Johnny Rotten, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Martin Luther King, Frida Kahlo — historical, cultural and social bad-asses, celebrated for challenging the status quo. This has always been my definition of a rebel.

Last Friday night, this definition was challenged….and it very nearly didn’t happen.

I had tickets to see a band I loved, part of a promise I made to myself this year to see more live music. But by the time the evening arrived, it took sheer bloody-mindedness to get myself there.

My youngest son, twelve, earlier that evening, had kicked off, annoyed at having to watch his brother play in his basketball match - again. He decided if he wasn’t happy, nobody else should be either. Why do I have to be here? He doesn’t come to my matches. Can you just leave me at home next week? It was like being pecked to death by ducks – borrowing from the evocative image Maya Angelou once used. The negotiating. Cajoling. Asking for an answer on the spot, when all I needed was space to think. So many moving parts! By the end of it, it is fair to say I was completely depleted. Add to that the rain…it would have been very easy to stay home.

Thank God I didn’t.

Because somewhere between the downpour and the dinky parking situation (resigning myself to the threat of being towed, though equally hoping this threat was reserved for business hours only), I walked into a much-loved venue, filled with as many twenty-somethings as fifty- and sixty-something people who had come together because they loved music. Instantly, something in me shifted.

Music has always done something to me that few other things can. It short-circuits my brain, hardwired for rumination and sends me back into my body. It reminds me that there is a version of me that exists beyond responsibility, logistics and the endless mental load of being a single parent. There is something almost tribal about a room full of people connected by sound — especially when it’s Indie rock, the soundtrack of my youth. A strange combination of freedom and belonging, which I need as much now, maybe even more so than when I was a fifteen-year-old kid.

As a solo woman, I have my schtick – walk with purpose, to the side of the stage, near the front, best views and room to dance.

The warm-up band is finishing up. It’s good to be back. A woman in an embroidered mini-dress and gold Mary Janes stands next to me. “Love her style,” I thought to myself, “but wow, she’s brave to be wearing that at a gig!” — my toes safely enclosed in a pair of heavy boots.

The band is Silversun Pickups. They troop onto stage like restrained greyhounds at their local meet. A pair of gold Mary Janes catch my eye. It’s their bassist’s. It made me smile. The thing I had perhaps judged, as “brave”, was attached to a woman who, with the first strum of her bass, had the audience in the palm of her hand.

When you go see a band, especially one that has been around for 20+ years you never know what to expect. Will they still be on point? Will it be the case of ‘having stayed at the club till the lights came on?’ It’s either hit or miss with very little in-between.

Within seconds, I knew.

They still had it.

Epic talent, banging song list, electric vibe. But more than this, it awakened something deep in my core, trip-wired by the all-important rapport-building chat from the lead singer between songs.

“I know the world can feel messy and slimy and dirty out there. But when you come in here, I want you to shake all that from your skin.”

That is what music does for me.

I shelve the things I cannot control. There are no problems to be solved. I am just present. The slime slides right off my skin.

As we were coming towards the end of the gig, it got even better.

“In today’s world, the biggest form of rebellion is to stay sane and be decent.”

This.

This is what I want to teach my boys.

My dad always pitches me to his mates as a rebel, often one without a cause. Upsetting the apple cart for shits and giggles. That was never what drove me.

My rebellion was anchored in the incessant questioning of the world around me — why things are the way they are, who decided what success looks like, why popular people, well, were popular (when often, quite frankly, I found them as boring as bat shit). Why everyone was expected to want the same things.

At school, my hand was permanently in the air. Probably 60% because I genuinely wanted to interrogate the teacher, 20% because I loved the interaction, and 20% because, if I’m honest, the desire to be known as a thinker.

My poor, exhausted teachers!

But that instinct — to question, to examine, to create my own definition of who I was — has shaped my life.

And maybe that is what sanity really means.

Not blindly accepting the narratives handed to us. Not measuring ourselves against society’s scoreboard. Not confusing attention with achievement.

Sanity is knowing yourself well enough to decide what matters, and fighting for it. It is writing your own script. It is being willing to stand slightly apart from the crowd when something doesn’t feel right.

And then there is the second part.

Be decent.

Not performatively kind.

It’s something quieter. More humble.

It is noticing the person struggling with their bags and helping them. Saying hello as you pass someone in your local neighbourhood. Being patient when everyone around you is rushing. Treating people well when there is nothing in it for you. It is that warm smile at an overloaded barista that says “You’ve got this”.

But sanity asks us to think. Decency asks us to care. Both are becoming acts of resistance.

This is the type of boys I want to raise.

Which sounds simple, until you realise how hard it actually is. Because supporting their sanity means stepping back.

Listening to some of the shit they parrot out and question rather than judge. Giving them the latitude to try on different identities, all whilst having faith that the values I’ve taught them will be the lighthouse they circle back to with time.

I cannot hand them my hard-earned version of sanity.

They have to discover theirs.

And supporting their decency means more than modelling it. It means naming it when I see the opposite. Calling out the impact of actions. Recognising and celebrating it when I do see it. Helping them understand that how they make other people feel matters.

I think about my twelve-year-old on that Friday night, dragging everyone around him into his misery.

That is not a character flaw. That is a kid still learning. A kid who has not yet discovered the power of decency. Empowered by its true rebellious energy.

I cannot force that lesson into him. But I can surround him with people who demonstrate it. People who do the right thing when it is inconvenient. People who show him that decency is not weakness; it is strength.

This is the real rebellion.

Choosing thoughtfulness over reaction.

Choosing personal alignment over the inherited script.

Choosing connection over hamster-wheel optimisation.

Sanity and decency are where the mind and heart meet. Not a place of guaranteed peace, but a place to return to when everything else is uncertain.

Giving my boys the tools to create their own certainty is the best gift I have to offer.

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My thirteen-year-old son can form cohesive arguments. He spots weaknesses in my logic a mile away. He can read a room like it’s nobody’s business. And when it comes to sex, he’s throwing around terms I didn’t learn until I watched The Bold Type a few years ago.

Somewhere along the way, I realised I’d started assuming those things meant he was more mature than he actually was.

They didn’t.

Like many parents, I’ve begun to conflate the speed at which he absorbs information and his ability to play it back with the rate at which he’s actually growing up and this came to bite me last week.

I’ve always tried to make talking about sex feel normal. He’s never been afraid to ask a question, and I’ve always answered whatever’s come my way with honesty and transparency. Most questions have come off the back of a TV show or movie we’ve watched together, and my answers have all been guided by a piece of advice an incredible schoolyard mum shared with me many moons ago:

Adults feel awkward talking about sex because we answer through our own lens, not their lens of curiosity. Stick to the basics, and you’ll be fine.

Case in point.

Adam Sandler’s The Wrong Missy.

“Mum, what’s a threesome?”

“It’s when three people have sex together.”

An episode of The Good Doctor.

“Mum, what’s polyamory?”

“It’s when someone is in a relationship with more than one person.”

He was happy with the answers. It was enough. It was never awkward. He fed his curiosity, got his social kudos of being the guy ‘in the know’, and I felt quietly confident that as he got older, he would come to me with the trickier questions.

However, earlier this year I got an inkling my credentials in this space were eroding. A new set of voices entered my son’s world. Loud. Confident. Specifically Joe Rogan. I didn’t know a huge amount about his content, but Manosphere-adjacent certainly came to mind.

So hearing my son mention his name for the first time, I baulked, but (thankfully) rather than go in all guns blazing, with judgement masking my fear, I approached with curiosity and asked my son what the appeal was.

“He interviews interesting people talking about interesting stuff.”

To be fair, he does.

I know this now because I’ve since listened to a few episodes and have concluded that what unsettles me isn’t what was being said. It was how it was being said.

With certainty.

No room for another perspective.

What happens when a thirteen-year-old, who hasn’t yet developed judgement, equates certainty with confidence, and adopts that same dogmatic approach to his life and others?

I got a glimpse of this one evening driving home from basketball.

“I don’t like girls who only want to date guys who make like five million dollars.”

A huge statement. Delivered as though it applies to all girls.

We talked about it. Did he actually know anyone like that? Had he ever heard a girl say it? Eventually, I asked where the idea had come from.

A guest on a Joe Rogan podcast.

Compared to these charismatic guests with street cred, my guidance has started to sound increasingly generic, adult, like I follow a PC script. I needed to up my game. Offer him something better.

Once again, television would be my compadre.

Or so I thought.

My previous article referenced Off Campus, a young adult coming-of-age series that stood out to me for its healthy portrayal of male friendships and relationships. Boys and girls genuinely enjoy each other’s company. Respect is present, but so are mistakes. Sex, consent and female pleasure are addressed head-on in ways most shows still don’t bother with. What it doesn't contain, though, is the meanness I increasingly notice at this age - between boys, between girls, and between both.

Together, these elements struck such a chord with me, and I was convinced it would unlock something in him. Break through the black-and-white cultural noise he was absorbing. Give him a fresh perspective, a healthier story to anchor him.

So last week we sat down to watch it together.

We made it twenty-three minutes into the first episode.

There was a sex scene.

A glimpse of a breast.

He visibly flinched.

At first I assumed it was because I was sitting beside him. I made a joke.

“I’m sure that’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”

He didn’t laugh.

“Apart from that video shared on WhatsApp in Year 7 that I told you about, and what we’ve watched together on TV... no.”

I turned it off.

Off Campus has been shelved for at least another year. Probably two.

The next evening we discovered Riv4lries, the spin-off of Di4ries, the Italian tween series he’d loved when he was eleven.

“This is just a rip-off of Di4ries,” he declared before the opening credits had even finished.

Five minutes later, he was completely transfixed. Offering opinions on the characters. How they were behaving. What he would do, or not do, in their situation.

Why?

Because it was kids living ordinary lives.

Friendships. Parents. School. Failing tests. First crushes. The everyday dramas that actually belonged to his world.

And that’s when it hit me.

He is still a kid.

It made me think back to a few months earlier. We were at the school’s gold card ceremony, an honour given for a consistent positive approach to learning. Something he (my eldest) had achieved for 8 consecutive terms. Something his younger brother, just starting at the same high school this year, had been working towards all term. Parents are notified in advance so they can attend the ceremony. Again, my eldest received one; my youngest, no.

I quietly asked him not to flaunt it in front of his little brother, assuming a level of maturity he didn’t yet possess.

Because as expected, he did what any older brother would do.

He rubbed it in.

Have I forgotten what thirteen looks like?

Somewhere between being proud of how articulate he’d become and worrying about everything he was absorbing, I’d started expecting behaviour that had nothing to do with his actual age.

Have we confused what a boy says with what he can carry?

Perhaps this is the real challenge of parenting today.

For most of human history, information arrived roughly in step with experience. You learnt about relationships because you were having one. You learnt about intimacy as it became part of your life.

Today's boys are exposed to information without context. They absorb confident opinions before they've had enough experience to question them. They rehearse versions of masculinity before they've discovered what being a man means to them.

The information arrives early, but maturity still takes its time.

I’m no longer convinced my job is to race alongside everything he has access to. Perhaps it’s simply to remember what the world keeps making me forget.

Access to adult information has accelerated.

Child development hasn’t.

My son is growing up. But he is not a grown-up.

Have you ever mistaken what your child can say for what they're actually ready to carry?

The basketball court. Teammates pulling each other up after a tumble. Sunset. Passing a group of boys biking freely around the neighbourhood. Surreptitious whispers. Overhearing about the latest pairings on the school bus…

First parties. Learning to drive. Making mistakes. Finding your people. Where did those stories for boys go?

As the mother of two of them - one tween, one teen - I’m witnessing this strange space they now inhabit. Trapped between two worlds: no longer children, not quite adults, where guidance gradually shifts from parents to peers and to stories told in culture.

For some time now, I’ve become increasingly aware of the absence of these stories and the desperate need to bring them back. For centuries, they have helped young people rehearse life before they had to live it – to experience rejection before their first heartbreak, friendship before they found their tribe, and courage before they needed it. Stories lower defences, pique curiosity and open up conversations naturally.

There are still wonderful coming-of-age stories being told for girls: The Baby-Sitters Club, Never Have I Ever, Ginny and Georgia, Elle, but very few talk to boys in the same way.

Instead, they are surrounded by the noise of celebrities, moguls, and influencers. Their power, smarts and bank balances give them cut through.

Believe me, I know. My eldest has gone through phases of admiring Elon Musk and Bill Gates. Whenever he mentions them, he laughs because my face can’t tell a lie. “Mum,” he’s said more than once, “you don’t seem to like any men.”

I do. I admire plenty - just not the famous ones.

What our boys need are older brothers: characters a few years ahead of them who share their insecurities, their dreams, their fears, make believable mistakes and live to tell the tale.

They also need men who, off-camera, quietly show them they will make it through those awkward teenage years and that good things await on the other side. Fiction gave us the first. Community used to give us the second. We’ve lost both at once.

Thinking about the world of television and why stories about boys growing up have stopped being told, all I can land on is that their adolescence itself has become harder to portray in an era of fragmentation, scrutiny, and cancel culture. Perhaps networks would rather not get it wrong than try to get it right?

I also know it feels more important than ever to bring them back. Being a boy, navigating that space between child and adult is murkier than ever, especially with greater access to information. The questions are multiplying. The desire to be the boy who knows is powerful. And today's boys carry the world's answers in their pockets, without the capacity to discern right from wrong.

But their uncertainty has become a business model.

And the less sure boys feel about themselves, the more valuable they become.

A 2014 Dove Men+Care study found that 93% of men don’t recognise themselves in the media and culture. I suspect the problem starts much earlier with our boys. I suspect it’s them who stop seeing themselves first, and it only compounds from there.

When culture gets it right, though, and boys see themselves on screen, it is powerful - for them and for us as parents.

I only realised this when my sons discovered the Italian series Di4ries. It follows a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds as they navigate school, friendships, first love and the process of figuring out who they’re becoming as they move through Galileo Galilei Middle School.

Nothing earth-shattering happens; its beauty lies in its simplicity and relatability. It captures the awkwardness of first crushes, the impact of divorce, anxiety, neurodiversity and shifting friendships, with a lightness that makes growing up feel exciting rather than scary. It gently opens up conversations about the harm of casual misogyny when Pietro and Guilio rank the girls in their class by looks and are caught. It shows boys trying on different identities, discovering passions, making mistakes, apologising for them, learning from them and moving on.

One storyline was dedicated to Daniele’s first crush, which just happened to be on another boy, Mirko. Watching it with my sons was fascinating. They seemed almost shy, unsure as to why this felt different from anything they’d watched before. Picking up on this, I gently probed and what followed was a conversation we probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. Whilst the conversation began with sexuality, it quickly became something much bigger: kindness, care and what actually matters in a relationship.

As it transpires, it wasn’t the homosexuality per se they found uncomfortable, but the hyper-camp tropes they had come to associate with gay culture. Seeing an ordinary teen crush presented quietly expanded their understanding of what being gay could look like.

That’s what good stories do.

Growing up, we were surrounded by shows that acted almost like older siblings. Happy Days, Grange Hill, The Wonder Years, Neighbours, Home & Away, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Some were more realistic than others, but they all offered something invaluable: characters just a few years ahead of us, navigating life’s next chapter before we got there ourselves.

They quietly showed scenarios that were on the peripheries of a curious mind, answering questions we didn’t yet know how to ask, or were too shy to. Today, those kinds of shows feel surprisingly rare, but when boys don’t find those stories, they don’t stop looking for guidance. They simply look elsewhere.

According to the Institute for Family Studies, the average age at which boys first encounter pornography is around twelve, with some seeing it as early as eight or nine. Here, there is no tenderness, communication or uncertainty. Just bodies, acts and bravado.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve found myself watching shows with my boys that I never expected to.

It started with Wednesday, whose gothic world unexpectedly sparked conversations about belonging, cliques and what it means to be different.

Then came The Summer I Turned Pretty. I assumed this would be entirely my ‘kids have gone to bed now it’s me-time’ guilty pleasure - until I caught my two boys hiding behind the sofa, convinced I hadn’t noticed them watching. Before long, we were debating Team Conrad versus Team Jeremiah, talking broodiness vs brawn, emotional availability and how boys treat girls, girls treat boys and then generally about how people should treat each other.

Most recently, I’ve stumbled across the young adult romance Off Campus. It offers a fresh, thoughtful, compelling portrayal of the male characters and their relationships that I have not seen on mainstream TV for a long time.

They tease each other relentlessly but also care deeply for one another. They talk, fuck up and apologise. They show up and offer (great!) advice. Love wasn’t portrayed as manipulation, domination or emotional distance. It isn’t about performing masculinity. It is about learning, caring and being strong enough to lean into how you feel, and asking for help when you need it.

As for the sex, there’s plenty. And it’s not just the committed one-on-one kind. But at this age, when much exploration takes place, what differs is that clear intentions and consent play a front-and-centre role. This level of communication and respect between young adults warms me right to my cockles.

This is rare – rare enough that my sister felt it was important for me to share this show with them.

Still hesitant, I mentioned it to a dear friend and parent whom I deeply respect. Her comment was, “They’ve probably already seen worse online.”

She was right.

When my eldest was in Year 7, an explicit video circulated through a school WhatsApp group. It disturbed him. I know this, as he didn’t tell me for nearly a year. For a boy who normally talks about everything, that silence said it all.

And whilst I am still not 100% comfortable showing my teen, if he is going to encounter sex on screen, I would far rather he experiences it through stories that leave room for tenderness, consent, vulnerability and conversation. This, coupled with multiple characters embodying the nuances that live within teen boys – caring, silly, respectful, funny, flawed – is a no-brainer.

Reflecting on it all, maybe it's one problem, seen from different angles: we worry so much about who's influencing our boys online, and so little about the vacuum we've created.

They need the men who aren’t seen in the headlines. The colleagues, friends, family - men doing their own thing, living a life built around what matters most to them.

But to my boys, those men are invisible.

They don’t imagine themselves at fifty.

They imagine becoming sixteen-year-olds, and deserve to see themselves. Not just who they are today, but who they might become.

Television can’t replace community. But it can recognise and celebrate boys – the support they give each other on the basketball court. Their first heady tastes of freedom. The power of a first crush. The devastation of a first heartbreak.

It can also guide boys – show healthy friendship, care, and what growing up looks like until they find those people in real life.

Ordinary stories.

Because ordinary stories gently become the older brothers our boys are looking for.

Raising emotionally literate kids has been part of the cultural conversation for a while now, and rightly so. We know it shapes lives. But the impact of financial literacy is just as profound, yet we're still largely silent on it. The two are more intertwined than we realise, and if it is not addressed, the silence has consequences, especially for our boys.

My dad spent nearly fifty years as a stockbroker. In that time, he watched men win big, lose, win again, and then lose everything. Not just their money, but their families, their friends, the whole architecture of a life, dismantled. His single most consistent piece of advice: never try to beat the market. Never, ever convince yourself you’re smarter than everyone else playing the same game.

I thought about that a lot this week.

Unexpectedly, I found myself with a ticket to a wealth summit. As a curious cat, I took it, not entirely sure what to expect. The room skewed male. That wasn’t a surprise, but my takeout was.

The day was structured around three pathways to wealth: property, trading, and buying businesses. I’m not a finance person. Not even close. But I didn’t walk in cold, either.

My dad’s time as a broker gave me one lens, but I had a second, more down-to-earth one from my mother. Born in communist Slovakia, where few had money and every koruna had to stretch far, she brought an extraordinarily financially savvy mindset with her when she emigrated to Australia. Coupled with a desire to live as fully as possible, she knew how to make every dollar count.

Between them, my parents gave my sister and me a financial education I only now realise I took entirely for granted. The more high-level stuff came from my dad - particularly, never invest what you’re not prepared to lose. But it was my mum who really instilled good habits early. Split your pocket money into thirds — spend now, short-term savings, long-term savings. If something looks too good to be true, it usually is. Buy well, buy once.

These habits have served me well. Over the last five years, my household income has dropped by over 90%, and yet our day-to-day life doesn’t reflect this. Why? Because between them, the message was consistent: keep your cost of living low, because the best thing about money is what it gives you access to: choice. Freedom.

A strong start

The property session went better than expected. Two younger guys, conservative, structured, and measured in their approach to investment and money in general. What struck me was how they framed the conversation, not around accumulating assets, but around life goals. What do you actually want your life to look like in twenty or thirty years? Work backwards from that.

They introduced a distinction that I knew intuitively, but hadn’t thought about in detail: rich versus wealthy.

Being rich focuses on ‘stuff’— the brands, the cars, the houses. But this is quite the house of cards. A disruption to income…and it collapses. You are a slave to money.

Being wealthy is about freedom. Assets that generate passive income. Lifestyle choices that prioritise control and the value of time above all else. Money becomes your servant, freeing you to do what truly matters.

That framing alone, and the conversations it opens up with your kids, is gold.

The alarm bells start going off

Things got complicated during the stockbroker session.

A wizened broker began, speaking carefully. He laid out what the last fifteen, twenty, or so years have looked like: an unprecedented bull run, driven by consistently low interest rates, relatively stable geopolitics, and market conditions that, by any historical measure, are anomalous.

Today, he’s watching carefully. Amber lights are flashing. Geopolitical unrest is happening on multiple fronts. AI is disrupting labour markets in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Interest rates on the move. Not panic, but caution. The kind that comes from watching enough cycles to know that with every boom, there is a bust.

Then the younger broker took the floor.

He spoke about market volatility, risk and reward, and the behaviour of a careful investor. All the regulatory boxes were ticked. But during the panel discussion, the mask slipped. He couldn’t help himself. The need to prove that he, the young buck, knew better. Regaling us with tales of the great stock tip ChatGPT had given him. About not underestimating savvy young investors. About sessions he’d run at universities and the wins finance students were achieving. About his eighteen-year-old brother’s WhatsApp group, circulating brilliant stock tips.

My dad’s voice was loud in my head.

Here is a generation of young men, boys really, making money in the longest bull market in living memory. Mistaking a rising tide for skill. Making decisions with a pre-frontal cortex that won’t be fully developed for another decade, maybe two. Where the risk/reward equation is neurologically skewed towards reward. Where social currency is still tied up in being rich, and ‘wealthy’ is a concept most haven’t yet encountered, let alone considered. Without a firm grasp of market fundamentals and cyclical behaviour, losses aren’t a possibility. They’re a certainty. And when they come, they won’t just be financial.

I knew technology had opened up the financial markets, democratising them and making them more accessible to everyday people. What I didn’t realise was how much of a Pandora’s box it is, putting active trading in the hands of people who simply don’t have the financial literacy to handle it. That includes our kids. Not just our boys, but given the traditional script that casts men as market players, they feel more exposed. The manosphere has already moved into this space — get-rich-quick schemes are endemic to it, deliberately targeting young men who are financially ambitious but underprepared.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Two trading platforms I had never even heard of are now firmly on my radar: Polymarket and Kalshi. Predictive markets where you bet on future events — election outcomes, economic indicators, geopolitical events, sports results. Polymarket is crypto-based. Kalshi is cash-based. Both are essentially gambling, dressed up as informed speculation. The proverbial wolf.

What makes them particularly dangerous for young men is the combination of low barriers to entry, crypto infrastructure that obscures real money, and the social currency gained from a winning bet shared in a group chat. It’s gambling with a leaderboard.

Keep your ears open. And if your boys mention these, open up the conversation.

What money is actually for

The day closed out on something more grounded. Hopeful even.

The GM of the hosting company, a young, thoughtful fellow, spoke about two famous studies on money and happiness that seemed to contradict each other. The first, by Kahneman, found that happiness rose with income up to around $75,000 USD and then plateaued. Beyond a point, more money bought no more happiness. The second, by Killingsworth, used significantly more data points, over a million, and found the opposite: happiness continued to rise with income, with no ceiling.

An adversarial collaboration between the two research teams, published in PNAS in 2023, sought the truth. They found that both were right, depending on who you looked at. For the least happy people, income helped up to around $100K, after which it no longer mattered. For those in the middle, happiness rose linearly with income. For the happiest, the association actually accelerated above $100K.

Their conclusion: money amplifies what is already there.

That means financial and emotional literacy aren’t competing conversations. They’re the same one. What kind of person do you want to be? What does a good life actually look like? What are you building towards, and why? These aren’t just questions for a financial adviser; they’re discussions you should be having around the dinner table. These conversations will determine whether money will be your son’s servant or whether he becomes a slave to it.

So what do we actually do

We talk to our kids about money. Not vaguely. Specifically.

About the difference between rich and wealthy. About cycles — that booms end — always. That you can never beat the market. About why the current market conditions are such an effective trap for anyone who’s only ever known a bull run. About what Polymarket and Kalshi really are.

And about what money is for. What it can amplify, if you are its master. What you stand to lose if you become its slave.

If you haven't yet formed a view on this, start there.

And when it comes to the technical side, if you don’t feel equipped to have these conversations, find someone who can help. A good financial adviser doesn’t just manage portfolios; they teach frameworks. Your kids deserve these lessons before the market teaches them the hard way.

My dad watched men lose everything trying to outsmart the market that was never theirs to win. That lesson cost those men everything.

It doesn’t have to cost your son or your daughter anything. But the boys, right now, are the ones most likely to be in that room. Start talking.

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In statistics, outliers are the anomalies, the data points furthest from the norm. They disrupt patterns. Distort averages. Challenge conclusions.

Culture tends to treat people the same way.

The misfits. The ones who instinctively know the script handed to them doesn’t quite fit. Who look at the path worn smooth by everyone before them, but only feel friction, feeling instinctively, this is not them.

Is this why they’re often the ones who teach us how to live most freely?

One such misfit is Arjun. Bangalore-born, now a citizen of the world. Curious, flamboyant, articulate, emotionally open. A man who drinks up new people, new ideas and new experiences like water from a firehose.

Arjun grew up in a blue-collar family in India. One of two sons. By his late teens, he knew he was gay, but also, in many ways, fit the script of a traditional man — high performing, a jock. Which left him stuck in a particular kind of tension. He could see the path. He just knew it wasn’t his. And so he started watching the world. Trying to figure out his place. What he should be. Who he should be. What a rich life actually meant.

He came out to his family in his mid-twenties. And here is where his story diverges from the familiar one. There was no rejection. No crisis. No dramatic rupture. His family received him with acceptance. A soft landing.

But a soft landing is not the same as a clear path forward.

The world around him, in his own words, still felt deeply heteronormative. A trench dug before he had even arrived. Play sport. Be decisive. Don’t show too much emotion. Marry a woman. Have children. There was also the narrative that, for this type of masculinity to work, femininity had to sit opposite it. Supportive. Accommodating. Follow behind the man.

This didn’t feel right either. None of it fit.

So Arjun started searching.

One of the biggest surprises along the way was realising that being gay didn’t free him from society’s “shoulds”. He was still bound by heteronormative shackles. Endless conversations about who was the “man” versus the “woman” in the relationship. An assumption that being gay meant being less masculine, and that he should naturally lean into a more feminine expression of self.

But that didn’t fit either. He loved sport. Playing it, watching it, talking about it. He wasn’t interested in playing a role in a relationship but in building a partnership. At this point, all he knew was that he didn’t want to ride the wave the majority chose.

So the journey continued. First Dubai, then San Jose and finally San Francisco, the place he now calls home.

Along the way, he both met and sought out people who chose to live differently. Men and women less focused on performing the role set out by culture and more focused on becoming their true selves. There was both a complexity and an ease to them that was alluring. Not the ease of having had it simple, but the ease of people who had asked hard questions and sat with uncomfortable answers long enough to actually trust themselves. They challenged him, and embraced it when he challenged them back.

He explored both traditional relationships and non-traditional relationships because every encounter gave him permission to ask: what actually feels true for me?

Throughout all of this, he stayed deeply connected to home, both his safety net and his springboard. His younger brother, whilst outwardly fitting the heteronormative script almost perfectly, was quietly building a life of his own authorship too. Reading voraciously. Forming his own opinions. Treating new ideas as something to be explored, never shut down. The script may have fit him, but he wasn’t simply surrendering to it. He was both an intellectual sparring partner for Arjun and a friend. They were sympatico. Their father was similar. Traditional in upbringing, yet open-minded and curious enough to know that learning never really stops.

Through all these relationships, conversations, and experiences, Arjun began to develop mastery. Not in the conventional sense that leads to status, achievement, and accumulation, but something quieter and more powerful. Mastery of his internal world. Learning how to make intentional decisions. How to choose relationships carefully. How to resolve situations with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. How to deftly steer through life, choose his own direction, rather than living on the runaway train that the masses represent.

And understanding, perhaps most importantly, that this process never really ends.

The reward of this way of living wasn’t other’s approval or certainty. It was something harder won than either — a joyful self-acceptance — built not on finally finding the right script, but on becoming someone who no longer needed one.

The irony is that the people often viewed as misfits are the ones who become most fully themselves. Not because life was easier for them. But when the script doesn’t fit, you can’t afford to stop asking questions.

However, most people can...and do. The path is already there, worn smooth by those who walked it before them. Comfortable enough. Close enough to right. So they stop asking. But that’s the quiet cost of a life that fits too easily, never being forced to discover who you actually are.

The misfits don’t get that luxury. And in the end, that’s exactly their advantage.

Javier Bardem premiered El Ser Querido (The Beloved) at Cannes this past weekend. A film about the reconnection between a father and his daughter after years of estrangement. In discussing it, Bardem speaks passionately about the cultural script he was raised on in post-war, authoritarian, Franco-led Spain. The machismo culture he describes, one that took male power and control for granted. For many men around the globe, this script will feel familiar, perhaps not in detail, but in structure.

This script, this structure has had its day, but there is nothing yet to replace it. That’s the crisis. Not that masculinity is under attack, that framing is lazy and self-serving. The real problem is simpler and harder: the old script telling men exactly who to be, no longer works.

And the new script doesn’t exist yet.

Men are living in that gap between a past they can’t return to and a future that hasn’t been written, with no permission to admit they’re lost.

The Messy Middle

Men are searching everywhere for guidance, conversations and spaces to explore what ‘next’ actually looks like. How much of the old script do you hold onto without being vilified? How do you navigate expectations that are still being formed? Nowhere is this more evident than in podcasting. A space, akin to a pub, or a long car journey, where it’s acceptable to think out loud, change your mind, and sit with uncertainty, without judgement.

Joe Rogan’s show draws around 11 million listeners per episode – the most listened to podcast globally, made up mostly of men (and boys), tuning in to learn or in some cases, avoiding the hard work of figuring it out for themselves and finding another strong person to follow.

Theo Von’s appeal is more revealing. His conversations inhabit the tension sitting at the middle of modern masculinity. Reflecting on the latest episode with Mike Tyson, we see the inherited script of masculinity burnt into his soul, the performative element he is famous for, and the vulnerability he expresses when recounting the power his mentor/adopted father instilled in him. It is the plurality of his experience men are drawn to. They recognise these layers. The public face. The private pain. The gap between them.

We also have considered figures such as Scott Galloway offering a balanced perspective on structure, purpose, and economic realism in a register that men find accessible. Richard Reeves, doing serious, systemic policy-level work on the cost of under-investment in boys and men.

On the extreme end, we have Andrew Tate offering dominance when men feel emasculated and the Looksmaxxing phenomenon, equating attractiveness as the sole route to success. These voices found a vacuum and monetised it.

Looking at the world of book buying, men are now the largest growth market in self-help and psychology, accounting for 50% of purchasers. Bestsellers include Atomic Habits, The Psychology of Money, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**$ all. This is not a trivial cultural signal. It speaks to a genuine desire for personal agency, for tools to navigate a world whose expectations keep shifting.

The Hard Truth

What most conversations about masculinity miss is that this uncertainty cannot simply be solved by finding the “right” voice to follow.

At some point, every man encounters the harder task beneath the noise: deciding who he actually wants to become.

The old scripts offered certainty. Authorship does not. Creating something from scratch is hard. We’ve all been there, looking at a blank piece of paper, having to write those first words. And for many men, it is about taking the time to work out who they actually want to be.

That moment is genuinely hard. It deserves to be taken seriously. But it cannot be outsourced.

I have two young sons, 11 and 13. That’s the whole reason. The burning question keeping me up at night being: how could my boys grow up to be healthy, grounded and comfortable in their own skin, when the conversations around masculinity remained trapped between silence, shame and stereotypes?

That’s what this Substack is. A recognition not just of them, but also of other boys and men, and a need to see examples of men navigating change honestly. Men questioning inherited scripts without pretending to have all the answers. Men finding ways to live with greater self-awareness, openness and agency — even imperfectly.

It is an attempt to surface stories of men living quietly and intentionally, in ways that rarely get celebrated. Men who aren’t building brands around their identity or shouting their worldview into the algorithm. Men who are, in their own steady and sometimes stumbling way, trying to write themselves out of the scripts they inherited and into something more self-authored. Because if men cannot see honest ways of becoming in the culture around them, someone else will always be waiting to sell them certainty.

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Instead of trying to define what it means to be a good man, I should have been asking how men successfully navigate the different versions of themselves.

I want to start with a story. It’s not one man’s story, but something close to the truth of many I’ve spoken with.

He did well at school, which meant one clear path — university. The first in his family. With a desire to earn good money, three clear paths presented themselves — law, finance, and engineering. He chose finance and stuck to it.

Fast-forward twenty years — he’s at his desk by 7am. Cracks on, without thinking much about it, but in quiet moments, he escapes into a world where he’s working in the garden, maybe getting a beehive or two. Retirement. A time when living life his way starts.

Later, at weekly touch footy with mates, one asks how things are. He says, “Great,” listing the recently booked holiday, the planned kitchen renovations and the car he’s looking to buy as proof. He means it…mostly. But somewhere behind the answer, he knows his happiest memories don’t include any of these things.

Home. He walks through the door and checks his watch — sleep score, blood pressure, number of steps — better than yesterday, worse than Monday. Tomorrow he’ll be back on track. The thought feels productive and purposeful, but what is the endgame?

He puts his son to bed. As he is leaving the room, his son asks him a question he wasn’t expecting — something small and honest — and for that moment, everything falls away. He’s himself. No script. No metric. No audience. Just a man trying to share the truth with someone who believes him — completely.

What you’re seeing in that story isn’t a contradiction. It’s movement. And it’s the reality behind a version of masculinity we’ve been sold as solid, fixed, consistent. For too long, we’ve been treating masculinity as something to define — a fixed idea of what a man should be. But for most men, it doesn’t feel fixed at all. It feels like something they are constantly navigating. Different versions of themselves. Different rules. Different measures of what it means to be doing well. And judgment at every turn.

And whilst today we pat ourselves on the back for being open-minded about masculine expression - more vulnerability, self-expression and openness - the reality is that it’s more limited than ever, reduced to fixed terms such as ‘positive’ and ‘toxic’ masculinity. Terms that feel defined by someone else – but never by the men themselves.

From the men I’ve spoken to, those who seem most at ease with themselves don’t fit either template. When they share their experience, it feels more like a tango — being pulled towards the ideas they were handed about what a man should be, and driving towards what they’ve slowly worked out for themselves. Between the choices that get a nod from the room and the ones that feel right when there’s no room to perform.

The Four States of the Masculine Experience

This dance is the masculine experience, and moves across four distinct states - no ‘better’ or ‘worse’, just four states, each with its own logic, appeal, and cost.

The Inherited Path

The state a man enters when he is guided by the script handed down by culture, family and expectations. Almost a default — certain, familiar and almost never consciously chosen.

I do what my dad did. It worked for him. It works for me, but I’ve never really thought about it.

There is a real comfort here, but the cost is agency, as the realisation slowly hits that even though the life fits – it’s not quite his own.

Performance

A state where — how you’re seen — becomes your measure of how you are doing in life. Achievement, status, and recognition – all signals that confirm your place in the world and your worth.

If I live in the right suburb, drive the right car, have the latest gadgets and go on the right holidays, it should be enough….but why is there a hole inside I can’t seem to fill?

The validation here is real, and it matters, but when the applause stops, the silence is deafening.

The Project

Relentless self-improvement. Discipline, focus, constant tracking, optimisation. It creates a sense of forward motion, but the ultimate destination remains unclear.

There’s always one more thing I can improve on. One more area I can focus on. But what is the endgame?

It’s a project without a brief. The effort is real, but with no clear idea of when you’ve ‘arrived’ — so is the exhaustion.

Authorship

The state where a man shapes his life based on genuine self-understanding. Not the approved, or pre-destined path, but something closer to his own truth.

This feels right to me, but what will my family think? Friends? The people I work with?

This is the least comfortable but most courageous state. The reward - living at peace – is high, but so is the risk.

No man sits in just one of these states. They’re oscillating — sometimes within a single day — between all four. A man might be following the inherited script at work, performing with in-laws, in full optimisation mode at the gym and in complete, self-possessed authorship when he’s alone with his kids at bedtime.

It would be easy to rank these states. To elevate self-authorship above the rest.

But that misses the point.

The inherited path offers stability.
Performance brings recognition.
The project creates momentum.

None of these is empty by default. The problem is when men default into them — or get stuck — without understanding what it’s costing them. Or when they can’t move — because movement feels too risky. No map. No tools. No guarantee of reward.

Masculinity isn’t something men arrive at. It’s something they negotiate.
And the men who carry it best aren’t the ones who solve it — but the ones who know themselves well enough to be at peace with their choices.

That’s why I started this Substack. Not to define a better version of masculinity, but to share the stories of men figuring it out in a quieter, less visible but deeply intentional way. Men who are writing themselves out of the scripts handed to them and creating their own.

In seeing them, I hope to give other men, particularly those helping raise the next generation, the courage, the tools, and the solidarity to do the same.

A short note to let you know I’m going offline for a few weeks.

Both into the actual wilderness with my boys, but also into the metaphorical wilderness.

Something is brewing. My thoughts are spooling and I need space to breathe, time to marinate, and plenty of paper to write and talk my way to an answer.

So I’m putting the weekly cadence on pause and stepping away.

Back soon. And it’ll be worth the wait.

Until then - stay curious. Be kind. Smell the roses.

But I want to apply it somewhere else entirely - to boys, to men, to masculinity right now. And the more time I’ve spent in those conversations, the more the question itself shifts. Away from representation in the traditional sense, toward something much more fundamental.

What is it that men are even trying to become?

When I started this Substack, it was with a simple intention — to share positive male stories to counterbalance the waves of negative noise. To highlight examples of growth, wisdom, and hope. And that still feels important. But the more time I spend observing, listening, reading, writing, and thinking, the clearer it becomes that this is only part of the picture. Before we can meaningfully answer what men need to see, we must understand what’s happening beneath the surface.

My springboard, oddly enough, was something that surfaced earlier in my career during a project on modern femininity. A big aha moment where my understanding of women and progress shifted. Significantly. It is a story often framed as one of liberation - more choice, more opportunity, more ways to live life. And all of that is true.

But alongside that expansion sits something slightly more complex.

When the range of possible lives opens up so dramatically, the pressure doesn’t disappear - it simply shifts. Away from constraint, and toward the weight of choosing “well”. Choosing “right”. Doing those that have come before you proud. And in that, a quiet paralysis can set in.

The cage, in many ways, never fully disappears. It just becomes golden.

When I think about men in this moment, I feel a similar tension, but it manifests differently.

Historically, masculinity has followed a relatively narrow and clearly defined script - to provide, protect, and maintain stability. In service of that role, many men were taught, whether explicitly or implicitly, to disconnect from their inner world - their feelings, emotional landscape, and interior life.

Terrence Real describes the result of this as an omnipresent low-grade depression that up to 80% of men carry through life. Not because they don’t feel, but because they have learned to suppress those feelings so effectively that they lose access to them.

That script is now loosening. The boundaries are less rigid. There is, in theory at least, far more freedom for men to define themselves differently. But this is where the heart of the tension lies.

Because expectations have evolved much faster than the tools needed to navigate them. The permission, language, and time to explore what lies beneath that old functional identity have not kept pace.

And when the gap opens up, one image comes to mind, embodying the feeling men have no words for.

The Nothing. The antagonist from The NeverEnding Story.

For anyone who hasn’t come across this Gen X classic, The Nothing doesn’t attack or destroy in any conventional sense. It simply erases. It has no intent, no presence, no form. It just stops things from existing.

And for many men, that is what this moment in time can feel like.

Because if you are a man, whose sense of self is mainly based on function — providing, carrying, doing — then what happens when that function shifts or disappears? Whether through redundancy, retirement, children growing up, or a relationship ending.

If there hasn’t been the space to build something underneath, there is very little to stand on. The Nothing doesn’t arrive in that moment. It simply reveals what was already missing.

This discomfort manifests as escapism - endless scrolling and YouTube videos. This disorientation is alleviated in the world of gaming, where the rules are clear and the end goal is defined. This fear of irrelevance drives men towards rigid, outdated identities that at least provide a sense of grounding. Alternatively, some opt for a quieter withdrawal - a stepping back. According to Scott Galloway, the rising number of young men classified as NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, Training or Study) is now 1 in 7 – an 11-year high. Not because men lack concern, but because they are struggling to find their place in a changing landscape.

And this, for me, is where the conversation often goes slightly off track. It is not that men lack values. Nor is it that they lack a desire to grow or evolve.

It is that their inner life has, collectively, gone largely unwitnessed.

Culture, over time, has stopped paying attention to it. Stopped making space for it. Stopped naming it.

And what isn’t seen or named becomes much harder to access.

Which brings me back to you need to see it to be it.
And, perhaps unexpectedly, to brands.

Because brands do not exist outside of culture. They are one of the mechanisms through which culture is expressed and reinforced. They play a role in deciding what gets visibility, what gets language, what gets reflected back to people about who they are and who they might become.

And when I look at how men are currently being spoken to, the picture still feels surprisingly narrow. A quick pulse check on Reddit confirms this: very few brands truly resonate with men. What came through more strongly were references to other men — fathers, friends, mentors — people who, in their own lives, embodied a more nuanced and complex version of masculinity.

Brands, by comparison, still operate within two limited poles. Either leaning into older, more rigid archetypes (like most men’s fragrance adverts), or displaying a polished, performative version of “positive masculinity” that doesn’t quite succeed (hello Gillette, The Best Men Can Be). In both cases, the mark is being missed because the expansiveness men are being asked to embrace simply isn’t present.

The gap, it seems to me, is not in the values being expressed.
It is in the depth of seeing.

Because when that depth is missing, The Nothing has room to expand. The parts of the male experience that are not reflected back slowly begin to feel less real, less accessible, less available.

This is where opportunity lives.

Not in redefining masculinity from the outside, or creating a new ideal to aspire to, but in doing a better job of witnessing what is already there. Bringing to life the full breadth of the male experience.

Of showing more of the inner landscape. The uncertainty, the tension, the process of working things through. Not just the outcomes, or the roles, or the performance.

A brand that chooses to engage at that level is not simply “doing good marketing”. It is doing something that has genuine cultural weight.

It is saying: we see this part of you, we recognise it, and we are willing to give it language.

At its most powerful, that is what “see it to be it” really becomes. Not representation as a surface-level exercise, but reflecting something back that men can recognise in themselves.

I am, by nature, an optimist – and need to be. I am raising boys and I have to believe that they are growing up into a world that offers them something broader, more nuanced, more humane than what has come before.

And there are signs of that shift already underway. In the growth of men’s mental health movements and charities, in fatherhood champions like Michael Ray and podcasts such as How Other Dads Dad. In policy initiatives like that spearheaded by Richard Reeves and the Institute for Boys and Men, and in the quieter, everyday ways men are starting to show up differently in their lives.

But there are still clear gaps.

Between what men feel and what they are able to express.
Between the hero fathers want to be and warts and all dads their boys need.
Between what exists within men and what culture chooses to reflect back.

That is the space I want to spend more time in.

Until that inner terrain is better understood, named, and shared, men will continue navigating without a clear sense of direction.

But when it is, boys can begin to see what they might become and men can move more fully into who they already are.

A short pause on the weekly cadence while I get my head down into this. Back soon

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“You make the most money out of people’s stupidity.”

Growing up, my mum said this. A lot. And it was this thought that sat with me through the entirety of Louis Theroux’s Manosphere.

But the stupidity I kept returning to wasn’t the influencers themselves.

It was the uncomfortable idea that we — as parents, as a culture, and through the commercial systems we’ve built — have helped create the world that made it possible.

For those who have not yet watched Manosphere, we step into a hyper-masculine ecosystem inhabited by podcasters, self-styled businessmen, content creators, and life gurus, all armed with a countercultural sales proposition to win at life.

It is hstikkytokky, denigrating Bonnie Blue’s character for monetising her sexuality on a platform central to his own wealth. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

It is Justin Waller standing on his balcony, gesturing toward the skyline and crediting men for all of it - the irony stands out as brightly as his veneers.

The universal catchphrase of this empowerment-coated dogma is ‘trust me, bro.’ Delivered with zero proof and 100% swagger. This is what stayed with me the most. Because it works - on a lot of young men.

So the question I sat with after watching wasn’t how these men sleep at night. It was something far more uncomfortable: why are boys listening to them instead of us? Even more unsettling is the question that festers underneath: what does it say about us that they are?

Expressing outrage about the manosphere is easy. Sitting with the possibility that its mechanics are not particularly different from those of any other industry that has ever monetised the gap between what people need and want is more complex.

For the past twenty-five years, my job has been to listen to everyday people across the globe, trying to understand how they live, what they need, and how we can better meet those needs. At its best, we create something that improves people’s lives. This makes me proud. Other projects leave me feeling slightly gross. One in particular stayed with me.

As a new mum, I was tasked with delivering insights to grow a children’s snack brand aimed at busy parents who wanted to feel good about what their child was eating. On the surface, it sounded entirely reasonable. The packaging suggested wholesome abundance. But upon closer inspection, the story began to unravel, revealing sugar and preservatives, jacked up far higher than any child really needs.

What stayed with me, like the synthetic taste of the product we were testing, was that on some level, many of the parents probably knew. But the story on the packaging was easier to believe than the reality of baking after a long week, or navigating the school-run morning without a breakfast battle. The trade-off was clear — peace over perfection — and they accepted it.

I understand that trade-off. Truly. Life is busy. Pressures are high, expectations even higher. The easy road can feel like relief. But over time, something subtle happens when ease becomes the default. Shortcuts quietly replace the effort.

And the manosphere is built almost entirely on shortcuts.

Cheat codes to wealth.

Cheat codes to power.

Cheat codes for picking up.

But where did that language come from?

Uncomfortably - us.

For decades, we’ve been normalising it. Fitness hacks. Parenting hacks. Biohacks. Sleep hacks. Entire industries have been built around the promise of a faster, easier way of doing things, if you know where to look…and what to buy.

We built the cultural architecture of shortcuts and now we seem surprised that our boys are fluent in it.

Social media – our shortcut to escapism, sometimes at the expense of parenting, also plays a significant role.

The average adult spends about 2.5 hours a day on it. Doom scrolling is often our way of taking micro-breaks from the pressure of daily life - and our children notice. They’re used to seeing us on screens for work, so the white lie of I’m just working often buys a little cover. But when they walk in and see us on Instagram or watching YouTube, they register it and file it away.

When I interviewed boys for Campfire Conversations — my series exploring how boys and men feel today, what they’ve learned and what they need to flourish, one response really made me sit up. I asked the boys what they wished their dads did less of.

One boy said simply: let me play video games.

He understood something important, even if he didn’t yet have the words for it. That permission to game for hours at a stretch wasn’t really freedom. It was an absence.

When he was on the screen, his dad was off duty. Parenting, in a small but significant way, had already been outsourced - handed quietly to technology.

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable. To the boys and young men who follow these influencers, they are not the paper-thin characters with questionable morals we observe, but rather ever-present men of influence. Mentors. Offering a ‘way in’ to a world of wealth, confidence and sexual success that is seductive and made to feel attainable.

But on a deeper level, they are filling an empty space. They recognise the confusion and fear many boys feel as they move towards adulthood, and they express something that sounds very much like empathy but, in reality, is a weaponised openness.

I see you.
I’ve been where you are.
Let me show you how to win.

Every boy entering adolescence is absorbing signals about what it means to be a man. And if no one in his life is speaking clearly into that space, someone else inevitably will. Which raises a difficult question: why are strangers getting access to our boys? If we are honest, in part, the answer points back toward us.

At this point, I want to speak directly to the mothers reading this, because a conversation about boys that sidelines our influence tells only half the story.

This isn’t about blame. It’s about recognising how powerful influence really is.

For most boys, their mother is the first and most formative relationship of their lives. The emotional security a boy carries into the world - his capacity for trust, for expressing need, for believing he is worth being known- is largely built in those early years. But mothers continue shaping their sons in ways that extend far beyond childhood.

Boys notice everything. The boy who cannot hear you calling for bedtime from another room will somehow decipher a hushed conversation on a different floor. They absorb the way we talk about men. About their fathers. About men in public life.

About a year ago, my son told me he admired Elon Musk and Bill Gates. They are smart! Inventive! Rich! It took all my self-control not to react with my immediate thoughts. However, I understood that criticising his heroes would be perceived as a direct attack on him, risking the fragile sense of his identity he is only just beginning to build. So I put on my researcher hat, got curious, switched on my listening ears, and asked questions.

What was it he admired? What did he see in them? Slowly, through conversation, we found our way to something more nuanced. That a person can achieve remarkable things and still fall short in other areas of their life. That success without values is not worth chasing.

But something has shifted in my son over the past year.

Twelve into thirteen is a profound change. He is turning - as boys often do - toward the men around him. Not away from me, but toward something I, with my pink bits and boobies, cannot fully provide.

He is beginning to ask questions that sit at the heart of male identity: how does a man carry himself? How does he approach conflict? What does strength actually look like? What does success look like?

Celia Lashlie describes this moment beautifully in He’ll Be Ok as the bridge between boyhood and manhood. The mother’s role, as difficult as it can be, is to stand slightly to one side and allow the father to walk with him across it. Not because her influence disappears, it doesn’t - but because a boy beginning to construct his identity as a male needs a living reference point for what that might look like.

And this is where many fathers are struggling.

There is a particular grief carried by men who did what they believed they were supposed to do - who worked, provided, and showed up in the ways they understood a man should. Only to wake up one day to a world where the cultural ground beneath them had shifted dramatically. The role they thought they occupied has been renegotiated. The status they believed they held feels uncertain. The value they once added is no longer entirely clear.

In its place sits a sense of failure alongside a shame they cannot easily name – and certainly cannot talk about. And it is precisely into that silence that the manosphere steps.

I was watching kite-surfers over the weekend - fifteen or twenty of them carving through the water on a wildly windy afternoon.

I couldn’t take my eye off one skilled rider in particular. Again and again, he adjusted his position, catching the wind at just the right angle, allowing it to lift him high above the water.

Our boys are already in the water. The noise around them - the manosphere, the algorithms, the cheat-code culture we helped build - is not going away. We cannot turn it off.

We can become the wind worth steering toward. Something steady. Something real. Something that lifts rather than monetises their confusion.

Given a genuine alternative — a relationship built on trust and consistent presence — boys become very good at reading the difference. They are not passive. They are paying close attention. The question is whether what they see in us is worth orienting toward.

For mothers, much of that presence is already woven into the everyday fabric of raising a boy. As he grows older, the challenge becomes staying connected across the distance - remaining a safe space and a trusted voice even as his attention begins to shift outward.

Part of that work involves being mindful of what we carry and how we speak. How easily our own frustrations with men or the systems surrounding them can be absorbed by our sons, shaping their understanding of themselves and what it means to be a man.

For fathers and for the men who step into that role when fathers are absent, the work is becoming someone worth looking up to. Not a man with all the answers, but a man who is steady in his values while remaining open to learning. Consistent enough that a boy can find his bearings simply by watching him. And open enough to talk about it - honestly, awkwardly, often imperfectly.

These conversations — between father and son, man and boy — are where trust is built and connection deepens, slowly and over time.

They are born from a genuine curiosity about what your son thinks and feels. From listening without already composing your response. From allowing him the time and space to explore and be someone other than a smaller version of yourself.

Those conversations rarely happen face-to-face, and almost never on demand. Boys tend to open up sideways - shoulder to shoulder, in the car, on a walk, somewhere neither of you has to hold eye contact.

Which means the work is found in the small rituals of ordinary life. The Sunday morning hot chocolate. The lift to school. The repeated signal that you are there, that you are interested, and that you are not going anywhere.

Over time that becomes something the manosphere cannot touch. Because beneath the swagger, the manosphere is always transactional. It is always selling something. What a parent builds with their son is not a product. It is a foundation. And a boy who stands on that foundation can hear trust me bro for exactly what it is - cheap tat - and keep walking.

The greatest disservice we can do to our boys is allowing other men - men determined to profit from their fear - to answer questions we were too uncomfortable to ask ourselves first. That discomfort is the starting point.

It always was.

Understanding what strength means to men today has involved talking to a cross-section of generations. The younger men often speak about vulnerability. Emotional honesty. Learning to express what previous generations were taught to hide.

Older men tell a slightly different story. This is one of them.

It is 1953.

Brett is born to a lower-middle-class family in a small Yorkshire town. A time when homosexuality was still illegal, gender was binary, the class structure rigid and the sole focus of any parent was to move their kids onwards and upwards.

The youngest of three, twelve years younger than his sister, six years younger than his brother, he was left largely to his own devices – his parents, both fatigued from child-rearing but also quietly confident he was going to make it. His way.

A happy boy, he took every day as it came. School was tricky; he was no academic, but he had the capacity to enjoy life, taking the greatest of pleasure in spending endless days on his bike, building go-carts from orange boxes and camping with friends in nearby fields. Even taking Marjorie Barley with them once, resulting in his first kiss at the age of nine.

Walking arms around his mate’s shoulders, this was the best of times. Formative. As impactful as the role his dad played in his life.

His father’s presence, though largely in the background, was powerful. Work meant travelling Monday to Friday, only home on the weekends. Conversations were not frequent and certainly not frank. Talking in code was the norm when it came to anything related to women or the birds and the bees. Emotional intimacy was limited, but mutual love was present, coming to life through the rare, shared physical contact that arose when he asked Brett to trim his moustache or the hair from his ears.

Looking back, what Brett remembers most clearly was not conversation. It was his dad’s consistency. His values. His father was determined to instil a particular way of moving through the world – a gentlemanly one.

Greet people.

Shoulders backs. No slouching.

Work hard for what you want.

Treat people well.

Cultivate your inner world - because who you are on the inside determines what follows on the outside.

His father’s unwavering confidence in him also quietly stayed with him. Despite lacking academic ability, “He saw me having future success,” Brett says. “There was an implicit sense I had to make something of myself,” which he did – but not without trials.

The teen years arrived with their own soundtrack. Peering through the steamed-up glass of the local den of iniquity - the coffee lounge – he watched his brother and their friends dance to rock n roll. By 17, he was lying on a chaise longue in the dark, listening to Jimi Hendrix, in 18” bell-bottoms, and dreaming of the prospect of free love. Until then, he had been making it up as he went along - until he couldn’t. He found himself sobbing on his bed, being tested by the transition from school to – what next?

With a brother already an outstanding linguist studying at university draining his parents’ funds, undiagnosed dyslexia hampering his exam results and stealing his confidence, he was a spinning compass. The needle flickering every which way but settling nowhere.

Leaving him in the wilderness.

His father gently stepped in and lifted him up, offering him a role at his company as a salesman in the South of England. £1000 a year and a car. Brett was in! But, alongside this, came another lesson from his dad – opportunity does not equal a free ride. He was held to very high standards. Weekly reports, rewritten five times, hoops to jump through, higher than his colleagues. Discipline disguised as opportunity. A lesson he still respects today.

By the time fatherhood became part of Brett’s story, he was already on the treadmill of success and eager to keep running. It was both intoxicating and a way to uphold his father’s aspirations – move onward and upward. Socially, this meant sending his boys to private schools. Emotionally, it played out as a greater presence in his sons’ lives: attending parent-teacher evenings, Saturday football matches, and taking father-son fishing trips.

He shows up. But certain things, he realises only much later, he carried forward unchanged. The stoicism. The refusal to crumble. The instinct to hide failure from his sons, believing that the appearance of resilience was the same thing as modelling it.

He wanted to give his boys what his father had given him, without fully realising how much the world around him — and he himself — would eventually need to change.

The reckoning arrives in semi-retirement through a manuscript Brett has quietly written. He calls it My Book. It is both a personal account of his life — so the stories aren’t lost — and, more importantly, his way of coming clean. From school days to the heydays of London in the 70s and 80s, it covers successes and failures, from work to women. It is his permission to be human, but his sons have not read it. Yet.

From where he sits now, this is the tension at the centre of Brett’s life. He has always been drawn to big personalities. Full-on, rambunctious, unapologetically non-PC. The type of people who enjoy the cut and thrust of arguments and big ideas. People with a clear stake planted in the ground. And yet, in front of his own sons, he does not reveal his full hand. More controlled, contained, stoic. The Gentleman, his father had raised him to be. Shoulders back, chin up.

Perhaps one day, My Book might bridge the generational gap. A legacy of growth, passed down from father to his sons. A story of how masculinity evolves across generations. From the strong values of the gentleman, to the expansiveness of his hippy years, to something new. Not just the courage to venture out into the world like Huckleberry Finn, but the courage to venture inwards. To truly know yourself and have the confidence to express this without a mask. To be able to convey the richness this offers - in both relationships and the texture of life. A kind of success his father’s generation had no language for but would still value.

Photo credit: Alexandra Wolkowicz

*Alex, 31, was from the Estates in Southern England. A rough place that breeds a fighter’s mentality. Where you settle things on the street to make the wrongs of the world right.

For Alex, the wrong was a local kid, Nathan, who had a penchant for hurting animals, namely the neighbourhood dog, with a pair of scissors. It led to weekly street fights. Alex has never been able to stomach injustice.

So far, so stereotypically masculine.

Alex was sporty. Happiest with a ball in his hands. One of the boys. Loads of mates. No problems fitting in. Loved football. The competition. The thrill of the win. Always sizing up his opponents, working out how to overpower them. Not through size, as he was a self-declared runt, but through British bulldog tenacity. There only needed to be one tough guy in the family, and that was Dad - a local bouncer known for being a real hard-ass.

But Alex was also part of the chess club. His classmates underestimated him - in the bottom streams, easy to write off at first glance. What they didn’t know was that Dad bought him a set one Christmas, and they played non-stop through Twixtmas. That practice, combined with his fighting spirit, had him pinning the smartest kid’s ass to the wall in his very first game.

And then there’s the other Alex. The arty one. Drama club. Music. Friday nights, driving to the local shops with Dad, The Doors on the stereo, just him and me against the world. Video games were always played, with wins rewarded with a bag of Revels and his choice of film. Alex always won - Dad made sure of that.

These were the good memories of Dad but then there were the less good ones.

After his parents’ divorce, a chaotic mother meant Alex went to live with his father. It sounded like the better option, until you remember that Dad was a doorman who had to work every evening. Alex was nine. Left to his own devices, he did what any kid would do — crisps, cartoons, Tropical Fanta to kill the middle-of-the-night thirst. And loneliness. A heavy, all-consuming loneliness that a nine-year-old doesn’t have words for, that sits in the corner of the room and watches.

Alex idolised his Dad. Strong, fun, uncomplicated in the way men on the Estates were supposed to be. But somewhere underneath the football and the fights, it also represented loneliness, and this is something he didn’t want. He wanted a different road. He just didn’t know where it started.

In 2006, when he was 14, the Arctic Monkeys handed him his passport.

Their debut album - Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not – struck him. Hard. A band from the North, romanticising the working-class world that was all Alex had ever known. They sang about girls, mates, and going to the pub, but in a way that felt like literature. He felt seen. But more than that, it offered an alternative road that resonated. This album gave him permission to go against the grain, something that had always lived in him - right back to those street fights with Nathan - but had never had a language before.

The opening lyric of the first track seared through him – from heart to brain: anticipation has a habit of setting you up for disappointment.

Life was experienced through a new lens. He started noticing things. Questioning things. Caring about how he expressed himself – from what he wore to his thoughts, feelings and the precise words for them. The world went from black-and-white to something more complex yet more alive. It sparked a passion for seeking out more bands – The Manic Street Preachers, The Cure. It was the lyrics that got him, that could bring to life a world that only ever existed as a feeling.

The curiosity didn’t stop at the world outside. Alex turned it inward. He read. From philosophy to politics and cooking, whatever grabbed him. He listened. To professors on podcasts, following their thinking down rabbit holes. He built, slowly and deliberately, an interior life - a self he was constructing rather than inheriting.

One idea that lodged in him was sonder - the sudden realisation that every stranger passing you on the street is living a life as full and layered as your own. For a kid who’d grown up sizing people up, working out how to get the better of them, this landed differently. He started looking at people not as opponents or obstacles but as entire worlds he hadn’t yet been introduced to.

The more he learned, the more he wanted to put it into practice – and for Alex, cooking was the key. Not just an application of knowledge, but a tool for self-expression and ultimately self-care. The intention behind what he bought, what he made, the paired glass of wine, took him beyond the Estates and nourished him in a way Fanta and crisps never had.

Through music, reading, chess, cooking, fighting and other contradictions he refused to choose between, Alex became friends with his own complexity. Not in a man-as-island way. But in the way that created a healthy buffer between him and his loneliness, that had sat, watching him in the corner of the room when he was nine.

There was a cost. The Estates no longer feel like home. With curiosity in the driver’s seat, wanderlust became the passenger - moving between countries, between past and future, always reminded of where he came from, going back, but never for long. It’s a more solitary life. But he’s learned that aloneness is not the same as loneliness. It is a choice, a form of discernment - not a consequence he has no control over.

He still has his Dad’s physical strength. But creativity, for Alex, was the catalyst in understanding himself – which has become his true strength. Now he leads with learning over performing. With listening over being heard. With a disarming smile.

Twelve years old. The only Christian in a Muslim school. New country, new language, new rules.

The heckling started on day one. Religion being the differentiator, the reason not to belong. But *Rayan made a choice that most adults would struggle to make. Rather than defensiveness, aggressiveness, or abandoning who he was entirely, he got curious. And filled the gap between himself and his classmates with questions. About their religion, their culture, their history, their beliefs.

He’s thirty now, sitting in the UAE, the country he’s called home since that first disorientating year. And when he talks about the friendships he ultimately forged since that day — through sport, visits to the mall, over shared food — there’s something in how he speaks about people that stops you. A depth of care. A genuine delight. Still that kid, drawn to others, their stories, their lives.

Rayan was born in Lebanon, but the mountains outside Beirut truly shaped him. His father, drawn by a need to feel closer to his roots, moved the family there for a period, and it was in those mountains that Rayan found his people. Friends forged through sport, scuffles and scouts — people he still returns to when he needs to connect with his core. Even now, twenty years on, living across different countries, he still picks up the phone. Not for any particular reason. Just to check in. Because that’s how he’s wired — to tend to the people he loves, quietly and consistently, without needing a reason.

Moving to the UAE at twelve was where Rayan first felt the friction that transforms a boy into a man. Unknowingly, he began taking responsibility for himself and chose the kind of person he wanted to be.

This pattern — a period of change, of pressure, of being pushed to the edges of comfort — came up again and again in conversations with the men I spoke with. It’s rarely the easy seasons that define us. It’s the ones where we have no choice but to either show up as ourselves under pressure or abdicate our character to an ever-changing external context.

For Rayan, that pressure came in the form of being visibly, uncomfortably different. And rather than shrinking from it, he walked toward it. Beyond a genuine curiosity for his new classmates, he threw himself into sport — not to escape what separated him from them, but to focus on what connected them. A love of the game. A desire to win, which required showing up for each other.

He reframed difference as an invitation to learn. And in doing so, he didn’t just survive that first foray into the necessary wilderness — he built something that has lasted his entire life: the ability to connect with almost anyone, anywhere.

When Rayan talks about strength, he doesn’t talk about it the way you might expect. No reference to dominance, to zero-sum competition, to what he’s overcome. Strength, for him, has a mutuality to it. It’s both what grows him as a person and what he gives back to the world.

His particular expression of it is his ability to connect people. He sees the threads between the people he loves — those who might benefit from knowing each other, who might lift each other — and he draws them together. He expands the lives of the people around him, which feeds back into his own.

At the time we spoke, the wilderness had returned.

A difficult breakup, alongside the loss of his workplace mentor — a man who had modelled how to move through life lightly, stay calm under pressure, and dream bigger than felt comfortable. Not just a storyteller, but a storyliver. Challenging Rayan to step up and into his next chapter.

Losing both in close succession left a gap.

His instinct, as it is for many of us, was to escape. Evenings and weekends alone, gaming. Not unhappy exactly, but aware, somewhere underneath, that this wasn’t an answer. These losses once again created friction between comfort and discomfort, and again, it was time to grow. He felt a yearning to expand himself, to be passionate about something, to move toward something.

The answer came, as the best answers often do, sideways. A get-together with friends, one of them talking about her passion for Zumba - enough to jolt him out of his fug. Not because Zumba was the point, but because pushing into something unfamiliar with an open mind, letting it lead somewhere unexpected, was exactly what twelve-year-old Rayan had done in that school yard. The instinct was still there. He just needed his people to remind him of it.

This, for Rayan, is what strength actually looks like. Knowing when you need help. Leaning into the opportunities friends provide. Because the man who can’t do that, who doesn’t have that mental strength, he’ll tell you, is the weakest person in the room.

His village. Created over twenty years. Across different countries. Different lives.

The ones from the mountains. The ones from that first difficult year in a new school. His mentor. The ones he has collected, carefully and gratefully, ever since. The ones he still calls, for no reason, just to check in.

Cultivating these connections is where Rayan's strength lies.

*Name changed for privacy

Have you ever watched a boy set up a marble track or a domino run? They’ll spend hours building elaborate runs, testing trajectories, and tweaking angles. They’re drawn to both the clarity and the cause-and-effect. If you construct it correctly, you’ll be rewarded with the satisfaction of a perfect run. A brain medal, as one boy I interviewed described satisfaction.

So when another eight-year-old boy explained to me why an image of a marble track brought to life what it’s great to be a boy, it was because boys like seeing things roll along a set track. Unknowingly, it also brings to life the central tension facing them today: How do I move forward in life when I don’t know what is expected of me?

There is a pattern emerging in conversations with boys today. A quiet observation: a feeling of being caught between two impossible choices. Follow the old script of their fathers and grandfathers - education, job, marriage, kids, stability and end up exhausted and disillusioned like the men they see around them. Or strike out on their own to build something different, and... who knows? The risk of getting it wrong feels high.

But here’s the real problem: boys aren’t being taught to build their own paths because even their fathers don’t know how. And admitting it feels weak. The antithesis of what being a man means.

A Track of Broken Promises

The traditional track feels like the ultimate broken promise. Being a provider is now shared, not heroic. Jobs aren’t guaranteed. The automatic respect? Gone. When boys look at men who have successfully followed this track- often their own fathers - what they in fact see is busy, tired, isolated men who no longer have fun with their friends. If that’s winning, what’s the point?

Social media offers new tracks: the cryo-bros, tech-bros, the Andrews (Tate, Huberman). Clear, purposeful, confident. They promise: do these specific things, and you’ll have value. But something feels hollow - strength as aesthetic, confidence by proxy, agency outsourced. Limited to a few rather than available to the masses. Still, at least they're talking to boys directly—making them feel seen, offering guidance that in many homes doesn't happen much.

The third alternative is building your own track. But this requires self-knowledge, self-trust and a willingness to go into the unknown and this is where boys - and their fathers get stuck.

.

Uncertainty Squared

For generations, culture handed men a clear identity: provider, protector, leader. You didn’t need to know yourself deeply. You just needed to fulfil the role. Women, meanwhile, have spent decades actively dismantling prescribed roles and building new ones through conversation, literature, support networks, and sheer will.

Boys are now being asked to do the same work- but without the timeframe or support. They’re expected to build something from scratch with no blueprint, no guarantee it will matter, and no language to describe what they’re even trying to build.

Worse: many feel the nip of immediacy at their heels. In an instant gratification society, they want the answer now. When the truth is, even their fathers don’t quite know how to navigate these changing waters, because it requires skills they were never taught. It’s uncertainty squared.

The fathers I spoke with acknowledge this privately but struggle to admit it to their sons. Because admitting “I don’t know how to do this either” minimises an often already wounded male psyche. It requires saying: “The path I followed got me here, but I’m not sure it’s the one you should take. And I don’t have a clear alternative to offer you.”

That level of transparency - about confusion, about mistakes, about not having it figured out wasn’t modelled for them. Their fathers didn’t do it. Their grandfathers certainly didn’t. So they stay silent. Or they default to the only advice they know: work hard, be responsible, provide for your family. The same track that led to their own exhaustion.

The result? Boys are left to figure it out alone. With only online influencers and communities offering advice, even when those frameworks are hollow or destructive.

The Cost of Uncertainty

The boys I spoke with shared their joy, skill, and confidence at creating external worlds - forts, new playground games, and Minecraft worlds. When the rules are clear, but there’s freedom in execution, they thrive. But when it comes to constructing something intangible - an internal world dependent on exploring who they are, how they want to show up and live their lives, they freeze.

Boys live in a world of linguistic polarities: success/failure, right/wrong, strong/weak. There’s no room for “I don’t know.” No practice ground for making decisions and learning from them. Each choice feels final. Each mistake feels like proof they’ve fallen off the track.

The result? Analysis paralysis. Or retreating into the only spaces where the rules still make sense: gaming, or online communities promising clarity, even if the clarity they offer is destructive.

What Strength Actually Looks Like

My last article showed that among boys, strength remains synonymous with maleness. But its expression is narrow: physical, intellectual, financial. Emotionally, it’s self-reliance bordering on isolation.

Boys watch women rising without traditional masculine strength and wonder: what is our strength actually for?

The answer isn’t in performance or image. It’s in presence. It's the father who tells his son about failing the exam that derailed his plan. Not just what he built instead, but what it felt like in the gap - the uncertainty, the doubt, the gradual figuring-it-out. It’s the man who shows up at the surf/court/pitch/movies/cafe/pub even when staying home feels more comfortable, because a friend needs him. It’s choosing connection over achievement when your kid needs you, even when work is demanding both.

It’s the ability to hold uncertainty without collapsing into either bravado or despair. To pivot without shame when a wrong decision has been made. To say “I don’t know” without losing credibility or value.

This version of strength doesn’t perform well on social media. It doesn’t optimise or scale. But it’s what boys need to see. Not because it’s a new track to follow, but because it shows them that building without a blueprint is possible and that uncertainty is the starting point, not proof of failure.

What Boys Actually Need

Not another rigid path. Not more performance. What boys need is what their fathers need too: permission to not have it figured out. Practice building anyway and have fun doing it.

This requires fathers, and other men in boys’ lives to do something uncomfortable: share how they got it wrong. Not superficial “I learned from my mistakes” stories, but the gritty detail. This is brought to life in the great quote the son wishes to remember what the father wishes to forget.

The career path they followed to earn the big money that sucked their will to live. What that felt like, day to day, how long it took them to admit it wasn’t working, what they lost while figuring it out. The experiences they missed out on while optimising their body, the relationships neglected while chasing promotions, the justification at the time and whether they managed to repair it…or not. The years they spent performing strength instead of actually building it - what finally broke through, what they wish they’d known earlier.

These conversations need to start early. As I once heard: you can’t have end-of-the-bed conversations at 15 if you haven’t had them at 5. In the car ride to school. The hot chocolate after practice. Painting the fence. From the boys I spoke with, it was the conversation in the car on the way to school that was the most special. It was a ritual and it was memorable.

It was not formal sit-downs where a father delivers wisdom. But a consistent presence where a boy can test ideas, decisions, and revise them without losing value.

Boys also need practice making decisions before the stakes are real. Aristotle understood this: decision-making is a skill honed through practice. Opening up conversations -”what would you do if...? - lets them test options without real-world consequences. What would you do if a job pays well but the culture seems toxic? What would you do if your friend group excluded someone and you thought it was wrong? What would you do if a path you fought for no longer works for you?

These hypotheticals aren’t theoretical exercises. They’re rehearsals for the actual choices boys will face. And they only work if fathers model decision-making themselves - including the messy parts where you don’t know the right answer and have to choose anyway.

Most importantly, boys need to see men pivot without shame. Changing direction isn’t failure, it’s navigation. But again, they need this modelled. They need to hear: “I thought I wanted to work in an office and earn lots of money, until I did, I realised I hated it. So I quit and became a counsellor. Best decision I ever made – even though it was scary at the time.”

This requires fathers to do something difficult: admit their own path wasn’t perfect. To say: “I took a track focused on earning money because I thought that would make me happy, be able to provide for my family, but I lost myself and forgot along the way what is really important. And because the world is changing so fast, I talk to lots of different people, learn from them and learn about myself - always thinking about how I can do things differently and better. Soon it will be your turn. You’re not alone. Let’s figure out your path together.”

What Comes Next

In the coming weeks, I’ll share conversations with men who have done the work and continue to do so. Building and re-evaluating their own paths. Not because they have it figured out, but because they’re willing to admit they don’t. And they’re showing up anyway.

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Mummy, why is there an International Day for Women but not for men?

My friend’s eight-year-old son asked her this one morning on the way to school.

She didn’t know what to say.

The truth is, there is an International Men’s Day. But he’d never heard of it. And in that moment, what mattered wasn’t the facts - it was what he felt.

Do I matter in the same way?

That conversation sat with me for weeks. And as a mum of two boys, this exchange left a burning question in my mind – how am I going to raise boys in a culture they feel is telling them they’re shit?

Because that’s how shame starts. Not through one big moment, but death from a thousand paper cuts. Observations, overheard conversations, small moments of confusion. A boy wondering where he fits into the world and what value he brings.

I wanted to understand when these feelings began. And whether other boys felt it too.

So I did what I always do. I asked.

What Boys Said When I Asked Them What It Means to Be a Boy

I spoke to boys aged 8 to 12 across five countries. The first thing that surprised me wasn’t what they said, it was how openly they said it.

They were eager to talk. Thoughtful. But underneath their answers sat something I wasn’t expecting: frustration. They felt misunderstood. Their initial responses were framed in relation to girls. And this frustrated them - they didn’t want to be compared. They wanted to be valued for who they are. And wanted the chance to set the record straight.

I started with the simplest question I could think of: What do you love about being a boy?

Their answers came easily.

They loved being creative. Inventing games. Making things. Building worlds. Creating new adventures.

They loved simple pleasures. Playing with friends. Eating delicious food. Feeling free.

But two words kept coming back. Over and over. Across countries, across ages, across every conversation.

Strong. And fun.

Strong was physical. Being fast. Athletic. Able to do a backflip. It was how they experienced themselves moving through the world.

Fun, though, was different. Fun was relational. It lived in friendships. Shared jokes. Games with mates. Time with dad.

Fun was fuel. It was connection. It was what made being a boy feel good.

I sat with those two words for a long time. Because I kept thinking: What happens to them later?

The Question That Wouldn’t Leave Me Alone

We’re living through a loneliness epidemic, and men are struggling most. In 2021, an American study found that only 27% of men reported having six or more close friends, down from 55% three decades earlier. 15% said they had no close friends at all.

Somewhere between fun at eight and loneliness at fifty, something breaks.

The boys I spoke to felt connected, to themselves and those around them. They had rich, playful social worlds. They had friends they trusted and dads they wanted to spend time with.

So what changes?

When does strong stop meaning capable and start meaning silent? Or winning at all costs? Or appearing perfect?

When does fun - the thing that connected them to others — quietly disappear?

And when does a boy stop asking, ‘Why isn’t there a day for me?’ and start believing that this world is not built for them to flourish?

In Search Of Answers

I needed to talk to men. Good men. But what the hell does that actually mean? It was about men who were comfortable in their own skin. Who had faced challenges and come out more connected to themselves and the people they loved. It wasn’t about binaries - good/bad, strong/weak - because those are what got us in the cultural quagmire we currently live in.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing what those men told me. And I’ll be weaving their stories in with what the boys shared with me. To see where we need to focus our attention. How do we protect boys’ vitality, identity, and sense of value before they erode even further?

But I want to flag something now. Something I won’t fully unpack until later in this series.

There was a pattern I kept seeing. A quiet, but powerful quality the men who were thriving all shared - and not one of them realised they had it.

For now, just know: it didn’t come from fixing something broken.

It came seeing what was already there.

Next week: What boys said when I asked them what scares them now and in the future

Campfire Conversations is a weekly series drawn from interviews with boys and men across five continents - created for anyone raising, loving, or trying to better understand boys in today’s world.

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4th January, 2022. It was the middle of Covid, I had just moved to a brand new country, I had two boys under nine, and their dad had just suffered a life-changing stroke.

Sheer panic. On so many levels.

The biggest one - how do I raise a boy…today?! Whether you’re a mum, dad, step-parent, grand-parent, or anyone raising a boy right now, the landscape hasn’t just evolved, it has seismically shifted.

Suicide rates among men and boys are climbing. Depression is rising. The messages boys are getting about who they’re supposed to be are more confusing and more contradictory than ever. Kids are like sponges - and if we’re not there influencing them, someone else is.

The problem, however, is that I brought boobies and pink bits to the table. What I needed was a winky, a predisposition to fart jokes, and someone who understood Pokémon.

So I did what any slightly panicked researcher does. I reached out to my global village and asked for help. And boy did they show up.

More than thirty men - sons, fathers, uncles, friends, from five continents - sat down with me and shared openly. Generously. Not advice on raising boys but wisdom. The kind that comes from living, making mistakes, learning from them, and finally having someone ask — and really listen. And they weren’t the only ones. Boys came to the table too. Sharing what they loved about being a boy, what was scary and the important role their dad had in their lives.

I share one those conversations here. Topics relevant to our kids, especially our boys and thoughts about where life is heading and how we can support them.

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