Photo by MissItNoonan

I sat here tonight and made a dozen excuses why I didn’t need to write an article.  I could read a book, drink a beer, or watch some pointless show on TV (it is Friday night).  Or worse, I could let my wife pick the show and I could pick my nose.  Either way, I could not think of anything to write and my motivation was not there either.  But, here I am, writing away.  How did this happen?

As I was coming up with excuse #12 (which was that I need to pick out lent that was between my toes) I realized why I am doing this blog in the first place.  This really does have a purpose and that is to be a better Dad and do a good job of raising a son.  And then to pass that knowledge on to you. 

One complaint that many women have with many men is that they don’t follow through.  I definitely hate it when someone doesn’t follow through on something they said they would do, and I do it all the time (not follow through that is).  Ask my wife how many times I said I was going to build something for the house and then how many times I actually did it.  You get the idea.

Simply put, in order to teach my son to be a dependable person and follow through on his promises, I am going to have to do that too.  Boys look to their fathers (or other males in their life) for this type of personality development and if I want my kid to be a certain way, I am going to have to model that.  He has already picked up on my habits of driving aggressively and talking to the other drivers on the road.  He even asked me why I called the guy in the other car an idiot.  Now, I sing a lot more in the car!!

So, in order for me to display the qualities of dependability to my son, I am going to have to follow through on my commitments and that is starting right here.  So here is my Friday night post!!  They will be here every night.

Photo by Paul Dietrich

Choping wood is a very manly thing to do.  I remember when my Dad would chop wood in the side yard.  I would wonder if I would ever be able to draw that axe over my head and come down with enough force to get one log to splinter and fly in every direction.  When I got older, my Dad got a mechanized log splitter.  That thing was equally manly because it was man-made thing with lots of power splitting logs without needing to wipe the sweat off its iron brow.  I still wasn’t allowed to split logs with it because it could have split me in half if it wanted to.  Now, if you want a fire in your living room, you flip a switch that turns on the gas fireplace.

The moral of this story is that many of the things that used to make a man “manly” are really things that we don’t do a whole lot of.  Here are a few more activities done by a man’s man.

• Roping cows – Very manly, but not really done very often outside of the rodeo.  All the cows I rope I get from the grocery store.
• Sword Fighting – Again, very manly, but now we have to wear those white outfits and masks that look like the eyes of a fly.  I wouldn’t want to cut off an arm.  I may need that to flip the switch to turn on my fireplace.

So what does this have to do with raising boys?  Well, since chopping wood is outdated, and since it is hard to find cows to rope, and since we don’t want to chop off the legs of our boys, we have to find new ways to make our boys into men.

Sometimes I fear that my advice will come off as me wanting to turn boys into little hamsters stuck in a glass box.  That is the last thing I want to do.  I want us to teach this generation of boys the true meaning of manliness but I didn’t quite know how to say it.  Then I ran across this article: Boys to Men by Tony Woodlief.  It talks about the difference between harnessing the energy of boys instead of standing on it.

Here is an interesting quote from the article that really hit home for me:

Take it from a guy who used to bear hunt in his spare time

Maybe the problem isn’t that boys are aggressive, but that we’ve neglected their moral education. As Teddy Roosevelt wrote to one of his sons: “I would rather have a boy of mine stand high in his studies than high in athletics, but I would a great deal rather have him show true manliness of character than show either intellectual or physical prowess.” Manliness, then, is not the ability to survive in the wilderness, or wield a rifle. But having such skills increases the odds that one’s manly actions–which Roosevelt and others believed flow from a moral quality–will be successful.

What he is saying is that the essence of manliness (aside from B.O.) is in the way a man carries himself.  I can think of hundreds of ways a man can show his manliness that are actually applicable in everyday life (unlike sword fighting).  I ask that you all tell me what kinds of qualities makes a man a man and how to teach those qualities to our boys by leaving a comment on this post.  Now go rope some cattle and percolate some coffee over a campfire of logs you just chopped after winning your sword fight.