“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

—Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

In my last article, I wrote about the importance of helping your son develop a life plan. That life plan, I explained, ought to answer three fundamental questions:

1. What is the purpose of my life?

2. How will I attain my purpose?

3. What do I hope to leave behind?

Raising these questions—and helping your son begin to answer them—is a good start toward charting a course for his life. Doing so will encourage him to live with greater intentionality. Rather than meandering through life, he will actually be able to journey through it.

In this article, I want to consider a common pitfall that can arise as your son begins to live more intentionally: what I call the perfect life fallacy.

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The Problem with Seeking the Perfect Life

We are at a cultural point where we believe we can control everything in our lives. This is likely not the first time in history we’ve found ourselves here, but I think it’s more pronounced now. Given technological advancements, we tend to believe we can control every aspect of our lives—or, at least, that we will eventually be able to. The idea that nature is to be controlled, subdued, mastered—beaten into submission, even, to borrow Francis Bacon’s language—has worked its way into how many of us see the world, though we would likely never put it in terms so blunt as Bacon did.

What’s more, given certain philosophical shifts, we’ve come to believe that this kind of control is a right we have by nature. We think that when something undesirable happens to us—something that we did not, nor would choose—we are a victim, wronged either by someone else, by circumstance, or even by a god we don’t know. On a cosmic level, we are like spoiled children.

Given this cultural milieu, the temptation for someone seeking to live with greater intentionality is to believe he can somehow craft the perfect life—to hold up as an ideal a life in which he controls every aspect, or at least the ones that count for something. The inner monologue sounds something like this: My life is under my control. I control my day. I have my schedule, my plans, my idea of what ought to happen.

Truth be told, we can govern many aspects of our lives. As parents, you ought to help your son develop a sense of agency over his choices. He should be thoughtful and intentional about his day. He should have dreams and aspirations, and plans for attaining them.

The problem arises when this pursuit of control is taken to excess—virtue, as Aristotle tells us, lies in the mean. This sense of control inevitably leads to disappointment, because, in fact, we control very little of our lives. For sure, we can control our mindset, our approach, our actions and reactions. But we do not control outcomes, nor the thousands of circumstances that make up our lives and shape the choices available to us. If our implicit, primary goal is control, we will be grasping for an unrealizable ideal—and will be forever frustrated trying to fit such a round peg into a square whole.

More importantly, seeking a “perfect life” quickly devolves into selfishness. We have all met someone who was unwilling to help another because doing so would mess with his plans, his idea for how his day or week was planned to go. His life plan will turn selfish too, if he bases decisions on what he thinks his perfect life ought to be—rather than on what will help others, or society, or God.

The perfect life fallacy flows from two false views of this life.

First, it typically goes along with a view—often unspoken and unacknowledged—that this life is an independent unit. This can even creep into the mindset of a believing Christian. We forget that this life is but a passing journey, a step on the way to eternity. Instead of trying to live in a way that prepares us for heaven, we try to make heaven on earth.

Second, it goes along with the idea that our life is our own. How often we think of ourselves as the masters of our lives, owners with full power of determination. We forget that even our lives are gifts from another. We did not make ourselves; we are stewards of a gift.

Beyond these two errors, the search for a perfect life often masks pride. We take ourselves too seriously, secretly believing we could make straight As on the report card of life. Of course, saying the thought out loud is enough to reveal its absurdity. Nevertheless, it is quite normal to find such a notion lurking in the background of our thoughts and feelings.

A Good Life

The perfect life fallacy is easy to fall into precisely because it is close to the truth. We want to live intentionally and meaningfully—though those terms are overused today. We want to live well and achieve our goals, especially when they’re good and noble ones.

What we should aim for, however, is not the perfect life but a good life—full of mistakes, challenges, setbacks, joys, moments of peace, contradictions, beginning again (and then beginning again once more), and all the rest.

How can you help your son aim for living a good life without falling into the perfect life fallacy?

The first step is to realize that life on earth is inseparably linked to life after death. In fact, we cannot really understand this life without reference to the next one; the proportions are wrong. C. S. Lewis put it well in Letter 28 of The Screwtape Letters: “It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life.” Life on earth is a stage, a phase toward eternal life—an infinitesimally small part of an existence that will persist for eternity.

Any life plan, therefore, has to keep eternal life in view if it’s to be well conceived. Sacrifices, goods, sufferings, joys—all should appear in light of eternity. As St. Josemaría put it, “There is a remedy for those anxieties of yours. Be patient, have rectitude of intention, and look at things from a supernatural perspective.”

The second step is to remind yourself often: my life is not my own. It has been given to me.

Every gift ought to be handled according to the intention of the giver; it would be rude to do otherwise. In the case of a living gift, it also ought to be cared for according to that creature’s needs. A gift of a dog differs from a gift of furniture: the furniture I should use according to the giver’s wishes; the dog, according to those wishes and the dog’s own well-being. I should use my life, then, according to the wishes of its donor, God, and in accordance with human nature—which is itself also a gift from God.

The ultimate question, then, is this: What does the giver of my life have in mind, and how do I live according to his wishes? I won’t answer those questions here—each reader has to work them out for himself. But answer them he must, if he hopes to avoid the perfect life fallacy. Once he has answered them, he’ll be able to live intentionally; and if the intention behind his life is good and true to his nature, he’ll find satisfaction and meaning in pursuing it.

Your Dreams Will Fall Short

There is no perfect life in the sense of a finished one—life is a process until the moment of death—nor in the sense of a faultless one; even the best lives are marked by occasional mistakes. To live well is not to live perfectly, but to live with the understanding that life is a process. The point is not to be errorless but to persevere.

As you help your son develop a life plan, encourage him to dream. But remind him, too, that his dreams will fall short of reality. Life will be better than he could have planned it—because he is not the protagonist of his own story. God is.

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“I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. . . . I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught.”

–John Henry Newman

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the well-respected supreme court justice who served nearly thirty years in the first decades of the twentieth century, though a sharp legal intellect, was famously absent-minded. As the story goes, Holmes was riding a train one day when the conductor came through to check tickets, and the justice realized he’d misplaced his own.

As the conductor made his way down the aisle, Holmes searched his pockets frantically, then his briefcase—without success. By the time the conductor reached his seat, Holmes still hadn’t found it.

Seeing the man’s frustration and recognizing him as the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the conductor reassured him with a smile: “Justice Holmes, don’t worry. I know who you are. Everyone in this train knows who you are. You do not need to show me your ticket.”

“No, sir, you don’t understand; that’s not the problem,” replied Justice Holmes. “The issue is that without my ticket, I don’t know where I’m going.”

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Drifting Between Dreaming and Dabbling

Many young people today find themselves in a position analogous to Justice Holmes’s—except their problem is worse, because the destination they lack isn’t a stop along a train line, but the very point of their life itself.

The research of William Damon, a Stanford psychologist and author of The Path to Purpose, sorted 12- to 26-year-old Americans into four groups based on their sense of purpose: the disengaged, the dreamers, the dabblers, and the purposeful. Only about one-fifth qualified as purposeful—having found something meaningful to commit to and sustained that commitment over time. Roughly a quarter fell into the disengaged category: no real interest, no consistent action, and not even actively searching for a direction. The remaining majority drifted between dreaming—holding vague, shifting ideas about a future without acting on them—and dabbling in one interest after another without settling on any.

Data from the CIRP College Freshman Survey—also known as “The American Freshman”—has tracked students’ changing priorities for decades, and points in a similar direction. Since the late 1960s, college freshmen have steadily ranked developing a meaningful philosophy of life as less important, falling from over 80% to roughly half today, while ranking being financially well-off as more important, rising from under 45% to above 80%. Perhaps many young people aren’t finding meaning in their lives in part because fewer of them are treating the search for it as a priority.

What Does Meaning Mean?

You can’t help your child find meaning in life unless you yourself have a good sense of what meaning even means in the first place.

Researchers like Frank Martela and Michael Steger, whose work has been popularized by Arthur Brooks, define meaning as the combination of three factors: coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is the ability to gather the parts of one’s life into a sensible whole; without it, the events of your life feel random, disconnected. Purpose is the direction of one’s life, the goal toward which your efforts aim. And significance is the sense that your life matters—that it actually makes a difference.

I find this framework helpful. Though I didn’t have it in mind at the time, it fits well with a talk I gave years ago on the moral imagination, in which I used the metaphor of a book—could be a movie or a play as well—to describe life. If your life is a story, then it has coherence—a narrative arc that draws together its various scenes. It has a purpose: the protagonist has some goal to accomplish. And it has significance: it matters whether you, the protagonist, accomplishes the mission that has been given to you.

Developing a Life Plan

Practically speaking, you can make these ideas concrete for a high school student by helping him develop a “Life Plan.” The plan will likely change as he matures and the particulars come into focus, but drafting a first version is a valuable step toward getting him to think reflectively about his life as a story of consequence.

There are three steps to formulating a life plan.

The first requirement of any plan is knowing the end goal. Life is a series of journeys, and unlike Justice Holmes, you shouldn’t set out on one without a sense of the destination—to do so is meandering, not journeying. What is the goal of your life? What do you believe happens after you die? You cannot arrive without a destination.

And once you have a destination in mind, it matters that you aim for it from the very beginning. The moon is hard to miss, given its size, yet all it takes for a rocket to miss by thousands of miles is to be off by a few inches at launch.

The second step is asking: How am I going to get there? This is a hard question for a high schooler to answer. A better way to frame it might be: Who will be on my team? Friends, mentors, spiritual directors—a kind of board of directors for your life. No one arrives at a worthwhile destination alone; the people you choose to walk with you shape whether and how you get there.

The third step relates to significance. Ask yourself: What do you want to leave behind? We tend to think of plans in terms of action—what we’re going to do in life. That matters, but it matters more to first decide what you want to leave behind, because that’s what motivates and guides your actions in the long-run.

What Parents and Educators Can Do

There is no hack for teaching something as important and as big as the meaning of life. The only way to teach this kind of subject is through modeling—in word, in action, and in disposition. It happens through many small comments made over time, responses to events as they occur, a steady disposition that only reveals itself gradually.

So what does that look like in practice for a parent or an educator?

First, clarify for yourself what you believe the purpose of life actually is. As a Christian, this is simple in outline, if not in practice: to go to heaven—or, more specifically, to learn to love on earth so as to love God forever in heaven. You must have a destination in mind before you can help someone else find theirs.

Clarifying that purpose requires time for reflection and self-examination—dedicated moments of quiet that create space to honestly consider your own motivations. Why do you do what you do? Why do you work? Why do you relate to people the way you do? What do you want to be remembered for? What do you believe happens to you after death? These are the questions that help you identify what you actually believe the purpose of your life to be—because you can’t convincingly hand a boy something you haven’t first worked out yourself.

Second, you have to believe it deeply. Boys are experts at detecting insincerity—especially when what’s being conveyed is a deep truth.

Third, the actual teaching happens in two registers: active and passive.

Active teaching consists of talking to your son or student directly about the things that matter most—religion, family, work, virtue. This does not need to involve long, planned lectures. A short, unplanned comment about the importance of faith, or heaven, or God, often lands with more force than any formal talk would. As Seneca put it, “The greatest benefit is to be derived from conversation, because it creeps by degrees into the soul. Lectures prepared beforehand and spouted in the presence of a throng have in them more noise but less intimacy. Philosophy is good advice; and no one can give advice at the top of his lungs” (Moral Letters to Lucilius, no. 38).

Passive teaching is what a boy absorbs simply from watching how you react to events, since that reveals what you actually value, regardless of what you say. What are you visibly disappointed by? What makes you angry? What excites you? What do you seem to value most? How do you respond to the death of someone you loved?

Passive teaching also involves modeling: how you practice your faith, how you treat other people, how you approach your own work—the ongoing demonstration of what you actually believe is important in life. Modeling includes both what you do and the manner in which you do it. As St. Teresa of Calcutta put it, “The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.”

Discovering Your Life

Finally, though I’ve spoken about developing a life plan, I should clarify: we don’t create it on our own. We discover it in dialogue with others—and with God, who is the Author of our story.

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For more articles, videos, and podcasts on topics like this one, visit The Heights Forum.

When I first started out in education some forty years ago, I rarely, if ever, heard the young men in my classes say they were stressed. Perhaps they were—though they did not seem to be.

Today, it would be surprising for a teacher to go a day without hearing at least one student at his school say they are stressed about something. This makes sense, given the fact that according to the CDC one in three U.S. high school students report their mental health being “not good” most of the time or always in the past thirty days. What is more, the stressed out high school student is only a minor league version of the zombie-like university students that William Deresiewicz described in a 2014 article sub-titled, “The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.”

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Two Causes of Adolescent Anxiety

There are certainly many causes of such adolescent anxiety. The academic-professional rat-race and the athletic industrial complex are two which are particularly relevant to educators.

As they enter late middle school and high school, many students feel they have started down an inevitable and always moving runway, the end of which is success, most often meaning professional success measured in monetary terms. They feel, moreover, that if they make a mistake on this runway, they may fall off—never to get up again.

A similar fear plagues athletics, which have become fiercely competitive. Many children are unable to simply play a sport for the sake of enjoyment. Youth sports, rather, have become unhealthily professionalized—only those making the money are not the athletes themselves, but the coaches and sports clubs who convince them that they have a real chance to make it big.

Whether academically or athletically, far too often the prospect of not being successful terrifies students even more than any particular vision of a good life motivates them.

In fact, the fundamental problem is often that young students have not thought much about what makes for a truly good life. Instead they have a few vague ideas in the back of their minds as to what it consists of, driven mainly by what the current culture and their own passions present them.

Beyond College Prep and Pre-Professional Training

If parents and educators want to help students, then, an important part of the solution will require them to recast high school not as college prep, or training in professional skills, but as life prep—a life which may likely include college and will certainly include work in one form or another. Part of a high school student’s education, in other words, ought to be learning how the parts of his life cohere into a whole, discovering what the point of his life is. Greater clarity in one’s vision of a good life orients his decisions and, when stressful moments come, allow him to step back and see the difficulty in light of the bigger picture.

Approaching high school in this way is also good in itself, regardless of the current statistics on student stress. It is equally important for the boy who is not stressed about the future because he has not thought much about it as it is for the student who is stressed about it because he feels uncertain about the outcome.

The idea of seeing high school as life prep originated in a seminar for young men entering high school, which I used to lead back in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Run through a supplementary education center that focused on character formation of boys, the seminar aimed to help freshman boys reframe their high school years—to broaden the scope of what their aim ought to be for the next four years. And, of course, to help them translate this broader vision into practical strategies for how to make the most of high school.

The idea for the seminar came from an old mentor of mine, James B. Stenson. Jim put together the curriculum for the weekly seminar, which I led for several years.

My first goal in the seminar was to get the young men to think beyond the immediate concerns of high school—classes, extracurriculars, social life, and so on—and even to think beyond the immediate next step of college. To do this, I would present the boys with a hypothetical timeline of how their life could go starting freshman year until death. Here is how the timeline would look if I were giving the seminar to high school freshmen this fall:

• 2030: graduation from high school

• 2034: graduation from college

• 2034-35: first full-time, post-graduation job—official start of professional life

• 2038: graduation with some type of advanced degree

• 2040: marriage (28 years of age is not too young!)

• 2041: first child

• 2055: oldest child enters high school

• 2070: first grandchild

• 2098: death

The years reflect statistical probabilities—not a source of quibbling. The point is not that every boy ought to go straight from high school to college, nor is it to argue that he should get married by twenty-eight—or whether he ought to be younger or older. This was simply the statistical reality of the young men in the seminar, even if some would not go to college but join the military or study a trade or become a young successful entrepreneur.

The exercise, rather, was meant to lay before the eyes of the entering high school freshman what his life might look like for the purposes of then discussing with him how he should approach high school so that he may more likely be personally and professionally successful.

Encouraging boys to do an exercise of this sort as freshmen in high school is particularly important. During these years, boys are developing the sense of who they are—what their persona is. And unless he is helped to think beyond immediate concerns, unless the horizon of his reflections is expanded, many boys are likely to limit their thinking to particular and relatively short term goals—and to tie their sense of self to these goods. The boy who sees himself as the athlete, for instance, may focus his energies on athletic goals; perhaps he sees his ultimate aim in life as getting a D1 scholarship. The academic may do a similar thing with grades, seeing entrance to a prestigious college as the end goal.

These are good goals, and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. The challenge is being able to see these goods in light of the bigger picture of one’s life. What boys need help with often is this: learning how to properly order these parts, integrating them into the whole of a life.

The Most Difficult Problem in the World

Over the next few articles, I will present more key ideas from that seminar, originally designed for students, now with parents and educators in mind. The purpose of the articles will be to help you help your family and school to approach high school as life prep. We will cover topics such as: how to help your son discover the point of his life, how to teach boys financial management, physical education for boys—and more.

My hope with this series is to equip you with some ideas for how you can help your sons and students solve what Cicero called the most difficult problem in the world. As he put it, “We must decide who and what manner of men we wish to be and what calling in life we would follow; and this is the most difficult problem in the world. For it is in the years of early youth, when our judgment is most immature, that each of us decides that his calling in life shall be that to which he has taken a special liking” (De Officiis, 1.117). Whether they realize it or not, high school students are constantly making life decisions, and they are doing this when they are least prepared to make them.

Those who are most prepared to make such decisions are those for whom it is too late to do so for themselves—that’s you. Of course, you can’t make the decision for him. The one thing a coach cannot do is play the game. But we can be mentors and guides, sharing our own wisdom—even the wisdom won by learning from our unwise decisions.

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Summer differs from the academic year in two important ways: the amount of free time at a boy’s disposal and the baseline mental disposition he’s likely to bring to it—one of enjoyment, rather than hard work. Approached in the right way, these characteristics can actually work for the good of a boy’s growth.

But failing to plan the summer well is more than a missed opportunity for growth. It risks backsliding. There is no such thing as moral stagnation; there is only growth or degeneration.

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As a parent, you need to look for ways to help your son grow. I’d suggest setting goals across a few categories: physical, intellectual, moral, and spiritual.

Before getting into what kind of goals to set, two caveats are in order.

First, summers are great for family time. Time together should be prioritized. In our fast-paced, technologically-minded world, we have a tendency to think that personal growth works the way that building a machine does. In some ways, this is true. It helps to be deliberate and thoughtful about your son’s moral development. But formation is fundamentally relational, and it is important to create a family culture in which the boy desires to spend time with his parents and siblings.

As much as possible, parents should enjoy time with their children over the summer: more relaxed meals, pool time, watching movies and sports—the World Cup, say—playing board games. When boys do have activities outside the house, those activities should be purposeful and formative—not simply expensive babysitters.

Second, summer is the season for boys to be allowed to be boys. Schools often do not permit much freedom or healthy risk. Summer gives boys a natural chance to be themselves. Don’t fear downtime, or boredom, or roaming the neighborhood, or catching frogs—the things boys have done for generations. Having a job and staying busy is good too, of course. But our culture tends to fear downtime excessively, depriving boys of the chance to simply be themselves. Plus, as my friend Arthur Brooks explains, embracing boredom is a key ingredient to developing that contemplative disposition necessary to discovering the meaning of one’s life.

A Few Suggestions for Goals

When it comes to helping your sons develop a game plan for the summer, here are few tips:

1. If your son is already in high school, let him come up with his own goals, with your guidance. He’ll own them—and so pursue them with more enthusiasm—and he’ll begin developing the habit of setting goals for himself.

2. Limit him to one goal per category below. He may not need a goal in every category.

3. Goals should be specific, measurable, and doable.

Physical: The purpose of physical goals is three-fold: develop habits that contribute to long-term bodily health, grow in the strength and toughness necessary to being a protector, and learn sports that can become enjoyable, life-long hobbies—ideally played with friends. This means he should be doing some form of exercise every day that develops his overall strength and conditioning. It is okay to be an expert in a single sport, but his expertise should not lead to imbalance; this is a recipe for injury. He should play sports for fun. He should consider what he eats and when. At times, he should even choose to forgo a snack or delay a drink of water. And he should set times for going to bed and getting up.

Intellectual: Summer school work is good and necessary, as is SAT prep and college essays. Even more important is developing a habit of reading, enjoying a good book. The best reading plan, however, is seeing mom and dad read.

Moral: Self-discipline is especially good ground for boys. The best battlegrounds are material order, personal hygiene, and punctuality. Also consider goals around family relationships: attentiveness and care for younger siblings. Service projects can be good. But they are good mainly if they help the boy return home with a disposition of service in ordinary family life—chores, playing with a younger sibling even if he does not feel like it, etc.

Spiritual: The question to ask yourself as a parent is: What does my son need to do in order to own his faith more fully? Morning or evening prayers? Praying the rosary on his own? Getting to daily Mass during the week?

Finally, accountability: a boy should feel accountable to someone for the goals he sets. Goals work best when someone—most likely a parent—“reports” with him, helps him stay on track and adjust course along the way.

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For more parenting resources on making the most of the summer months, check out this article from The Heights Forum.

To a certain extent, this anxiety is understandable. We only worry over what we care about, and there are few things parents care about more than their children. Nevertheless, the degree to which parents are anxious today is neither necessary nor productive.

A psychiatrist might offer a more technical analysis, but my observation is that parental anxiety has three common roots—and understanding them goes a long way toward relief. The first is a misunderstanding of a parent’s role. The second is unreasonable expectations of what good parenting entails. The third is a distorted weighing of the dangers and opportunities that confront our children.

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A Parent’s Role

Many parents feel responsible not simply for guiding their children but for guaranteeing outcomes. If a son struggles academically, morally, socially, or spiritually, parents often interpret that struggle as evidence of their own failure.

This misunderstanding creates enormous anxiety because outcomes can never be guaranteed. Your children are free human beings. You can control what you do and how you respond. You can provide structure, encouragement, affection, and your own example. But you cannot take over the will of your child.

The deeper problem is not merely that we cannot control our children—it’s that we often wish we could. If there were some parental version of Minority Report, a way to see every future mistake and intervene before it occurred, many parents would gladly accept it. They would love to stop every bad friendship, every dishonest choice, every moral failure before it happened. That desire to take the wheel is itself a source of anxiety.

Parents should love their children as God loves us, which means loving their children’s freedom, even knowing that freedom will entail mistakes and messiness. God created Adam and Eve with freedom, knowing well that they would abuse it. He “takes this risk,” as C. S. Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters, “because He has a curious fantasy of making [us] His ‘free’ lovers.”

Unreasonable Expectations

A second major cause of parental anxiety is an unreasonable expectation of perfection.

No one would say this out loud—because doing so would immediately reveal its absurdity—but many parents carry a tacit assumption that they should be capable of always saying the right thing, always making the right decision, always intervening at exactly the right moment. This, of course, is impossible. You bring into parenting the same limitations and defects you had before your children arrived. Expecting to make many mistakes is not pessimism but realism; it is the only reasonable stance and, paradoxically, it is a source of peace.

The same principle applies to our expectations of children. Boys are works in progress. Their wills are not yet strong enough, and their prefrontal cortexes not yet developed enough, to consistently master their passions. Our judgments of them should reflect this reality. Expecting complete consistency, discipline, prudence, or self-mastery from adolescents is unrealistic.

Growth is a game of inches and is rarely linear. Celebrate small wins. Don’t dwell on setbacks, which are often temporary anyway.

It’s also worth remembering that the target is constantly moving. What works in one stage will not necessarily work in another. A seventh-grader may enthusiastically clean the cafeteria floor in exchange for a free lunch. An eighth-grader may suddenly decide that such an arrangement makes no sense because he can get lunch either way. The same tactics do not work in different stages. Parents often interpret these shifts as failures when, in reality, they are normal developments in growth and temperament.

Perception of Risk and The Anxiety Formula

One useful way to think about anxiety is this: anxiety equals the perception of danger divided by the perception of opportunity. When perceived danger rises and perceived opportunity shrinks, anxiety spikes. If you focus entirely on the numerator—magnifying every potential risk while minimizing every potential opportunity—your anxiety will go through the roof.

The antidote is realism. Yes, there are dangers. A boy may struggle academically, make poor moral choices, drift spiritually, or waste opportunities. These are real risks. But they are, at most, half of the picture. If you want to be truly realistic, you need to spend as much energy—if not more—imagining how beautifully things might unfold. History is full of people who struggled while young but flourished as adults.

Persevere

Because children take time to grow—and because parents take time to figure out how to help them grow—perseverance may be the most important virtue in parenting. Good parenting is not the elimination of mistakes. It is fidelity over time. And peace comes from realizing that there is still time.

As parents, you have to be coaches of second-half players. Your sons will make mistakes. They will end up in situations you wish they hadn’t. When that happens, there are two ways to respond. One is anger and frustration. But the other response is the optimism of knowing that the mistake is done—it cannot be changed—and that now is the moment for opportunity. Discipline is necessary, but the best discipline teaches your son to respond well to his mistakes. The question is: What is the best way for my son to get out of this mess? Where is the victory? Where is the opportunity?

There is a beautiful passage from Leif Enger’s debut novel, Peace Like a River, that captures parental fidelity especially well. The story centers on a good, saintly father. After one particularly painful episode, one of the boys asks his dad, “What are we going to do?” The father’s answer is a single word: persevere.

That’s it. What do you do when things go wrong? Persevere. Persevere in prayer. Persevere in love. Persevere in hope. Persevere in being there.

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This article continues where we left off, looking at the final three types of presence, as well as the stages of parental presence.

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Intellectual Presence

Beyond physical presence, intellectual presence equally matters. Your children ought to be present in your mind, and you ought to be present in theirs.

Though your child will one day leave the home, they should never leave your thoughts. Practically speaking, this means setting aside time to think purposefully about your children. Without such intentional time, the default mode may be to think reactively about them, which creates imbalance by focusing mostly on what has gone wrong.

Time for deliberate thought could happen in a variety of settings. Perhaps it’s during the commute home, or maybe it’s on a walk around the neighborhood.

Ask yourself:

1. What in the last week am I grateful for about my children? (Be specific.)

2. What are my children going through?

3. Are they emotionally up or down?

4. What is coming up soon in their lives?

5. What do they need?

6. How can I pray for them?

Your conversations with your spouse about the children are also very important. Your spouse may see things that you are blind to, just as you will have insights and approaches that your spouse may not have considered.

Another form of intellectual presence is being present in your child’s mind so that when he interprets things that are happening in the world around him, he does so with you in mind.

Counterintuitively, for this to happen, you need to learn to listen. Children love to be listened to, even if they do not speak much. They want to know they can speak without being harshly judged. In this way, they develop the habit of processing reality with you.

You should be ready for such conversation to occur at inconvenient moments. Your child may muster the courage to open a conversation late at night when you are exhausted after a long day and eager to rest before an early morning. If in such a moment you say, “Not now,” later may never come in the same way. Holding your teenage child’s late-night emotional conversation at sixteen years of age is just as important as holding your crying newborn in the wee hours of the morning at sixteen weeks of life.

You should also learn how to draw your child out. Learn the environment where they open up. For one child it may be a drive. For another, ice cream. For another, a hike.

Also ask yourself what your listening to advice-giving ratio is. Too often we move immediately to fixing. Sometimes children stop sharing because every conversation becomes a correction or a lecture.

Moral Presence

Moral presence begins with your example. The way you love your spouse teaches your children how relationships should be honored. Your relationship with truth teaches them how truth should be pursued. Your discipline, virtue, courage, honesty, and responsibility all become lessons. How you live now is how they will live later.

Correction is also necessary, but it must always be done with warmth. Correct with a smile. Correct with affection. The child should know that the engine behind correction is love, the vehicle of correction is charity, and the outcome of correction is hope. You correct because your children are called to become better men and women—even better than you are now.

Spiritual Presence

Your spiritual example becomes especially important as children grow older. If children see no spiritual life in the home, they may conclude that faith is something detached from real life rather than something integrated into it. They need to learn from you what it means to be a person of faith, not only through decisions but through visible practice.

I will never forget the example of my own father praying before Mass on his knees. There was something striking about it to me. There was my father, who in my eyes was the strongest man on earth, down on his knees. He was like a knight kneeling before the queen.

Stages of Presence

Besides the kinds of presence, it helps to consider the stages of parental presence. There are four such stages: holding the hand, holding the bike seat, holding the steering wheel, and holding the phone.

When children are young, life is highly directed. You guide constantly: come here, don’t do that, be careful. This is holding the hand.

In the middle school years, you are no longer leading by the hand. You are behind them, stabilizing them while hoping to let go. They make more choices, but you still watch closely. This is holding the bike seat.

In high school, they are driving, but you remain attentive. You coach gently and intervene when necessary. Much of this stage is observation, and the call is to observe lovingly, not critically. This is holding the steering wheel.

In college and adulthood, you are available whenever needed. You may still call sometimes, especially if you know they are struggling, but much of this stage is availability and readiness. This is holding the phone.

Conclusion

There is no universal manual for parenting. Every case differs based on family size, children’s temperaments, ages, finances, personality, work demands, marriage dynamics, and opportunities to serve the common good. But awareness alone is already a huge step.

It is worth asking honestly: Do I really need to be away from home right now, or is it simply easier to be away? Can my spouse hold me accountable? Can a close friend or mentor challenge me?

Ninety percent of success is showing up—not twenty-four hours a day, but at the right place and at the right time. Those two minutes in the morning may matter greatly. That half hour in the evening may matter greatly.

Behave as you want your children to behave at your age. And perhaps pray: “Let me be the parent I want my children to become.”

I conclude with Mother Teresa’s saying: “God has not called me to be successful; he has called me to be faithful.” Applied to parenting, your children do not expect perfection. They expect loyalty. They expect dedication. They expect you to be there—emotionally and mentally.

Finally, ask yourself: What one thing can I do to become a more present parent in my children’s lives?

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From these relationships, I have learned a tremendous amount. I’ve seen many examples of things that work and things that don’t. Even though there is neither a manual nor a strict rulebook for parents, I have observed there are some behaviors that tend to work better than others.

One of the clearest behaviors is simple in theory, though often difficult in practice. It is the importance of parental presence.

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The Importance of Being Present

I will never forget a particular story of this family from Mexico. Both of the parents had very demanding professional jobs that required them to be away from the home for long stretches of time. Their son, who was about ten years old at the time, would spend hours at home—often with the gardener. The boy loved playing in the garden with this man, fixing things, trimming shrubs, and helping him care for the plants.

At one point, the father asked his son a question that I am sure none of you would ever ask: “Who do you love more: mommy or daddy?” Much to the father’s surprise, the boy answered: “Francisco, the gardener; he spends time with me.” He was not asking for Francisco’s wisdom, guidance, or leadership. He was asking for Francisco himself. He wanted a person to be there.

G. K. Chesterton gives the famous image of children playing on top of a mountain. If there are steep cliffs on all sides, and you give them a ball, half an hour later you’ll find them huddled in the middle, afraid to play because of the danger. But if you build a wall around the mountaintop, you’ll come back and find them playing happily within it because they know they are safe.

That is what parental (and especially paternal) presence does. The presence of a parent provides a wall around children’s lives—especially when they are younger. Their presence communicates safety. Everything will be okay if a parent is around—not because of anything they do but because the presence of the strongest person a young person knows gives him a sense of security.

Challenges to Being Present: Professional Work

At the same time, it is challenging to be present at home. I imagine that most parents have experienced conflict between professional work and family life. In many cases, one’s career and children grow rapidly at the same time. And so there will be direct conflicts: Where should one be more present, and to whom should one give more attention?

Professions occupy time—long hours, commuting, after-hours work. Technology helps us stay connected, but it also becomes a ball and chain. In many professional settings, there is the implicit expectation of near 24/7 availability. Technology may help us be more present in theory, but in practice it can pull us away from truly being present to our children.

Work also takes mental energy. A parent can be physically home while mentally at work—still trying to solve problems in his head. Not to mention the modern complication of working from home, which can blur the boundaries between work and family life in the eyes of children.

There is a wonderful biography of Vince Lombardi in which his son recalls how hurt he felt growing up. In the biography, he describes family dinners where Lombardi was physically present but silent, mentally working through the Sunday game plan. One evening, near the end of dinner, Lombardi cleared his throat. The son became excited, expecting his father to finally address him. Instead, all that he said was, “Pass the salt.” Lombardi’s mental absence created a wound in his son. “My father is a great man,” he thought, “but I am not a great child in his life.”

Our professions also consume emotional energy.

I remember visiting the home of a family at my school years ago. I had arrived before the father did and was talking with the wife and children when I saw him pull into the driveway, looking exhausted after a long day.

As soon as the door opened, the four-year-old daughter ran downstairs yelling: “Daddy! Daddy! Let me show you my picture!” She had drawn a picture of the house—the sort of drawing children make with lines everywhere and colors far beyond the boundaries.

What struck me from this moment was the remarkable transformation that occurred on the face of this father. His tired face lit up. He smiled broadly, picked her up, sat her on his knee, and discussed the drawing for far longer than the work of art objectively merited. He noticed details I couldn’t even see. I was deeply moved by his ability to re-energize emotionally in order to give himself to his child.

Challenges to Being Present: Difficult Years

Sometimes the challenge is not work but personal preference. Sometimes, especially when children become teenagers, they can be difficult. You may love a child deeply—but not particularly enjoy him at a particular moment. If you are not careful, you may begin to avoid being present at home because being around difficult children drains you.

Besides reasons for not wanting to be home—like the tense family environment because of a particular child—there may be reasons for wanting to be elsewhere. Perhaps you are doing something fun with friends, or on a golf trip with buddies, or going on a retreat. Being away from home may be good and sometimes necessary. Dads especially need to cultivate friendships, which is something in all too short supply these days as sociologists tell us. Such friendships take time. The important thing is that the motive and particular details need to be explored.

Types of Presence

What is the solution to these challenges?

Usually it is not as simple as quitting a demanding job. Most families need the financial support that a demanding job provides, and it is important to serve the common good through one’s professional work.

In order to think about possible solutions to the challenges of being present as parents, it helps to think about four types of presence:

1. Physical presence

2. Intellectual presence

3. Moral presence

4. Spiritual presence

In this week’s post, I will focus on physical presence. Next week, we will consider the intellectual, moral, and spiritual presence, as well as the stages of parental presence.

Physical Presence

In the 1980s people loved to talk about “quality time.” What mattered, some people argued, was not the amount of time spent with your children so much as the quality of the time. There is some truth to this idea, for sure. The problem with it, however, is that quality time without quantity time rarely works. It is not how children work. Children need quantity—regular, predictable presence. This sort of presence creates security.

It may also require sacrifice.

One of my students once wrote a college essay about how present his father had been in his life—coaching him when younger and attending his sports games when older, enjoying family dinners, going on little excursions on the weekends. As a child, the student assumed his father simply had a lot of free time. Later in high school, however, the student learned that his father’s presence was not a lack of other commitments but the fruit of intentional sacrifice. He discovered that his father would work late every night after he and his siblings had gone to bed. For fifteen years, his father had rearranged his schedule, making life more inconvenient for himself so that he could be present to his family. That sacrifice left a deep impression on his son.

To be sure, not everyone can or should sacrifice sleep in this way. Depending on one’s constitution, some may need more hours of sleep, and to sacrifice them may be imprudent, as it would carry a heavy burden in other aspects of the family life. Regardless, every parent will need to look at his own situation and ask himself if there is a way, even a sacrificial way, to spend more time with his children.

I should also note that I have found children to be very forgiving when they understand that their parents are truly doing the best they can to spend time with them. But, they will be critical if they think that their parents are choosing to be elsewhere, even under the guise of having to be elsewhere.

You can continue reading Part II here.

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Nevertheless, handing on the faith is far from automatic. Recent research shows that a large share of those raised Catholic no longer remain in the Church as adults. Bishop Barron has called this attrition “the Church’s most pressing concern,” warning that without a change of course the American Church will face a severe contraction as older practicing Catholics are not replaced.

In a previous article, I developed in broad brush strokes a framework for how parents can think about forming their sons in the faith. I want to focus in this article on a specific angle to this topic: How can we present the faith in a way that is attractive to boys?

Let me offer five practical ideas.

1. Instill a sense that the life of faith is a grand adventure.

Boys love adventure. They also want to feel needed—especially when what is needed is their budding physical strength. One of the best ways to present the faith attractively to boys, then, is to present the life of faith as a life of adventure in the service of God.

On a daily basis, you do this by feeding your boys good stories of saints whose lives are full of adventure. The biographies of saints like Isaac Jogues, Francis Xavier, and Francis of Assisi animate the minds of young boys, presenting the faith as something manly. Authors like G. K. Chesterton, Louis de Wohl, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Elizabeth George Speare, Milton Lomask—and many others—do a good job of portraying heroic stories in ways accessible to even younger boys.

You can also do this by instilling a sense of vocation in your boys. Though many think of vocation in a limited manner, as only applying to those being called to the priesthood and religious life, the reality is that everyone has a divine vocation. The more a boy takes this reality to heart, understanding the purpose of his life as responding to a calling, a mission given him by God, the more he will be able to see the life of faith as an adventure.

Going on pilgrimages is another way to communicate a sense of the adventure of faith to your sons. These pilgrimages do not need to be a big, expensive trip to Santiago or the Holy Land. They could consist of a long walk to a Marian shrine at a nearby parish, or a family road trip to a particularly beautiful Church in your region. It could be an “urban hike” through DC to the National Shrine—an annual tradition that some teachers and students developed at The Heights.

2. Make the faith tangible.

In a letter to parents, St. John Henry Newman, who at the time was the headmaster of an all-boys school in England, wrote: “boys take in religion principally through the eye.” Explain the faith by way of art and architecture. Use images to illustrate points.

Another way that you can make the faith tangible is by finding specific hands-on projects that boys will love. For example, every year at The Heights the eighth graders spend a week forging their own pocket crosses. They learn how to make a mold, how to melt metal, and then they do it themselves.

3. Charge your boys with defending the faith.

Boys love to playfight—both physically and intellectually. They love wrestling, tackle football, boxing, and debating. Rather than stifling these inborn tendencies, help your boys to direct them to virtuous ends.

You can do this by tasking your boys with the defense of the faith. Tell them that as men, their job is to be protectors, and that among the most important things they are called to protect is the truth, goodness, and beauty of their faith. This sort of framing will go a long way in motivating a boy to learn doctrine and to learn how to communicate well.

I will never forget my father at the beginning of high school banning me from punching anyone—that is, unless someone ever disrespected my mother or Our Lady. I am not necessarily recommending this to you, though the lesson was powerful for me as a young boy.

4. Marry action with contemplation.

Not only do boys enjoy rough-and-tumble play, they are also primed for movement. They run, climb, and jump. They love watching things that move—balls, cars, planes, trains.There are even strong neurobiological reasons for this.

At first glance, this proclivity to movement may seem to pose a challenge to getting boys to pray. It can, however, become an ally. In fact, Christ used it as an ally for calling some of his apostles. He calls them while they are in action, at work: fishing, tax collecting.

Here are two examples of ways to combine action with contemplation.

First, go on “contemplative walks” with your boys. This has become a standard practice for the lower school classes at The Heights. The process is simple. Spend ten minutes walking in silence. That’s it.

Second, prepare the mind and body for contemplative prayer through arduous physical activity. Perhaps you can end a long climb up a tall mountain with five minutes of silent meditation. That is what the fourth grade faculty do with their students after a day of strenuous hiking: a time of silence at the very top of one of the highest mountains in our area. The boys do it, and they love it.

5. Present the spiritual life as difficult, and worth the pain.

In What’s Wrong with the World, Chesterton writes, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” This is certainly true. But, it is also true that for many boys, the Christian ideal has been left untried because it was made to seem something soft and weak.

Many boys are actually attracted to doing difficult things. They like the challenge of accomplishing something that is hard. If you want to motivate a boy to do something, tell him that you don’t think he can do it; and he’ll want to prove you wrong.

In this context, a phrase often repeated by St. Josemaria comes to mind: esto vir—be a man.

These five suggestions are means to presenting the faith in a way that will resonate with young men. Ultimately, the most important way to do so is to surround them with good men, men with a deep faith, a love for life, and an even greater love for life’s author.

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For those who educate boys, moreover, this vision of a man cannot be a generic, bland notion of a good person. Though it is certainly true that a man ought to be good, merely telling a boy to be a good person is not good enough.

The columnist Christine Emba captured this idea well when she wrote: “Telling men to just be a ‘good person’ isn’t enough. They want to know: What does that look like? What should a good man do? What should he aspire to? What are his responsibilities, his duties, his joys?”

Men and women share a single human nature. They are God’s rational creatures. But, at the same time, real men and women exist as specifically male or female embodiments of this single human nature. On one level of abstraction, then, it is true to say that the ideal man and the ideal woman are one and the same—a virtuous person. Both men and women ought to be prudent, courageous, temperate, just, and so forth. But, such virtue always exists as embodied in a masculine or feminine mode.

To be effective educators of boys, parents and teachers must be able to present a specific, true, and attractive vision of masculine virtue to boys.

Two False Images of Masculinity

In the absence of such a vision, a boy may easily fall prey to the false ideas of masculinity commonly—and often quite powerfully—on display. Today, the two most dominant flawed images of masculinity on offer are the nice guy and the barbarian.

Each of these understandings of masculinity represents an unhealthy extreme—an extreme that is appealing because it is partially true, playing certain strings in a young man’s heart. Indeed, each notion takes a single dimension of authentic manhood and distorts it by making it the whole.

The image of the nice guy is rooted in the false belief that boys and girls, men and women, are really not different in any meaningful ways. As such, the specifically rambunctious, masculine dimensions of a boy ought to be flattened as opposed to shaped and channeled. As Michael Reichert put it in his book How to Raise a Boy, “Boys shouldn’t have to be brave. They shouldn’t have to strive to produce. Boys should be more like … well, girls, I guess.”1 The result of this approach is men who are neutral, not a bother, harmless—ultimately, insipid.

On the other extreme, the barbarian understanding of masculinity is rooted in the idea that the real problem with boys and men today is that they are too “feminine.” What is needed, according to this idea, is to make the boys more macho, an aspiration that usually comes out in rough ways. This is the approach of the popular ‘manosphere’ figure Andrew Tate.

Usually these ideas come one after the other in a vicious cycle. The result either way is a truncated man.

Dangerously Good

What, then, is a man? Neither of these two—and both. Let me explain what I mean with two images.

The first image is that of Aslan, the lion from C. S. Lewis’s famous The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. As you may recall, when the children ask Mr. Beaver whether Aslan is safe, he responds: “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”

The second image comes from a painting in my office which is a rendition of John Pettie’s The Vigil. The painting shows a young man kneeling in prayer on the night before he is to become knighted, sword and shield by his side. I show this to my students to present to them the ideal of the protector. The knight, I tell them, has weapons—he is not safe—but he uses his weapons to defend what is good, true, and noble. He uses his strength to protect his family, his friends, his country, and ideals. His enemy is not other people but evil; and though sometimes he may need to neutralize threats, he is ultimately the friend of all, desiring that even his enemies should find the true path.

In short, a man is dangerously good. He has the physical, intellectual, and emotional strength to do damage, and he has the moral fiber and spiritual thirst to do a lot of good. He is not simply a nice guy, but he is meek, thoughtful, gentlemanly, refined, self-controlled. He is not a barbarian, but he is courageous, tough, risk-taking, powerful.

The world needs your sons and students to be these kinds of men because if good men are not dangerous, then dangerous men will destroy what is good.

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—Yogi Berra

A universal experience of parenting is that there is no single universal experience of raising children. As new parents quickly discover, no matter how many books they have read about taking care of an infant, the only real way to learn is on the job. As experienced parents with many children know, even when most external circumstances are the same, each child can turn out quite differently. Even parents of identical twins attest to this.

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This radical variability flows from the fact that a boy is not a machine, the operation of which can be reduced to a set of how-to instructions for assembly; nor is he a tree, which is expected to react according to patterns of growth, predictably responsive to external elements; nor is he a subrational animal, which can be trained to perform functions by following a program.

At the risk of sounding obvious, a boy is a human. He is a rational animal with a mind of his own and, therefore, a will which no one but he can control. Even more, each boy is different and affected by several variables: his temperament, his parents’ temperament, the environment in which he grows up, the friendships he makes, the social circles in which he operates, his daily interactions, and so forth. Most importantly, having a soul directly and uniquely created by God, he possesses a unique individuality which is perhaps impossible to put into words.

Because of this, no single, infallible, universal approach exists for raising a boy. There is no manual for raising boys (or girls, for that matter). There are certain truths that apply universally, but such universals, which exist in abstraction, take a multiplicity of forms in particular, lived, real, historical circumstances. Real boys do not exist in the realm of Platonic forms; they are embodied and irreducibly unique.

With this in mind, my goal in lecturing and writing about boys’ education isn’t to dictate what you, as a parent or teacher, ought to do. My intention is to give you ideas to ponder by sharing experiences—both my own and those gathered from working with thousands of parents over the decades. In some cases, the advice comes from universals learned by studying human nature: boys want to be loved and respond well to those who love them. In other cases, the advice comes from truths conveyed over the centuries that are clearly applicable today: wealth and material possessions tend to spoil children. And some advice comes from observing contemporary patterns: no middle school boy should be given a smart phone.

But most questions are particular to each child: one may be able to exercise judgment over a smartphone at sixteen and another may not. One may benefit from participating in competitive sports outside of school and another may not. One should take the more demanding academic schedule and another should not.

As you seek to educate the real boys in your lives, doing so without a manual, here are three axioms to follow:

1. Ask for reasoning, not just conclusions;

2. Direct, manage, counsel;

3. Become a studio assistant.

Ask For Reasoning

No one can tell you exactly how to raise your child, nor should you let anyone. You should, of course, be docile and open to the wise counsel of others, particularly those with experience and expertise. Not infrequently, however, those with experience and expertise give different answers to the same questions.

When getting advice from others, then, more helpful than specific prescriptions will be to learn what another’s reasoning is for their specific advice. Gathering reasoning, and not just conclusions or specific rules, will allow you to weigh whether the ideas apply in your particular circumstance.

Direct, Manage, Counsel

Ultimately, raising a boy is not training a young man but accompanying him through the early stages of his life journey. This is crucial work, as the early stages of one’s life inform—without determining—how he will walk the rest of the path. Our accompaniment is directive when the boy is very young, increasingly managerial as he enters high school, and becomes consultory as he leaves the house.

Being directive trains the child’s outward behavior, fostering good habits and routines. Becoming managerial allows the boy to begin to exercise agency while still being supported by your help. Being consultory allows the boy to fully embrace his freedom while still receiving helpful guidance.

When exactly and what precisely these stages take shape will, keeping with our theme, depend on the boy. To accompany a boy well, you need to know your boy very well—not boys in general, but this boy, your son, in particular.

Become a Studio Assistant

Though general ideas and frameworks based on statistics and empirical studies are certainly helpful—as they inform one’s prudence—raising a real child requires every parent to become an artist in his own right. No one can give you the playbook for raising your child; you have to write it.

Even better, it requires every parent to become a skilled studio assistant, for each child is a distinct and living work of art, and it is God who is the master artist. We are his assistants.

Because of this reality, parents and educators do well to remember that we do not determine a boy’s end for him. In fact, he does not even determine it for himself. He discovers it; and we help him down the path to realizing it. We ought to hold a loose grip on overly specific ideas of who he will become, lest our attachment to a predetermined idea of what his path ought to be pose an obstacle to helping him follow the actual course that God has laid before him.

Though we need to have a vision of the kind of man a boy ought to become—what a real man is—this idea, if it is to remain true, must be broad enough to encompass a wide range of specific embodiments of the vision. For example, I have often told prospective parents that the goal of my school is to graduate the kind of man you would want your daughter to marry. This idea has certain universal lines, but it remains sufficiently broad that there are many ways to practically realize it.

Boys, Not Boyhood

In short, real love is always particular; education is an art, not a science; and prudence, not technique, is the governing virtue of good parenting. Therefore, raising boys is not a matter of following a manual. It is a question of knowing and loving the boy—this boy—and the end to which that boy aspires.

This is not easy. Indeed, far easier would it be to know and love “boyhood” in general. Dostoevsky presents the trap quite famously in his Brothers Karamazov:

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together.

Only when you seek to know and love not boyhood in general, but your boy in particular, will the “how to” questions be helpful.

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First, all of creation is oriented toward sabbath. Each day ends with a sort of mini-sabbath, in which God beholds the goodness of his work. And the week culminates in God resting on the seventh day, contemplating the beauty of creation and, again, declaring its goodness.

Second, creation is in a certain sense incomplete. Though it is good, indeed very good, God desires man to help him bring it to perfection. Thus, God places man in the garden ut operaretur—that he might work (Genesis 2:15). Though toil is a consequence of the fall, work per se is not. Work is a part of man’s original vocation.

These two lessons of Genesis ought to inform the goal of education. The job of a school is to form the kind of people who are capable of both leisure and diligent work. Though it is easy to sway too far one way or the other, educators ought to attend to whether their education forms students capable of being contemplative—able to leisure, to rest, to behold beauty and enjoy it for its own sake—and who, in being contemplative, do not neglect their duty to serve God by serving their fellow men.

Last week’s article focused on leisure—wasting time well. This week, I will consider the other side of the coin, work, focusing especially on professional work.

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What Is The Point of Work?

Most people, I would argue, see professional work as a tool for personal success; it is how one makes it in the world. The details of what success means may vary. For some, success means attaining a comfortable life. For others, it means supporting a family. For still others, it means obtaining as much power or fame or glory—recognition—as possible. Though the details differ, the orientation is the same: that professional work is a means of personal gain.

Two worldviews often go along with this view of work. First, the world is an open field to be utilized for one’s own advantage, and professional work is the way we squeeze that gain out of it. Second, the world is a dangerous place filled with evil, and professional work is a tool for protection, providing one with the means to ward off that evil world.

These views of work and the world, I would suggest, are incomplete. The world does contain evil—we live in a fallen state—and many professions are geared toward protection. But the world is fundamentally still good; it is God’s creation; and protection is ultimately ordered toward rehabilitation. The world contains many resources that man can use for his sake; indeed, even in Genesis God makes the garden for man. But, he also makes man to care for the garden. Supporting a family is good and noble. Of all the above views of work, this most closely hits the mark. Still, the family has an apostolic dimension to it; the family ought to be open to the good of the broader community, just as the broader community ought to support the family. Taken as a whole, then, the above conceptions of work and the world miss the mark.

I propose a more complete view of professional work, one that parents themselves ought to embody and communicate to their children.

Work as Gift

God creates man and gives him the universe as a birthday gift. God also gives man the wisdom to know how to care for the gift and use it in the best possible way. Unfortunately, when he committed original sin, man broke the gift and diminished his wisdom. Because of this, the gift itself changed, no longer functioning as smoothly as it was designed to. Nevertheless, God’s decision to give man the universe did not change and, therefore, man’s original mission of taking care of the gift remains. Accordingly, God still mandates man to steward the whole earth, to know the universe and enjoy it by using it well.

We care for the gift, healing the world, through our professional work. Work is a tool not for personal gain but for personal care of the world. Work allows man to take a chunk of the universe and steward it for good use, for the purpose God intends for it. Effort, dedication, and skills are required in order for man to do this well. Becoming an excellent professional really matters because professional work is not primarily for one’s own benefit; it is for the benefit of the whole world.

Worth noting, this understanding of work embraces caring for a household as a real form of professional work. Indeed, what makes a given work “professional” is not the mere fact that one receives monetary reward for it. What makes it professional is the professionalism—the intentionality, skill, and care for details—with which the work is done. As St. Josemaría Escrivá put it in an interview: “Even housework is professional work! The manager of the home combines talents, creativity, and skills that are comparable to any formal employment.”1 Such professional work, like the work of a lawyer or a teacher or a doctor, is a means of caring for a part of God’s creation, helping him redeem and perfect it.

Professional Ambition

This view of professional work should lead us to be ambitious in our professional work. Because it is my tool for stewarding the universe according to God’s design, I should grab as much of the universe as God wants me to. Because the universe is in need of repair, I should want to help God heal as much of the world as possible.

Of course, we couldn’t do any of this without Christ first obtaining the graces for us to make our work powerful. But once he obtained the grace for us through his death and resurrection, it is our good, disciplined, generous, sacrificial work that puts the world back together, that repairs God’s gift.

If this is what professional work is about, then shame on me if I could grab a big piece of the world but shy away from it out of selfishness or laziness—even selfishness or laziness masked as humility and prudence. The truly meek obtain the world; if you are afraid of the world, are you truly meek?

Granted, there may be good overriding reasons for which I seek professional employment that restricts my reach of the world—because of my ambition to attend diligently to my family obligations, for instance. But, even in such a case, the restriction is not due to a lack of generosity but to a properly ordered ambition.

Working as Children of God

God’s gift has to be cared for properly, and we who see ourselves as God’s children have the important duty to do so. Truly, we ought to take over the world through our professional work. We have to be ambitious—not for personal glory, or power, or fame, or wealth. We have to be professionally ambitious because we owe it to the gift-giver.

What does this mean as parents and educators?

First, we should be ambitious professionals, both in the office and at home. Having this view of professional work matters because the world truly depends on it. As it happens with many other lessons, we can’t teach well what we don’t first live.

Second, we should instill ambition in our students. Studying well in high school, pursuing the best possible university or trade education, and seeking employment that gives one the opportunity to exercise the greatest influence in the world is what our students ought to do. The world needs them.

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For more on what these ideas mean for schools, check out this article from The Heights Forum: Elon Musk, Mother Theresa, and Why Catholic Schools Should Be Secular.

And there is truth to this idea. To become an excellent professional requires thought and effort and training. And becoming an excellent professional is crucial for one’s human development—beyond even financial recompense. Given the amount of time spent working, it is not wrong to say that the habits one develops in and through work will become one’s virtues or vices.

That said, leisure is equally important to work. In truth, it is even more fundamental. And it requires practice. Boys need to “waste time” if they are to grow into psychologically and morally healthy men who are spiritually alert.

This may sound contrary to advice I’ve given elsewhere on my Substack. Let me explain.

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I don’t mean boys should regularly lounge around with nothing to do, aimlessly walking around the house looking for any possible glimpse of excitement. After all, we hear that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Indeed, a boy’s idle mind and idle hands are vulnerable to making wrong choices. But what I mean is that the tyranny of efficient productivity should not dominate the lives of our boys.

We tend to over-value efficiency in our society. We believe that every task should be performed perfectly in the fastest possible way, and that we should perform as many such tasks as possible every day.

I’ll leave the first aspect of efficiency unexplored in this article and agree that it is generally true—although we also know that the perfect can sometimes be the enemy of the good, and that performing a task perfectly may not always be the best thing to do. But today I want to address the second aspect of efficiency: the idea that it is ideal to perform as many tasks as possible in any given day.

This is not a healthy standard for boys—really, for anyone. Boys should be allowed to spend time on tasks that serve no ulterior purpose, tasks that he will not use for any academic, athletic, artistic, or other strategic advancement. A boy should regularly have time when he is not doing homework, or studying for a test, or reading for school, or practicing a sport for an organized competition, or rehearsing music for a concert. He should be given the time and space to spend time simply doing something he enjoys precisely because he enjoys it.

In other words, a boy needs to have positive passions. These are found by engaging in intrinsically enjoyable activities that allow his mind to rest and his heart to expand. Such activities should leave him feeling energized, more at peace with himself, and more open to others. A side effect of such activities will be that he is more alert to others and helpful around the house, though that is not the motivating reason they are done.

What falls in this category? Anything that a boy can do for fun because he enjoys it, and that is mentally healthy and emotionally fulfilling. For instance, exercising for its own sake—whether playing a game in the backyard with his siblings and friends, or working out—playing an instrument to relax, reading for fun, painting, sketching—the list could go on.

What underlies all of these positive passions is a boy’s active engagement in an exercise of talent and skill which, unlike sports practice or rehearsals or homework, is not under competitive scrutiny.

Such activities differ from negative passions, which are fun and pleasurable but do not lead to a restful mind or an expansion of the heart. These activities are absorbing in a debilitating, potentially even addictive, way. Think of video games, scrolling on social media—screens in general. These activities captivate the mind and bombard it with images, hyper-activating it for no benefit. They leave the mind tired and the heart empty.

So, boys should waste time well. They need to practice good leisure regularly. If they don’t, they may develop habits of character that lead them to waste away. If they do, they will not only enjoy their lives more, they will be more enjoyable to be around.

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For more on this topic, check-out these resources from The Heights Forum:

• The Benefits of Free Play with Colin Gleason

• What is the Difference between Free Time and Leisure? by Joseph Bissex

• Is His Free Time Freeing? with Kyle Blackmer and Shane O’Neill

Subscribe to the Forum Newsletter here!

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Frameworks and formulae can give us helpful heuristics, but experienced parents know that reality is always more complex than rigid paradigms can capture. There are no universal functions for plug-and-chug parenting. There are no fixed rules that every parent must follow.

There are principles, there is common sense, and there is God’s guiding grace.

One such principle—a principle that itself resists being reduced to an algorithm—is the importance of following your gut.

Thinking Without Thinking

Following your gut proves helpful in a wide variety of cases. Indeed, Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author of Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, argues that this sort of intuitive thinking can often be just as good as, or even better than, the slow, analytical, articulated reasoning we tend to assume is best.

I agree with Gladwell. Whether we attribute these intuitive decisions to instinct or experience—or, more likely, a mixture of both—we can make good, even positively life-shaping choices based on how we feel about a situation. There are important caveats to this, of course, but the principle generally holds. Gladwell uses numerous studies of ER doctors, firefighters, marriage counselors, and speed daters to illustrate the way that gut instinct and pattern recognition are often better predictors of success than exhaustive research.

Psychologist John Gottman is a powerful example of this sort of blink-of-the-eye judgment in action. Gottman can watch a married couple talk for as little as fifteen minutes and predict with 90 percent accuracy whether they will still be married fifteen years later. He does this by “thin-slicing” their emotional interaction—reading micro-expressions, tone of voice, and subtle patterns such as contempt, defensiveness, or stonewalling. As Gladwell explains, thin-slicing is “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”

Though we may never reach Gottman-level accuracy in foretelling destinies, we all have the ability to make reliable judgments in everyday situations. When it comes to parenting, you may not be an expert doctor, therapist, or educator, but you are an expert in your own son. You should, then, trust your gut.

How and When to Follow Your Gut

Two practical questions naturally arise:

1. How do you know your gut will be right?

2. How do you know what your gut is telling you?

Your gut is right when it is well calibrated. Here are three essential ways to calibrate your parenting instincts:

1. Check in with your spouse early and often. Those conversations help you corroborate, correct, clarify, and articulate what your gut is telling you. Over time, you will develop a strong trust in your intuitive reactions—but never close yourself off to checking them, especially when emotions are running high. Anger, frustration, and disappointment can cloud not only our analytic reasoning but our intuition as well.

2. Cultivate a life of virtue. Virtue guards against emotions that distort our perception of reality. The more virtuous our lives, the more clearly we see our sons—their strengths and their weaknesses—and the more sensitively we perceive their behavior. This sensitivity allows us to respond quickly and correctly to their needs.

3. Pray daily for parental wisdom. God wants to grant it; all you need to do is ask. Prayer is where common sense and grace meet, and from that meeting comes sound parental judgment.

With a well calibrated gut, the next question is simpler: What does it mean to follow your gut? It means: if you sense something, do something. In deciding when and how to follow your gut, I recommend following these two principles:

1. Respond immediately if you need to stop immediate harm.

2. Wait to respond if there is no immediate harm.

Sometimes your son will say or do something that rubs you the wrong way. Maybe it’s obvious—like a boy rolling his eyes at you. Maybe it’s subtle—like taking an extra second to respond to your call for help with some chores. In both cases, your gut signals that something is off, and that behavior needs correction.

But if no immediate harm is occurring, the response doesn’t have to happen on the spot. If you notice the eye-roll, and if the siblings do too, then the boy must be corrected right away—otherwise his behavior plus your inaction may communicate the wrong message to him and the other children. But if the slow reaction to being called goes unnoticed, you can wait until later that day or the next. This gives you time to choose the right words and the most effective manner to deliver the message. It also allows you to parent from a place of peace, not emotion, allowing the message to land more powerfully.

Even when you must stop a behavior right away, you do not need to offer a full explanation of it in the moment. It is perfectly fine to say, “We’ll talk about this later.” Again, that pause gives you time to think, and ensures the subsequent conversation will be more fruitful.

Following your gut is not irrational parenting. At its best, following your gut is following a deeply ingrained rationality. It is the cultivated ability to feel what the situation requires. Star Trek’s Dr. Spock was an excellent first officer for dangerous voyages—but he would make a terrible father because he is too calculating. He lacks intuition. He would not know how to follow his gut.

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Such advances are cause for gratitude, but they should also make us attentive to how we raise our boys. If cultural currents are our guide, our boys will likely end up spoiled. They will, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, develop an ever-increasing desire for comforts and luxuries with an ever-decreasing return on investment.

The alternative is to help our boys grasp that he who needs the least has the most. The aim is to prevent them from becoming accustomed to the affluence around them.

As with most matters of parenting, this is easier said than done. Even well-intentioned parents struggle to know when it is better to withhold something that is, materially speaking, good for their son—especially when he is asking for it with the persistence of the widow in Luke’s Gospel.

By a kind of gravitational pull, many parents—especially in affluent areas—find themselves effectively competing with other parents. They don’t want to seem negligent, so they feel pressure to give their children the same experiences and possessions others enjoy. FOMO is not just a teenage problem.

To be sure, the instinct to give your children good things is not bad. Naturally, you want to give your child the best. The real question is whether giving good things all the time is what is best. It may not be good for your son to have the latest version of everything. What other parents think of you, and what other children think of yours, is a poor guide for parenting decisions.

Practically speaking, what can parents do to form children who are not spoiled—whose sense of happiness is not determined by their happenstance desires?

It comes down to expectations. The spoiled child develops the expectation of a life of luxury—or at least of comfort. He begins to see the good life as one in which he always gets his way. His goal becomes obtaining what he wants when he wants it.

As a parent, then, you should not provide every comfort or luxury. Growing up in Spain with pre-Second World War parents, I often heard a saying that sounds strange to modern ears: “When you grow up, you will have fried eggs.” When my parents were young, eggs were a rare commodity. Only the men who worked the fields got to eat them, as they needed the protein to sustain the arduous labor that supported the family. A child didn’t need a fried egg because he wasn’t yet working hard enough to absolutely need one. Though I would not suggest using this exact line today, the principle behind it stands. Children do not need much to live a good childhood, and giving them more than they need spoils them.

Here are four practical battlegrounds in the fight against raising a spoiled son:

1. Schedule

2. Food

3. Clothing

4. Other Pleasures

Schedule

Have your children follow a schedule for the good of others, not merely for their own comfort. They should go to bed at a reasonable time so that they get enough sleep and contribute better to family life. They should get up when they need to for school—or on weekends when they should, in order to be part of the family. They should be at dinner with everyone else and do their homework when it is time. And don’t let the entire family’s schedule revolve around kid activities (like club sports) unless the activity is a direct investment in their future, such as school.

Food

Have them eat whatever is served at home. Discourage boredom snacking—snacks should be intentional, like when dinner is late or they genuinely need something after school. It is good for a boy to be hungry for an hour before dinner. He will learn he can survive a little hunger. (When is a boy not hungry, anyway?)

Clothing

Buy clothes for school and for the activities you want him involved in, such as sports. But you likely don’t need to buy school clothes more than once a year. Get him what he needs, and don’t add more just because of fashion or whims. He doesn’t need to keep up with trends. And if he loses or prematurely damages an article of clothing, consider letting him go without—or, if you replace it, give him what he would have gotten the following year.

Pleasures

It is good for him to have wholesome pleasures, and it is good for him to persevere in them. In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis describes the “law of undulation”: every person’s engagement with pleasurable activities cycles between enthusiasm and boredom. Often the cycle mirrors the difficulty curve of the activity. Playing guitar may be exciting at first, but eventually improvement requires hard work for little immediate reward. The temptation is to quit. But sticking with it teaches him to do things not only when they are easy and enjoyable but also when they are difficult and less immediately gratifying.

The Point of “No”

There are many other battlegrounds, for sure, but the four above are especially common. Moreover, these are all arenas in which you can wage battle with your son. After all, the best way to avoid raising spoiled children is to avoid behaving like spoiled children ourselves.

A final idea, which is worth bearing in mind and communicating to our children: the point of saying “no” to our passing whims is not the “no” itself. The point of saying “no” is so that we can say “yes” to greater goods and, ultimately, to others.

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We often confuse the term ‘natural’ with the term ‘common,’ and as a result we sometimes view as natural something that is merely common. This is especially true when describing human behavior. Thus we talk about some type of behavior as being natural when it may not be. Natural behavior is that which is in accordance with man’s nature. Such behavior is always satisfying and fulfilling because it is a result of man acting according to his built-in guiding principles. We humans are happy when we do what we were created to do. On the other hand, common behavior is merely that which is widespread among a particular group of people, such as a family, a culture, or a generation.

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In an ideal society, what is common to the group and what is natural to its members are one and the same thing. We see this in our own families when love for one another reigns. Common behavior to the family—a loving family—is natural to each member: to love and be loved. In these societies, the individual lives in an environment that is conducive to his being fulfilled and satisfied. In many ways, the environment itself helps the individual to live a natural life, to be himself, to do what he ought. And there are so many activities which are natural to man—walking, running, laughing, crying, sleeping, eating, talking, praying—that one would think it should be easy for man to act naturally, and therefore be satisfied in his life.

Unfortunately, no society is ideal. Our society, for instance, suffers from several discrepancies between what is natural to man and what is common behavior. We all know that in our own lives we ought to do what is natural to us, even if it is uncommon, and avoid what is unnatural, even if it is common. At the same time, we also know the power of the “everyone else is doing it” fallacy, which, by the way, does not cease to control human behavior once you leave your teenage years behind.

This discrepancy between what is natural and what is common is perhaps most apparent in the widespread lack of respect for the dignity of the individual. We live in a society where it has become common behavior to denigrate the dignity of the person by using persons as objects, especially in a sexual context. Thus, respect for women is natural—a man can only truly act in a manner befitting his dignity if he respects women as persons and loves them with virile purity—but it is not common. This objectification of women is most clearly seen in the terrifying problem of internet pornography.

The Challenge

Those of us who remember life before the internet have witnessed the growth of something that has become distressingly common, and yet is deeply unnatural—namely, pornography. Aided by the astounding accessibility the internet provides, pornography has become a major challenge for teenagers who want to remain manly, and for parents who want their sons to become morally strong. The teenager who successfully avoids pornography is that much more likely to maintain a natural approach to young women and to be able to interact healthily with them. He is more likely to see the person of the young woman, and therefore be able to truly love that person. The teenager who ventures into pornography will find it difficult to remain wholesome, for his personality will be diminished as he loses sight of the fact that he and others are persons.

Because the internet has made pornography more accessible, it has also made its avoidance more challenging. According to a 2012 report, twenty-five percent of daily internet requests are for pornographic search engines. At the same time, the more common way people reach pornographic content is accidental—through ads, wrong URLs, and email links. Obviously, the young man’s curiosity coupled with the accessibility of internet pornography presents a special challenge to him. According to the same source, seventy percent of eighteen to twenty-four year-old men visit pornographic sites in a typical month. Eleven is the average age of first internet exposure to pornography, and the largest consumer group of internet pornography is ages twelve to seventeen. As a result, many parents may have sons who have been exposed to internet pornography years before the parents are even thinking of how to approach the “birds and the bees” talk with them. And many more may have sons who are regularly dipping into the dark swamp of internet pornography, even as they continue to live apparently normal teenage lives.

Numbers and statistics help us understand the magnitude of the challenge presented by internet pornography. As a parent, you must know that your children are susceptible to the pornography trap, and therefore you must take extraordinary measures to help your sons remain wholesome. It is only wise to protect ourselves and those we love from this trap, because it is especially powerful, extremely alluring, and frighteningly addictive. To take measures so as to prevent our sons from falling into pornography is not a lack of trust in their moral rectitude and desires to be good men. Nobody would accuse a parent of infringing on his son’s freedom if he took measures to prevent him from playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun. As a matter of fact, that parent would be negligent if he didn’t intervene. The comparison is in many ways inadequate, but it is appropriate in that they both risk death, albeit pornography’s victim is the soul or spirit.

Confronting the Challenge in Your Home

We cannot be so naïve as to think that we do not need to adopt preventive measures at home. Even without looking for it, the unrestricted internet user is one little mistake away from pornographic material. Why should we live unnecessarily one mistake away from serious harm? Would any of us leave gaping holes on the second floors of our homes? Would we not be that much more careful to avoid such holes if we had active boys in the house? We would certainly scoff at anyone who accused us of being overbearing or too mistrustful of our sons’ ability to stay out of those holes as we carefully and solidly patched them up, or at least placed a firm barrier around them. And the reference to the home is an appropriate one because it is in the home, in the family, that young men learn behavior that is natural to man. This initial lesson is then reinforced, or eroded, by schools, peers, and society at large, but the family remains as the behavior’s original community.

The first and most important lesson a young man receives regarding the natural way for a man to treat women comes from clear and deep parent-son conversations about how a man should behave as a protector of the dignity of women. These conversations should start early in the young man’s life—remember the average age of first exposure to internet pornography is eleven—and take place in natural ways as opportunities arise. The silver lining of the common erosion of sexual morality around us is that you will have many opportunities to point out the beauty of sexuality as God intended it.

Secondly, you obviously should have control of internet access at your house. Just as you would not allow your son to rent pornographic movies, or would not give him free tickets to Vegas for a solo trip, you do not want to allow your son’s unrestricted movement in cyberspace. The placement of computers in open areas, internet filters, the ability to check visited sites, and internet access discontinued after certain hours are all ways to help your son. Not one of them alone is sufficient, and not all of them together will prevent him from obtaining access unless they accompany his desire to remain whole. Those means will prevent accidental access to sites, but they too will be insufficient without your son’s regular desire to stay wholesome. And I pass over the challenges that the internet-in-his-pocket affords—even if his phone is “locked down” (for more on this, see the HeightsCast episode with Clare Morell).

In any case, restricting and controlling your son’s internet use at home does not totally protect him from engaging in self-damaging internet use. After all, there are more ways for your son to access the internet than you could possibly prepare for, such as friends’ computers and phones or other electronic devices. Your son needs to acquire the right way to approach the internet, to learn to use it for bona fide purposes, and thus you have a responsibility to teach him. In the same way that he learned from you to look both ways before crossing the street and to keep his fingers out of the electrical socket, it makes sense that he also learns from you how to manage the internet. You would not want your son to grow up in mortal fear of electricity, nor to approach it recklessly, ignoring its characteristics, but rather to learn how to use it for his benefit. And so should his approach to the internet be: fearlessly but wisely using it for his benefit as a professionally and personally useful tool.

Finding Partners in Mission

You are not alone in this important educational task. Your conversations with your son can be complemented by providing him opportunities to speak with his parish priest, as well as with a trusted school’s chaplains and advisors. It often takes more than a family to raise a young man.

But the reward for your son is both magnificent and guaranteed. It will be magnificent because a life of habitual respect for the dignity of the person will bring him happiness, and guaranteed because such a life is necessary to satisfy him. After all, he would only be acting according to his nature. He will not only be a man who truly knows how to love, but he will develop a great personality because he will be a fuller person. And that, although perhaps uncommon, is only natural.

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For more on parenting and technology, check out the Technology Collection at The Heights Forum.

In this process, how a boy understands himself is crucial. His self-image, moreover, is shaped largely by the image his parents—and the educators who assist them—have of him. Parents and teachers communicate this image at times with words, but more powerfully and more frequently through their expectations, tone, and manner of relating to him.

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Today, the dominant—though often implicit—image of the ideal boy is that of the compliant child. Yes, we want him to be smart, kind, funny, athletic. But most of all, we want him to do what he is told. The underlying message is simple: if he complies, he is good; if not, he is bad.

The problem with this view is that it often causes us to make formative decisions based not on what will facilitate the boy becoming a free man but what will make the boy less bothersome to us as parents and educators. And, increasingly, the behaviors that most annoy adults are simply those that express a boy’s nature: loud, energetic, active, and adventurous. Thus, boys are often punished not because they are bad but because they are boys. As a culture, we have a decreasing tolerance for boyhood itself.

Antecedent to any particular practical changes to how we educate boys, then, we need to reconsider what our “boy tolerance” is. Likely, it needs to be recalibrated.

When I say that we must be “boy-tolerant,” I do not mean tolerance in the sense with which that word is often used in contemporary political discourse. Mere tolerance, bearing with another, is not in itself a virtue. Rather, I mean learning to distinguish between what is natural in a boy and what is deficient in his character, and responding accordingly. Here are five practical suggestions to this end:

1. Distinguish nature from vice. We need to distinguish between behavior that is typical of a boy—a manifestation of his spirit of adventure and investigation, an outpouring of his energy—from behavior that is a weakness of character. A boy will naturally be loud and energetic, and in the right setting he should be allowed to act accordingly—yet, how often we fail to provide such settings. But a boy should not be rude by yelling obscenities or blatantly disregarding his mom’s calls for dinner.

2. Teach discipline without killing spirit. A boy will need to learn when to restrain his natural energy and will need to develop the self-discipline to do so. Parents and educators need to correct the boy to help him to this end. Correction, however, should be directed toward prudence—knowing how to act well—and self-discipline—being able to act well—without squashing passion. The manner and matter of our corrections is meaningful. We should, for example, tell a boy to remain quiet when others are speaking, to encourage respect, but still to voice his opinion in turn, to encourage self-confidence. And we should convey the message in a way that is clear and respectful of the boy, who is not a mere animal to be trained into subservience.

3. Accept his energy and help him channel it. Parents and educators must also be accepting of a boy’s energy, even embracing it, in moments where they personally would prefer calm but the occasion does not require it. A parent may be tired and hopeful of finding a quiet place in the evening, but that is not a good enough reason to suggest a boy be quiet. It may make sense for a parent to insist that his son be quiet (if, for example, mom is sick with a bad headache). In such an instance, perhaps dad may take that boy outside to throw a ball in the backyard and burn some boy-energy; it will be easier for the boy to be respectfully quiet after that. The point is that our convenience should not be the driving reason for telling a boy to be quiet and sit still. It should be the boy’s formation. We should not tell him to be quiet merely when he is annoying us, but when doing so is what virtue requires.

4. Correct what is anti-social, not what is inconvenient. Parents and educators should correct a boy when he exhibits behavior that is anti-social. This means behavior which is taking place at the wrong time or the wrong place, that which is especially unmindful of others or the occasion. But we should tolerate his behavior when it is simply loud, energetic, and goofy, since that is nothing more than the boy being a boy. It is okay for the boy to run around the yard with his friends, loudly chasing and tackling each other, wrestling—roughhousing. This is natural boy energy coming out; it is healthy and necessary. It makes the boy physically stronger and psychologically alert as he spends time outdoors being active, emotionally attuned to others as he learns their moods and how to interact with them at various times—to learn when his friend wants to play a certain game and when he would rather not. It is much healthier than being indoors quietly playing video games where the only physical exercise is in his thumbs, where his brain is withdrawing, and his interactions are with a screen rather than other kids. At the same time, that healthy roughhousing behavior would be out of place in the dining room, or even when there are guests over for dinner and the yard has become a social gathering space for adults.

5. Permit reasonable risk—which may mean more risk than you currently feel is reasonable. Boyhood involves danger, and that is part of its goodness. Running, climbing, jumping, and tackling are not threats but training grounds for courage and judgment. The goal is not to eliminate risk but to teach prudence: which branches can hold one’s weight, which cannot.

To be boy-tolerant is not to indulge immaturity or excuse vice; it is to recognize in a boy’s energy the raw material of virtue. The goal is to help a boy learn how to channel his vitality toward good ends. The world does not need nice guys; it needs dangerously good men.

If we fail to distinguish between what is natural and what is vicious, parents and educators may stifle the very energies that make true manhood possible. The result will not be peace, but passivity: men who fear risk and complain about difficulties.

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The Purpose of Rules

A rule is an explicit guideline that prescribes acceptable conduct within a community. They can be either positive or negative. A positive rule tells a boy what to do: “You should bounce the basketball outside.” A negative rule tells him what not to do: “You may not bounce the basketball in the kitchen.”

Both have their place. Rules teach young people what good behavior looks like and train habits by facilitating particular actions. For example, a good rule might be, “You must wait to eat your food until after we have prayed grace.”

But the purpose of rules is not to replace individual prudence or to control behavior in order to standardize actions. The end of education is not the rule but the man who no longer needs it.

A mature boy—and a mature culture—should outgrow the need for many external rules. As principles are internalized and habits formed, behavior becomes self-regulating. In a healthy home or school, good conduct is not primarily enforced but modeled. Older members of the community live in such a way that the right thing is naturally understood.

While at first a child may need the rule about waiting to eat until after grace has been said, an older one ideally will not need it because the action and the respect that the action embodies have become second nature.

As boys grow older, then, they should have fewer rules. This is not permissiveness; it is confidence in their capacity for self-government. A wise parent or teacher wants a boy to learn how to deliberate, choose, and act for himself.

Principles for Establishing Rules

If rules are to serve formation, a few principles help.

First, keep explicit rules to a minimum. Long lists of rules have the same effect as long lists of legal terms—no one reads or remembers them. But, unlike the terms and conditions that many mindlessly sign, unread rules do not bind a boy’s behavior. Fewer rules mean that each one carries greater weight and can feasibly be followed.

Second, have a bias toward positive rules over negative rules. Positive rules affirm what is to be done, offering a boy a clear and attainable good. Negative rules, by contrast, tend to deflate and provoke rebellion. “Men tackle like this…” has a very different spirit than “don’t tackle.”

Third, explain why a rule exists. Emphasize the reasoning that informs a rule over the specific policy that authorizes it. The reasoning educates; the policy merely controls. When boys understand that a rule arises for a good reason, they can begin to embrace freely the action that the rule promotes. Moreover, focusing on the reasoning behind rules forms prudence—the virtue of sound judgment—whereas focusing only on policy forms either mere rule-followers or rebels.

Finally, recognize that larger communities or new communities need more rules than smaller or older ones. The greater the diversity of expectations and backgrounds, the more external structure is required. Families and small schools, blessed with shared culture and close relationships, can afford to lean more heavily on trust, example, and the overall tone that already exists.

From Rules to Rites

If the end goal of rules is the freedom of virtue, then something must replace the scaffolding of rules as a boy matures. This is where rites of passage can play a vital role.

A rite of passage is an event or experience that marks a major milestone in life. Properly understood, it communicates three things:

1. The boy is entering a new stage of life—he is more of a man.

2. Because he is more of a man, he now has new responsibilities.

3. Because he has new responsibilities, he is afforded new privileges.

A rite of passage can take many forms: a weekend camping trip, a challenging hike, a special dinner with a father or mentor. For boys, some physical challenge is especially effective; it tangibly proves to the boy that he is in fact stronger and more mature than he was before. Yet the essential ingredient is not the activity itself, but the direct communication that accompanies it: “You are entering a new stage of life and leaving behind a previous stage. Because you are becoming more of a man, we expect you to act with greater maturity. With this greater trust also comes more freedom and responsibility.”

Rites of passage are powerful because boys desperately want to be—and be seen as—men. What they often lack is a clear idea of what this actually means—or when the transition occurs. In the absence of true rites of passage, they invent their own: parties, drinking, reckless stunts. These are counterfeit initiations into manhood. Real ones, guided by adults who love and respect them, satisfy the same instinct in a healthy and elevating way.

Putting It into Practice

Families and schools need not multiply such rites. A few, done well, suffice. Two moments stand out as good opportunities: the transition into high school and the transition out of it. These moments already carry importance societally, so they provide a natural opportunity to become a rite of passage moment. A father might plan a special trip with his son, or take him out for a nice dinner to mark the new stage. Some families link these rites to existing religious or civic milestones, like Confirmation or earning a driver’s license. Others create their own.

To give an example of what such a rite of passage might look like, consider one father I know who took his rising ninth-grade son on an overnight trip. He let his son choose the destination—anywhere within driving distance—and decide how they would spend the day. Whether it was paintball, bowling, hiking, go-karting, or exploring a nearby city, the father committed himself to simply enjoying whatever his son chose. In return, he asked for one thing: some one-on-one time after dinner for a man-to-man conversation. That evening, the father shared his hopes and expectations for his son’s coming years—academic diligence, the pursuit of virtue (especially honesty, integrity, and charity), and a deep respect for his mother. In this simple yet meaningful way, the overnight trip became a true rite of passage: the father’s way of saying, through both his words and actions, that he now saw his son not as a boy but as a young man.

A school might build into its culture a meaningful challenge or ceremony to signal that greater freedom now comes with greater expectations. At my school, the boys go on a three-day camping trip to end their junior year. On this trip, they are challenged to complete a sort of mini triathlon. Running and biking culminate in an open water swim to St. Clement’s Island, the location of the first Mass in the English speaking colonies. This is a difficult trial, and they earn every inch of progress. Some years, the water is rough and cold. Other years, it rains heavenly on the run. The subsequent celebration of Mass marks their transition to being seniors. On this trip, I always offer a short talk to them about our expectations for their senior year.

Because He Wants To

When parents and educators embrace this balance—fewer rules, more rites—they form young men capable of governing themselves. And that, finally, is the goal: not boys who behave in a certain way because they must, but men who do good because they want to, because they see why it is good.

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Boys, rather, learn when they want to learn—or when, in some way, they need to learn. Necessity is the great mother of virtues, including the intellectual virtues. Teaching, therefore, is not about what the educator says but about what the boy hears. And what the boy hears is a product of what he feels he needs to hear. Nothing promotes a willingness to learn like the realization that one is not as good at something as he wishes he were. To this end, failure can be a friend.

In fact, failure is a great tutor. If a boy is open to learning from him, he can be one of the most powerful teachers a boy may ever have. And unlike other tutors, he does not demand payment when he teaches—at least not an ordinary form of payment. He also does not need to be invited to show up in a boy’s life. All that failure asks is that you do not keep him out.

How Does Failure Work?

Throughout life, opportunities for growth present themselves to boys. These could be of an academic, athletic, extracurricular, social, or moral nature. In each of these instances, a boy has the chance to grow. He may succeed in learning a math concept and, consequently, do well on the exam. He may stick with the morning routine he has set himself, or succeed in the goal of keeping his room tidy. He may be patient with a sibling. As parents and educators, it is normal and good that we hope he succeeds in all these areas. That said, we should not restrict the scope of our vision to simply moments of triumph.

Here comes the challenge for parents and educators. When we see success as attaining a definite, often quantifiable, goal—an A on the chemistry exam, a starting spot on the soccer team—and failure as not attaining that goal, we may easily be tempted to intervene in our son’s life in whatever way necessary to avoid the boy’s failure.

Parents and educators should, however, widen the lens through which they view success and failure. Real success goes beyond attaining the immediate goal of an exercise. Ultimately, success consists of going through a process in which the boy himself practices applying certain skills and habits in the pursuit of a goal. He learns from the application of his own effort and ability far more than from the actual attainment of the outcome, per se. Indeed, the outcome benefits his learning primarily as an indicator of his input.

If the experience is to have any educational value, the boy must be allowed to stand or fall on his own. True success is learning from the experience, not simply attaining the specific product. A boy will learn more from reacting well to failure than by attaining a victory not fully deserved because it has been attained through the excessive intervention of others in his life.

Practical Suggestions

Let me offer a few practical suggestions for what to do and what not to do as parents:

1. Don’t interfere with your son’s attempts to succeed: he is the one who has to get the good grades; he is the one who has to make the team; he is the one who has to work out his social challenges.

2. Guide him. Make sure he is the one choosing and acting, and that his choices and actions are mostly from his own convictions, not from a rigid fear of failing to follow your script.

3. Don’t become your son’s advocate before his teachers or coaches. Let your son advocate for himself. Even if the outcome of his advocacy is less favorable to him than if you advocated for him, the process of self-advocating will help him grow as a man more than by being a passive recipient of the fruits of your advocacy.

4. When he fails, remind him that he is a second-half player, and that you are his half-time coach. Life is a series of games. In the first half, he may find himself losing: he got a bad grade, he failed to keep his commitment to working out each day, he had a bad social interaction. The first half, however, only matters so much. What dictates how the game ends up is what happens in the second half. How does he respond to the apparent failure? It is this reaction that offers the greater opportunity for growth. Just as it is the case in sports where overcoming a huge first half deficit to win a game is most memorable and most conducive to growth as a team, your son may grow most by how he reacts to those negative events in his life. Getting a poor grade is not a failure; true failure is not learning from it.

Understandably, parents have a hard time seeing their sons fail. This is partly because parents don’t want to see their sons suffer, and failure always brings along its little brother, pain. But reframing the experience as a way to build success in the long term will replace disappointment with hope—and sons will notice that.

Parents who endure the pain of letting their sons suffer failure, and who become half-time coaches that help their sons respond well to such failures, will value letting that peculiar tutor called failure work with their sons. Those who do not have, in effect, fired him—and firing him may end up being the greatest failure of all.

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Freedom is an ideal that people are instinctively drawn to. At the same time, the word is often used in unclear ways. Especially in a political context, people are quick to defend freedom with great energy—but rarely do they attempt to define it. As a foundational concept for the education and formation of boys, it is worth spending time reflecting on what freedom is.

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A Given and a Goal

It is helpful to think of freedom as both inborn power and developed capacity—a given and a goal. By nature, every person possesses intellect and will: the ability to think and to choose. In this sense, freedom is not acquired but innate. Yet this faculty matures only when it is perfected, that is, when one develops the stable habit of choosing what is truly good. Thus, one is free to the extent that he consistently chooses the good. Freedom here becomes a goal—something cultivated rather than automatically possessed.

Because freedom is the capacity to choose one’s true good, it implies that some aims are better than others. We often think of freedom merely as the absence of external restraints. But a fuller view sees freedom not only as freedom from but as freedom for—freedom ordered to a purpose, an end, a good. In this light, one grows in freedom the more he is able to pursue his ultimate end.

External and Internal Freedom

Two dimensions of freedom illustrate this truth: external and internal.

External freedom, simply put, is the ability to move around physically. One gains external freedom, in the first place, through time. For instance, a baby who can barely move himself grows in external freedom as he ages. First he learns how to crawl, then he begins to walk; finally, he begins running and climbing, and so forth. Beyond time, strength and conditioning also contribute to growing in external freedom. The young man who exercises consistently will have a greater freedom to move than someone who does not, for he will be able to move faster and further, and be able to move heavier objects. In the same vein, eating a healthy diet can increase external freedom, as one is able to remain healthier for longer. Certain skills also increase one’s external freedom. If a boy learns how to play the piano, for example, he has gained a new freedom: whereas before he was limited to banging the keys, now he is free to play nimbly and with intention to bring about something beautiful. Driving a car is another common example of how skills can increase one’s external freedom.

It is also worth noting that one can lose external freedom. Time does this: the old man cannot move as well as the young man. Passivity also does this: if a boy stops exercising he will no longer be able to move as well. Poor choices can likewise restrict one’s freedom. For instance, if a boy decides to drive recklessly, he may end up losing some of his freedom, either because he ends up in the hospital or because he ends up losing his license.

Notice that in all these instances, freedom involves an ability that is developed, and that this ability allows one to pursue a certain end. These abilities, moreover, have certain objective shapes that correspond to the nature of the activity. A decrease in freedom naturally follows from trying to do something in a way that goes against the nature of the activity. Poor form in lifting, which does not follow the way the body is designed to move, will end in injury. A poor diet that does not supply the necessary nutrients in the right amounts will decrease one’s health and therefore limit one’s external freedom. Any attempt to be free that is contrary to reality will be a short-lived freedom. The man who decides that he is going to be free of constraints by walking off a building will learn that his attempt to be free in this way is ultimately self-defeating. In all these instances, what good looks like is already set, and one grows in freedom to the extent that he harmonizes himself with that good.

Internal freedom follows an analogous pattern. If external freedom is self-movement for a purpose, internal freedom is self-determination for a purpose. It requires two things: the right understanding of happiness (the true end of man) and the virtues that enable one to pursue it. Internal freedom is not mere rule-following out of duty, but wholehearted alignment of thought, desire, choice, and action with the good.

For a boy to become a free man, then, he must clearly see what his true purpose in life is, and avoid external and internal limitations to attaining this purpose. One subtle external limitation to developing this kind of freedom is not being allowed to make decisions for himself. Though younger boys do need external indications to help them develop good habits, parents and educators should gradually desist from simply telling their boys what to do as they grow older. Example and explanation will prove far more effective ways to foster freedom, so that they are able to exercise choosing the good for themselves.

Strategic Obsolescence

Parents and educators should embrace their own obsolescence as the byproduct of a job well done. The ultimate goal is that the young man develop the prudence to discern for himself what the true good is in any given situation, the discipline and self-mastery necessary to do that good, and the courage to get away with doing it in environments that make doing so difficult and unpopular.

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IDD plagues men who, on average, have fewer close friends than do women. Studies indicate that the percentage of males who report having at least six close friends has been cut in half since the 1990s. Indeed, some social scientists have hypothesized that this lack of intimacy among males is a potential cause of another statistic: widows live longer after the death of their spouse than do widowers, as women tend to have more friends who fill their lives with purpose and joy even after the death of their husband.

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While there is no easy panacea for this problem, as with most things, one’s education can have a profound impact on how a boy learns—or does not learn—to relate to others. If men are going to sustain real friendships when they are adults, they must learn how to have them when they are boys.

So, how do you help a boy become the kind of man that will be a true friend? How do you help him overcome—or better yet avoid in the first place—IDD?

The bad news is that there is no single, guaranteed algorithm that ensures your son has deep friendships. Helping boys develop friendships is not a mathematical problem to be solved by formula, but rather an art that requires patience and prudence—a knowledge of particular individuals and not only abstract ideas. Real friendships, by their very nature, cannot be forced. Any attempts to manufacture them are likely to feel unnatural and will therefore be counterproductive. The good news, however, is that your son is made for friendship. He is a social animal and, as such, he is born with the desire to find good friends. He just needs to be offered the right coaching and to be given the right opportunities.

Here are three ideas to ponder, as you coach your sons in the manly art of friendship:

1. Boredom, oh blessed boredom;

2. Parents are welcome;

3. Virtue is king.

Boredom, Oh Blessed Boredom

Many people, especially in the D.C. metropolitan area where I live, suffer from over-programming. Parenting easily becomes a kind of activity management. Parents become like directors of a cruise ship, setting up their home life in such a way that their son is never without adequate entertainment and activities. It is as if being starved of diversions were akin to being starved of food. The result of such over-programming is a frenetic pace of life.

The causes of such over-programming are various. Fear of failure—a worry that one may appear unaccomplished—is certainly one of them. At the root of our modern freneticism may also be a tacit fear of boredom. Likely, every parent has heard his son complain of being bored, and in the moment felt the urge to solve the problem for him.

Boredom, however, is not evil per se. It very often can be a good starting point. Rather than seeking to satisfy their son’s growing need for more distractions from boredom, parents should teach their sons that it is okay to be bored. They should communicate to him a sense that he can face a few hours of having “nothing” to do and survive. In fact, time at home with nothing in particular to do is healthy for a boy’s development, especially the development of certain dispositions needed for genuine friendship.

The ability to embrace boredom may even be a precursor to deep friendship. To be a friend requires the ability to be present to another without needing to gain anything apparently useful from it. As Aristotle reminds us, real friends are useless. By this, he does not mean to say they are meaningless or purposeless, but rather that a true friend is someone with whom you can linger—someone with whom you can waste time well. Of course, spending time with a friend is not truly a waste of time; it is perhaps one of the best uses of time. But the point is that spending time with real friends is good for its own sake. Many fruits may come from it, but it is not sought merely for the sake of the benefits that may result. A friend can simply say to a friend, as Peter said to his Friend, “it is good that we are here.”

Being present in this way requires a certain contemplative disposition. Embracing boredom fosters this disposition by encouraging a healthy introspection, something which for many boys can be quite uncomfortable. It is much easier for a boy to rush from one entertainment to the next than to remain still. Down time leads a young man to become more observant of others and himself. Parents should not rob their son of this opportunity so as to alleviate themselves of the annoyance of their son’s complaints.

As a boy learns to slow down, to sit without being in a hurry, he will discover that whatever is around him is actually quite fascinating. He will come to see that Chesterton was right when he said, “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” Most of all, other people will become infinitely interesting to him. This attention to other people will be the starting point for deep friendship, and the ability to sit with them in an unhurried manner will be the catalyst.

Parents Are Welcome

In advising parents to let their sons be bored, I do not mean to advocate that parents should not play an important role in their son’s social lives. Parents should be involved in their son’s social life just as they are involved in other things that matter in their child’s life. And growing in the capacity to form deep friendships is certainly important—even more important, I would say, than grades or athletic success.

Though the matter and manner will differ greatly, boys need their parents’ help just as much in high school as they did when they were infants. Because the needs of an older boy are less apparent and tangible than those of a baby, parents need to be more intentional about how they tend to them. Your job in his social life is two-fold:

1. Find the right theater;

2. Remain your son’s acting coach.

You do not have control over who the other actors are, nor what plays are put on, but you can choose what theater you send your son to. If you find the theater that seems to show the right plays and attract the right actors, then you do not need to worry. Practically speaking, this means finding the right families, schools, teams, camps, and so on.

Though you cannot dictate what your son says or does—you are not the director of his life—you can and should remain his acting coach. Help him to discover his role and to play it well. Of course, a coach is most powerful and effective when the player seeks his advice. A coach that has to barrel his way into the player’s mind has already lost the battle. To become the kind of coach your son seeks for advice, a parent should strive to be interested, collaborative, and respectful.

Parents can show interest in their son’s social life by asking questions in a way that is not too judgmental. If you constantly judge your son’s choice of friends, he may begin to resist opening up to you about them. The overall tone of your questions should be one of genuine curiosity in his life. You do, of course, need to help your son develop a knack for choosing friends wisely and this inevitably involves making judgments, but you should seek to make judgments lovingly—that is, accurately and with mercy.

Flowing from your interest in his social life, you should seek to be collaborative by facilitating, to the extent that you can, his social life. Collaboration will look different depending on your circumstances, but the message you want to transmit to your son is that you are happy when he is with friends.

A way to show interest and a desire to collaborate with your son is by listening more than you talk when conversing with him about his social life. Very often parents have an idea of what their son should do before he even starts talking. After his first sentence, they are ready to share their opinion. Instead of immediately offering how you would handle a situation, ask questions that get him to think about what he should do. Get him to explain the difficulties of his social life. Get him to seek solutions. By attentively listening to him you are not only letting him grow in prudence, you are teaching him by example how to be interested in the life of others.

Finally, you should be respectful of your son’s decisions. It is his social life, not yours. Some things you may warn him of, if they are immoral; but there are many things that are a matter of preference. And you should be respectful of his friends, even defending them. If a friend slips up, help your son to judge him charitably by clarifying the difference between the person and the action. No one is all bad; we should seek to see the good in everyone. At the same time, you should help your son realize that to be a loyal friend means being dedicated to his friend’s real good—not just protecting him from being caught. Sometimes being loyal to a friend may mean defending him from himself, who can be his own worst enemy.

Virtue is King

The best preparation for being a good friend is helping your son pursue a life of virtue. Help him seek friends who are also trying to live a life of virtue. I have observed that the young man who strives to live such a life, even if imperfectly, proves to be the best kind of friend. Such a young man not only helps others live well, he also helps his friends really enjoy life. A virtuous friend is better both as a guide to heaven and a companion on earth.

A concrete way to help your son think about pursuing a life of virtue with his friends is to encourage him to consider how he can live the spiritual works of mercy in his friendships:

• Instruct the ignorant

• Counsel the doubtful

• Admonish the sinner

• Comfort the sorrowful

• Forgive injuries

• Bear wrongs patiently

• Pray for the living and the dead

A final thought to ponder: Cicero said of friendship that, aside from wisdom, there exists perhaps no greater gift given to man from the immortal gods. Although there may be no fool-proof formula that guarantees your son will find deep, lasting friendships, by helping him develop the capacity for intimacy—helping him avoid or overcome IDD—you are preparing him to receive one of the pearls of this life. And what is more, you are preparing him to receive that even greater pearl of the next life, eternal friendship with God.

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Opportunities through The Heights Forum:

• Convivium I | November 13-15 Registration is now open!

• Teaching Boys Workshops | January 7–9, 2026 & May 6–8, 2026

• On-Site Professional Development Workshops at your school

If you are interested in any of these offerings, please contact the Executive Director of the Forum, Nate Gadiano (nate@heightsforum.org).