” it’s often boys in general. Their place in a feminized society is diminishing. Their role in a safety-obsessed, feelings-driven, risk-averse climate is shrinking. Boys are increasingly seen not as a blessing, but as a curse. Their inborn, God-given traits are considered “anti-social.” Ominously, boys do not seem to fit into the plans of our future society.
Though they need the outdoors, physical challenges, mental tests, and opportunities to be active and assertive and aggressive, many boys have few such outlets today. Instead, they often sit inside, living on screens, infantilized and unhelped. For these reasons, I was so glad to see a remarkable story pop up on social media recently. In the context of a needless Twitter food-fight decrying home-school kids as “yokels” who would never read Hamlet (long story, best ignored), a Christian mother named Julie posted a picture of her fourteen-year-old son standing on a shed. This is where the story gets good.
Why was young Nate standing on a shed? Because, according to Julie, he started reading Hamlet but found it tough sledding. Picking her battles, Julie opted (wisely) to change things up. (It is terrific—and needful—to read great books, but wise paideia requires both flexibility and stubbornness.) As his home-schooling instructor, she offered him a different challenge. Here’s how she described this shift on Twitter a few weeks back: “He picked a course on construction math, binge watched all the lessons, printed out 200 pages of instructions, then went out and built this.” The “this” in question is the shed as seen in the image at the beginning of this post. He built it by himself—in entirety.
This was no prohibitively expensive venture. The online course Nate did is this one—it’s all of $75. But what an investment this godly family made. Without paying even a hundred dollars, this young man just acquired skills he will have for the rest of his life. He also succeeded in making something tangible, a key element of maturing boyhood. I once worked on a garden path for my uncle Ramzi and aunt Susan back in Maine. It took me several sessions, and it was no Tolkienesque creation. But I felt a real sense of accomplishment in doing it. Boys need such opportunities.
I don’t personally know this boy or his family (though his father took a class I had the joy of teaching last year at The Master’s Seminary). But I know this: I love this story. There is such wisdom in it. There is such blessedly counter-cultural thinking. This godly mother, following her husband’s lead, did not relax things for her son. She did not abandon all expectations. She played this exactly right: she challenged him, but not in a way that broke him. She challenged him in a way that sparked his innate desire to master something, and thus drew out of him real ability and skill.
I recently reached out to Julie, the mother in question. I wanted to hear more from her about why she would have the instinct to encourage her son to do what he did. Here’s part of what she wrote to me. It’s marvelous stuff:
Here's an example from my husband's [Tom] classroom teaching experience. He reads a book called The Iceberg Hermit aloud to his students because it is sadly out of print. It tells the story of a teenage boy who thinks he's stupid because he does so poorly in school but when shipwrecked in the arctic (with only a pocket Bible his mother had made him promise to read everyday) he summons up skills he never knew he had in order to survive and eventually be rescued. One of the questions my husband asks his students is "what skills do you have that you would be able to use to survive if you were in this situation." Oftentimes, the students say "none."
…I realized early on that one of the things boys crave most is freedom. But even more than that they need the confidence to know that they have what it takes to be a man. Our current educational paradigm not only fails in giving them what it takes, it works against that by trapping them during their most productive years in a system that seeks to undermine the very nature of who God created them to be.
Tom sounds like a great teacher—just the kind that boys thrive under. He and Julie believe, as I do, that boys and girls should not be educated in all the same ways. This is a great word from Julie:
Christians who buy into the philosophy that education should look the same for both boys and girls are ignoring another set of Biblical standards entirely. An education that does not prepare a boy to fulfill the Genesis 2 mandates of being fruitful, multiplying, filling the earth, subduing it, having dominion over it, feeding oneself from it, working the garden, keeping it, obeying God's commands, and naming God's creatures has completely missed the mark. Likewise, an education that does not prepare a girl for the noble task of "helpmeet" in all these endeavors, is deficient to say the least.
Amen to all of this—every word. (Here’s Julie’s blog, by the way.)
When I chanced across this anecdote on social media, it jumped up and bit me. I immediately knew I was seeing something unusual, something that once was known but now is forgotten in many corners of our modern world. I shared word on my Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Following these and a number of other accounts, a bunch of folks reacted strongly to the story.
Want proof? Just this past week, another mother (@emily_burleson) shared a shot on Instagram of a beautiful table made by her son. Turns out that she saw Julie’s post (see gmk.julie on IG), followed Julie’s advice to have her son watch the “construction math” videos on the aforementioned website, and turned him loose. In short order, he learned the necessary math, got the materials, and built a table that now sits in the family’s home. But don’t take my word for it: here’s the table itself, shared by Julie on Instagram.
As with the shed, I have to say: I love this. What a beautiful table. This kind of skill, by the way, is not merely nice for the development of a young man. Young men with these type of skill-sets can make good and even very good money for themselves. This is especially true in our virtual age, where few men have the basic physical abilities that many men used to possess. For those of us who love the free market, developing such skills is not only formative—in our day, it’s what you call a shrewd business move.
It might be a little early to name this phenomenon, but here’s a shot: this is #BoyBuilding. Boys—or young men—are getting a desperately-needed opportunity to get their hands dirty and build something. They’re getting a chance to push themselves, to make something tangible, to tackle a big project. In doing so, they’re succeeding. They’re proving themselves. They’re developing valuable (and even lucrative) abilities.
Reading these reports, you can almost hear David to Solomon: “Be strong, and show yourself a man…” (1 Kings 2:2). You get a little echo in the above stories of the old ways, of the path that used to guide boys to manhood, a path that involved difficulty and struggle and hard-won glory. Sadly, this path is overgrown in our time. Many American boys never make anything. Their exploits, if they have them, are on computers. They sit inside all day; they are rarely around men; if they act in boyish ways, they are often penalized and punished.
Let’s be clear: not every young man should be a wood-worker. I certainly am not. I do make my living, to some degree, off a computer, and I’m glad for it. The virtual world offers us all many benefits (you’re reading these virtual pixels, after all). But we cannot miss the import of #BoyBuilding. For my part, I am so thankful that I had years, growing up in Maine, of working outside. Starting when I was twelve, my father sent me out of the house. I mowed lawns, bused tables (inside), and raked blueberries. I earned some money in the process (another key part of raising boys to be men). Again, I never showed any great aptitude for craftsmanship. But all this labor shaped me. I am grateful for it now.
It is common in our time to get shot at the minute you start defining manhood and womanhood. In fact, in my limited experience, these twin themes are the most controversial topics there are. But Christians cannot help but define manhood and womanhood (here’s one book that can help). Nor can we stay there. We have the call of God to put our doctrine into practice. We must direct our sons and daughters to embrace godly manhood and womanhood.
This can only happen as God gives us sinners faith in the atoning and resurrected king, Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, leaning on God all the way, this is our calling. It is a joyful, exhilarating, never-boring calling, and boys take a lot of work, a lot of patience, a lot of repentance when frustration strikes—but can yield a lot of blessing when God moves and they grow up into sound and strong men.
Boys are not all the same. Nor does every Christian family home-school, good as such an endeavor can be. But here’s a challenge to fathers and mothers in 2022: in love, much prayer, and with wisdom given from the Lord, push your son. Encourage him to take risks. Help him tackle and navigate challenges. Direct him to develop real skills. His vocation may well involve a computer and high-level technology—if so, great. But whatever the case, give your son the gift of real-world challenge-taking and problem-solving. Let him be assertive. Let him build something physical.
He needs this. He must, after all, grow from boyhood to manhood. One way he does this is by successfully taking dominion of something. He’ll need shepherding as he does so, shepherding filled with the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). But he can do more than you might think. In the end, you see, #BoyBuilding isn’t really about the shed or the table. It’s about the boy—or, more accurately, the man the boy becomes.
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A few books to give some wisdom here:
Douglas Wilson, Future Men
Mark Chanski, Manly Dominion
Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys (secular, but with some insights)
Voddie Baucham, What He Must Be
Strachan & Peacock, The Grand Design
Strachan, Reenchanting Humanity (see Chapter 4)
Donn Fendler, Lost on a Mountain in Maine