Let Boys Be Men – Father’s Day 2023

“We need to teach our sons that a woman is not the same as a man and that they are to be honored and respected because of that – not dishonored by expecting them to fulfill their role and ours too.”

[Note: I wrote this article originally in 2015; and has been updated and reprinted a number of times. It has been, and remains, one of the most critical issues in our culture. MG]

Many decades ago, I first saw the reports and subsequent studies in National Geographic concerning rampaging juvenile male elephants tearing through unfortunate villages, crushing huts, destroying crops, and intimidating a bunch of terrified villagers.

The researchers finally realized that the juvenile male elephants lived in a herd where the mature, dominant bulls had either been poached or removed from the herd.

It seems the juveniles didn’t know how to act when it was mating season, and their testosterone levels went into overdrive. They needed the mature bull elephants around to show them how to act and control their behavior with severe “trunk trouncing” when required.

In more recent years, similar observations have been recorded. In South Africa, park rangers moved a herd of elephants from the overpopulated Kruger National Park and resettled them in the Pilanesburg National Park. However, the large mature bulls were left behind due to transportation issues.

Sometime later, park rangers in Pilanesburg started discovering dead white rhinoceros (an endangered species) that had been violently killed, suffering torso trauma and deep puncture wounds. Suspecting poachers, even though the Rhino horns were not taken, hidden cameras were installed, and soon enough, the bad guys showed up and were caught red-handed.

They weren’t poachers at all, but a marauding gang of aggressive juvenile male elephants that were chasing down rhinos (as well as other animals) and goring and stomping them to death – behavior that is not known in elephants.

When the rangers identified the juveniles as part of the Kruger herd, they decided to import some mature bulls from “home” as an experiment. Within weeks the bad-boy juvenile delinquents dispersed and stopped “acting out,” and the other animals in the park could breathe easier.

Like our highly intelligent and social friends, the elephants, this phenomenon is readily observable in the human family as well. The artificial manipulation and purposeful destruction of the nuclear family living in the modern era are having profound repercussions in the United States and around the world.

It’s not a new discovery, of course, that the family unit is a critical and essential link in the lives and well-being of children – male and female. It’s been obvious common sense for thousands of years. It has been questioned only in the modern era by the learned class of academics, sociologists, and other highbrows.

Humans are hardwired to live in a community with a family unit. The roles of nurture, discipline, education, and character are like the glue that assembles a person (or an elephant), passed down in the family structure, and done so, at least in part by the varied and unique roles that females and males play in rearing offspring.

In the U.S., we now have a culture where ancient wisdom compiled and handed down over thousands of years is treated as though it were poison, not the timeless reality and reflection of the human condition. We have legions of “professionals” to whom we have turned over the official duty of explaining how children “should” be raised – and we’ve gone even further as a culture to enshrine an awful lot of stupidity into our educational systems and family law. [We hear the radical deconstructionists prattling inanely on about abolishing “the patriarchy and the hierarchy ” in society, yet both seem to be the natural order of things throughout nature.]

The family is now seen – virulently by some and in part by others – as a structure that is actually detrimental to raising children, and it needs, some critics argue, at a minimum, to enforce “scientific” methodology as practice or even disbanded altogether. (Whether cause or effect, births to unmarried women have been over 40% of all births for the last twelve years.)

Yet the social issues in our society – especially with young males – stand in absolute rebuttal to all of this. Males are in trouble in our culture, homes, and distressingly broken schools.

Certainly, there are successful female-headed homes that are doing a great job rearing both boys and girls, even if it’s a much harder job without two parents. They deserve our support and praise.

However, the staggering statistics speak for themselves; 35% of the male children in the U.S. live in single-parent, female-headed families. Of that number, over 35%  rarely or never see their father, and 25% see their father less than once a month. The statistics for how young males in fatherless families “act out” are much worse, generally, compared to boys from homes with fathers:

They are twenty times more likely to end up in prison; five times more likely to commit suicide (males represent 75% of all youth suicides); twenty times more likely to have behavioral disorders; fourteen times more likely to commit rape; nine times more likely to drop out of high school; ten times more likely to use drugs.

Becoming a “man” seemed pretty cut and dried when I was growing up, and one suspects those expectations probably hadn’t changed all that much over the nation’s history.

But now? Well, let’s just say it’s a bit confusing.

Many argue that the assault on “manhood” began with the Great Society programs of the 1960s; others that the rise of radical and aggressive feminism played a larger role; still others suggest that changing manhood is simply a response to the changing economy. Perhaps all are true in part.

Personally, I think the elephants are more instructive.

Without involved dads or other dominant males around the family structure, young males don’t have a model to follow in terms of controlling their escalating emotions or a model that interdicts bad behavior with a swift kick in the pants. It’s not too complicated.

We need a new national “attitude,” a movement among men, led by men and insisted upon by men. A campaign that bubbles up from the grassroots of the nation and does our boys, our communities, and our country a favor – purposefully teaching our boys to be men.

We must show boys that doing for oneself at some level, and for one’s family and neighbor is essential. It’s God’s answer to self-centeredness. We need to show our boys, by example, that loving our neighbor makes both our neighbor and ourselves better.

For starters, we need to teach our sons and boys how to clean up yards, pull weeds, paint and chop firewood; swing a hammer and drive a nail; use a saw, a drill, and a tape measure;  turn a wrench and fix things.

We need to teach our boys that peace isn’t the absence of violence and that character is built one right decision at a time, usually when it isn’t convenient. We need to show them that brains outweigh emotions. We need to teach them nothing is more important than God, family, and country – and show them by example in our own lives.

We need to teach them how to fish and how to use a firearm and clean it; so that they would come to value and respect life, every life.

We need to teach our sons that a woman is not the same as a man and that they are to be honored and respected because of that – not dishonored by expecting them to fulfill their role and ours too.

Will raising boys to be men cut into their, and our, computer, TV, and gaming time? Sure, that’s the whole point.