As compared to mothers, fathers are sometimes thought of as a secondary, almost superfluous, parent.

But my guest says that fathers actually saved the human race, and continue to do so today.

Anna Machin is an evolutionary anthropologist, a pioneer of fatherhood science, and the author of The Life of Dad. Today on the show, we talk about the role of fathers in human history and how their main role continues to be teaching kids the skills they need to take risks, become independent, and navigate the world beyond their family. We also talk about the physiological changes that happen when a man becomes a father and how dads are just as biologically primed as mothers to parent. In the second half of our conversation, we talk about the experience of being a dad. Anna shares how long it typically takes a man to bond with a baby and transition into the role of fatherhood, how roughhousing is key in building that bond as well as developing your child’s resilience, and how your personality and background will affect your parenting. We end our conversation with the difference in how the relationship between Mom and Dad affects how they parent, and the implications of that for building a strong family.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Importance of Fathers (According to Science)
• AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Pregnancy — Getting Ready for the Baby Bomb
• AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Pregnancy — Your Progeny Enters the World
• AoM Article: New Dad Survival Guide — The Mindset
• AoM Article: New Dad Survival Guide — The Skillset
• AoM Podcast #119: Why Fathers Matter 
• AoM Article: You Don’t Have to Be Your Dad — How to Become Your Family’s Transitional Character

Connect With Anna Machin

• Anna’s website
• Anna on X
• Anna on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Everyone has the general sense that people these days get out of the house and do less face-to-face socializing than they used to. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson recently dove into the data available from the American Time Use Survey to figure out just how large this decline has been.

The answer? Very, very large.

American men are doing a third less face-to-face socializing than they did twenty years ago.

The drop amongst American teenagers is even more staggering: the amount of in-person socializing teens engage in has fallen by almost half since 2003.

Think about that for a second: today’s teenagers get together half as much as they did two decades ago. 

Today’s teens are not only less likely to leave the house to see friends but to do other things like work, date, or play sports, too.

When it comes to the consequences of this trendline for young adults, the discussion typically centers on a rise in loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

But there’s another consequence that may be part of this fallout: fewer young men stepping into independent manhood.

Since the most primitive age of human history, it’s been observed that males seem to have greater difficulty maturing into adulthood than females. Various theories have been put forth as to why this may be so, from the biological (females receive a more significant signal of maturation in the form of the onset of menstruation) to the psychological (boys must not only differentiate themselves physically, but also in terms of identity, from the female body — the maternal womb — of which they were once a part). 

Whatever the cause, boys have typically been given a greater outward nudge towards embracing mature roles and responsibilities. Traditionally, this nudge took the form of rites of passage — a practice common in every age and across every culture in the world.  

From time immemorial, boys have felt the tension between two impulses: One, the desire to stay in the safety and comfort of the domestic sphere, taken care of by their mother and free from difficult and dangerous responsibilities; the other, the desire to take risks, to explore, to win honor, to adventure — to take a place in the world of men. 

The rite of passage, dictated by their community, compelled young men to overcome the inertia of the first impulse to embrace the second.

Today, rites of passage — going to college, traveling the world, participating in a mission trip — are still possible, but the decision to undertake one, rather than being subject to communal forces of shame and honor, is voluntary and individualistic. 

This has been the case for a very long time now. 

But the ratio between the gravitational pull toward one’s childhood orbit and the attraction to the world beyond its borders has never been more lopsided. 

The time teens spend leaving the house and getting together with others really started to dip after 2010, when smartphones began to proliferate. Technology has provided everyone with a simulacrum of the kind of entertainment, conversation, and exploration that formerly could only be accessed by venturing into the outside world. There’s less incentive to leave the house and more enticement to stay at home.

When I graduated from high school, I couldn’t wait to go to college and get out on my own. Anecdotally, the young men I know now are less enthusiastic about this transition. And this hesitancy about striking out on their own could have a big impact on their maturation — on their ability to develop the qualities that make for an autonomous, self-reliant, happy adulthood. 

In staying within the domestic sphere, the childhood orbit, you’re more protected from the judgments, the risks, the slings and arrows of the wider world — the things that catalyze growth, build strength, and develop character. When you conduct all your communication through a digital device, you can carefully script everything you say instead of engaging in the dangerous dance of improvisation. When your parents are always close by to back you up, you’re never forced to figure things out on your own. The less experience you have in being independent, the less capable you become of escaping a life of dependence — a life that’s small, sequestered, and anxious. 

Get Your Son Out of His Bedroom

In reading about the statistics of how much less time young adults are engaging in face-to-face activities and thinking about the effects that may grow out of this cultural sea change, something Jon Tyson talked about in our podcast about “The 5 Shifts of Manhood” kept coming back to me.

When I asked Jon how to help boys step into mature manhood, one of the things he said was:

“You gotta get your son out of his room. You gotta get him out of his room.”

If boys are ever going to live a flourishing, ambitious, adventurous life — a life where they feel comfortable taking risks, relish being independent, and are able to focus less on themselves and genuinely care for others — then they have to be exposed to the energy of ambition, to the excitement of adventure, to the thrill of risks, to the satisfaction of self-efficacy, and to the challenges and joys of other people!

Everyone relishes experiences that happen in the real world more than those that are mediated through a screen; they just have to be given as many opportunities as possible to register and absorb this qualitative difference. 

As a dad (or other male mentor), you’re uniquely suited for the task of increasing the force that attracts a young man to venturing into the outside world. Since ancient times, it’s been recognized that mothers, on average, are more protective and have a harder time letting go of their sons than fathers do. A mother feels a dual impulse with her son; she wants to see him become independent and honorable, but she also wants to keep him close, as a child’s gain in independence simultaneously results in a loss of her maternal identity. Fathers feel a less conflicted pride in their sons growing up. This difference was actually best expressed in one of the greatest advertising campaigns of all time.

All traditional rites of passage included some kind of literal and ritualistic separation of a boy from his mother, as the father took on a greater role in helping him become a man.

Dads today should take an active role in helping expose their sons to the wider world. Invite your son into a bigger life. Take him along on work assignments if possible. Take him to do a service project with you. Take him on fun father/son activities — fishing, camping, going to a ball game. Encourage him to participate in activities that challenge him and get him outside the house, like sports. 

Both Mom and Dad can utilize family vacations as opportunities not only for rest and relaxation, but to broaden their kids’ horizons (daughters need this stuff too, of course). Show your children how big, beautiful, and interesting the world is. While on a trip, try new activities — hiking, skiing, surfing, rock climbing, etc. — that build skill, competence, and a general comfort with being uncomfortable. 

And, while it’s truly weird we’ve arrived in a cultural place where this is needed, parents should encourage their kids to hang out with their friends. If they’re debating whether to stay home or meet up with friends, or deciding whether to skip or attend a school dance, nudge them to go out. It’s normal to worry about the influence of their peers, and you may selfishly want them to hang out with you, but boys need the experience of gallivanting with a gang of buddies. They need to experience the joy of operating independently, outside the orbit of parental supervision. 

Hopefully, the more that boys get a taste of the excitements and satisfactions that can only be found beyond their bedroom walls, the more they’ll feel that an autonomous adulthood, where further such excitements and satisfactions can be had, is something worth striving for. 

For more advice on helping boys move into manhood, listen to our podcast with Jon Tyson:

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If you’re the dad of an elementary-aged kid, you’ll know that parent-teacher conferences are held a couple of times a year.

Perhaps because of their feeling of routine-ness, parents often kind of sleepwalk through these meetings. If they have a concern, they don’t think beforehand about how to bring it up productively. Or they simply don’t consider what they’d like to talk about until they’re stepping into the classroom, and when the teacher asks, “Do you have any questions for me?” they draw a blank.

I know I’ve typically approached conferences this way, and I’ve wondered what I could be doing to make more of these opportunities to meet with my children’s teachers. To get some tips on this front, I talked to Elle Fowler, an elementary school teacher here in Tulsa. Here’s what she shared.

Why You Should Attend Parent-Teacher Conferences

If you’re a dad with a busy work schedule, it may be tempting to relegate the responsibility of attending parent-teacher conferences to Mom. But you should try to be there whenever possible. 

Elle says the majority of fathers come to PTCs, even when the parents are divorced, and this number has seemed to increase over her 14-year career as dads have gotten more engaged with parenting generally. This is great news, as kids whose fathers are involved in their education do better in school than kids whose dads aren’t. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to the dads of daughters; girls whose fathers are involved with their education thrive more academically while feeling less anxiety about school.

As a dad who’s attended all his kids’ parent-teacher conferences, I’ve found them beneficial in parenting my children. Kids are at school seven hours a day, and what they get up to is kind of a black box. Children show a different side of themselves in the classroom, and a PTC can illuminate what that side is like. These meetings can highlight strengths you never noticed your kid had, deepening your appreciation for them. Or they can disclose a struggle you didn’t fully recognize because you see your kid through the tinted glasses of parental love. Either way, a parent-teacher conference can give you a third-party perspective that can help you get to know your child better and understand what they need to reach their potential. 

General Etiquette for Parent-Teacher Conferences

Be punctual. Respect the teacher’s and other parents’ time by arriving punctually to the conference and leaving on schedule. PTCs are typically scheduled in back-to-back blocks, and if you go over time, then the next conference will start and end late, as will the next. Don’t start a pile-up. If you need more time to talk, schedule a follow-up discussion for another day.

Dress nicely. Dress up a bit when attending a parent-teacher conference. It shows you respect education as a serious endeavor and teaching as a serious profession. You don’t have to wear a suit, but something in the smart-casual category like an Oxford and khakis works. My kids’ school has continued to offer the option of virtual conferences post-pandemic, and I don’t dress as nicely when the PTC takes place over Zoom, but I still try to not look like a slob.

Prepping for Parent-Teacher Conferences

Proper preparation is key to making the most of your parent-teacher conferences. By taking the time to gather relevant information and formulate thoughtful questions, you can ensure that the meeting is productive and addresses your concerns effectively. Here are some steps you can take to prepare for your upcoming conference:

Review your child’s academic work. Before the conference, review your child’s recent assignments, grades, and any feedback on that work the teacher provided. Take note of any areas where your child may be either struggling or excelling. If you have concerns about a specific assignment, write down what the assignment was and the score on it. “If you’re working with a teacher who sees 60+ students, they probably won’t know exactly what assignment you mean when you say something vague like ‘My kid got a bad grade on that test a few weeks ago.’ The more specific, the better,” Elle told me.

Talk with your child. Talk to your child about their experiences in school. If you’re going to a regular check-in conference, Elle recommends asking your kid the following questions:

• What’s something that’s going well at school that I can celebrate with your teacher? 
• Is there anything going on at school that your teacher and I can work on a plan to help you with?

If you’re going in for a conference that’s being scheduled because there is a problem, ask your child how they’re seeing the issue. “Sometimes as parents, we see a problem and think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a huge problem!’ but the child is not as affected by it,” Elle said. “So that gives us a kind of a recalibration for where we might want to go into that meeting and what our goals might be.”

Also, ask your child what they would change to resolve the problem. They might need to sit somewhere else in class so they’re not distracted as much, or maybe they need to work with another student more often. The more you can nudge your child to develop a solution, the more ownership they’ll feel for it and the more buy-in you’ll get.

Questions to Ask in a Parent-Teacher Conference

After doing a quick review of your kid’s academic work and talking to your child, take some time to develop some questions you want to bring up during your conference with their teacher. Elle recommends asking questions in three categories: academic progress, learning skills, and social-emotional development:

Academic Progress

• Where is my child excelling?
• What are the specific areas where my child may be struggling, and how can we support their improvement?
• Are there any resources or strategies you recommend for helping my child succeed in a subject?

Learning Skills

• Is my child turning things in on time? 
• Do they stay organized?
• When you get assignments, does it look like their best work? 
• When they’ve made a mistake on an assignment, do they revisit those mistakes? 

Social-Emotional Development

• How does my child interact with their peers?
• Does my child have friends?
• Are there any social or emotional challenges my child is facing?
• How does my child handle frustration or setbacks?
• Are there any opportunities for my child to develop their social skills further?

One thing Elle noted on questions about social-emotional development is that if you have questions or concerns about your child being bullied or the like, privacy regulations in many public schools prevent teachers from sharing information about children that aren’t your own.

“As a parent, you can share names and details, and those names and details are really, really helpful for teachers and for principals and administration to hear if you’re reporting things that have happened,” Elle said. “But teachers and administration cannot report back to you what’s happened to that other child. As a teacher, I can say, ‘Our handbook has consequences for these events that you’re welcome to read.’ Which is my hands-are-tied-way of saying, ‘The child is receiving consequences, but I can’t tell you about them because it’s a breach of privacy.’ It’s strange and can be frustrating, but it’s the system that some teachers have to work in.”

Lead With Curiosity, Rather Than Blame

If you have a concern about how your kid is doing in school, it can be tempting to come into the conference with guns blazing. But introducing the issue that way only creates defensiveness on both sides of the table and prevents the discussion from being as fruitful as it could be.

Instead, Elle recommends raising your concern using this framework: “I’m concerned about X. Are you concerned about X?”

Sometimes, something you think is a problem, isn’t a problem, and the above framework gives the teacher the chance to explain that what you’re worried about is actually developmentally appropriate, or something your kid has struggled with, but is making sufficient progress in. 

If your concern is also a concern for your child’s teacher, then the above framework allows them to affirm your concern and segue into what they’re currently doing to address it. If the teacher doesn’t explain what’s being done, follow up with “How can we work together to address this issue?”

Remember that you don’t know much about your kid’s school life, so rather than jumping to conclusions or making assumptions, give the teacher the opportunity to fill you in on needed context. At the same time, because the teacher doesn’t know much about your child’s home life, explain that side of things, and how it may be affecting how your kid shows up at school. 

Instead of focusing on blame or fault, approach the conversation with genuine curiosity and a commitment to exchanging information, fostering a collaborative partnership, and finding solutions. Remember that you and your child’s teacher are on the same team!

Follow-Up

The parent-teacher conference is not the end of the conversation; it’s the beginning of an ongoing partnership between you and the teacher. Elle recommends this parent-teacher conference follow-up:

Email the teacher. If a PTC involved a particularly meaty discussion, send a follow-up email to the teacher, thanking them for their time and summarizing the key points discussed during the conference. This email serves as a record of the agreed-upon action plans and ensures that both you and the teacher are on the same page moving forward.

Communicate with your child. Share the outcomes of the conference with your child. Let them know what was discussed, any action plans that were put in place, and how you will be supporting them. Make sure to pass along the positive things their teacher shared with you!

Schedule additional meetings, if needed. If you feel that further discussions or updates are necessary, don’t hesitate to schedule additional meetings with the teacher. Ongoing communication and collaboration are essential for supporting your child’s educational journey.

Parent-teacher conferences are a time to create a collaborative relationship with your child’s teacher. With a bit of prep, you can get the most out of these meetings and get back to work helping your kiddo be awesome. 

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When discussing the importance of fathers, the conversation often centers around their impact on sons. Which makes sense. Boys will more explicitly model their lives on their fathers’ example of masculinity and are greatly impacted by the male-to-male mentoring they do or don’t receive. 

But fathers also have an enormous impact on their daughters. 

From academic achievement to physical and mental health, fathers play a significant role in shaping their daughters’ lives and futures. 

Let’s take a look at five areas in which this influence works its effect:

1. Sense of Agency

Agency is the capacity to act in the world according to your desires. Agency is what allows us to shape our lives into what we want them to be. In general, men tend to have a higher sense of agency than women and are more assertive and comfortable with conflict.

Why do men have a higher sense of agency? It’s likely a mixture of biology and socialization. Higher testosterone levels in males contribute to agentic behaviors and impulses, like the drive to explore and strive for status. Layered on top of that is the tendency of cultures to socialize men to be more competitive and independent, and to socialize women to be more cooperative and nurturing.

Having a higher sense of agency comes with a lot of benefits. It helps people stave off anxiety and depression, advance in their career, and develop healthy relationships. It would serve both men and women to have a high sense of agency.

Dads have an outsized influence on their daughters’ sense of agency. Fathers are more likely than mothers to expose their daughters to novel and risky situations. In one study, for example, fathers were more likely than mothers to allow their three- and four-year-old daughters to play on a five-foot-high catwalk or walk across a three-foot-high beam. Dads also are more likely than mothers to encourage their daughters to stand up for themselves and think independently. 

So how can you help your daughter increase her sense of agency? Roughhouse with her for starters. That’s an agency booster. But beyond that, do stuff with your daughter. Take her on errands with you. Work on projects around the house together and teach her how to use your tools. Go on dad-and-daughter adventures where you take small risks. When you experience setbacks in your own life, model what it looks like to be a high-agency individual. All these things can help your daughter to be confident and proactive.

2. Physical Health

Dads have a big influence on their daughter’s health. In one study, it was found that the father’s, not the mother’s, total and percentage body fat was the best predictor of whether or not the couple’s daughter gained weight as she got older. Fathers also have an outsized effect on whether their daughter plays a sport in childhood. It’s dads (in general) who encourage their daughters to take up a sport, not moms. What’s more, it’s the father’s physical activity that has the most influence on a woman’s physical activity in adulthood. 

So what can you do to influence your daughter’s physical health? Again, roughhousing can help here. Encourage your daughter to get involved with sports. Take her on active activities like hiking, biking, kayaking, and so on. Help her develop a physical identity. Most importantly, model good physical health to her by moving regularly and eating right yourself. 

3. Mental Health

There’s been a lot of ink spilled lately about the rise of mental health problems among teenage girls. Dads can play a big role in mitigating mental health problems in their daughters. Strong and warm father-daughter relationships have been shown to stave off depression and anxiety in teenage girls, and this effect carries over into adulthood. The influence a dad has on his daughter’s sense of agency likely plays a significant role in this.

Body image issues are a big source of depression and anxiety among young women. Research suggests that dads dampen body image issues. Daughters with close and warm relationships with their fathers are less likely to have body image issues and more likely to report being happy with their bodies compared to girls who lack this connection with their dads.

Relatedly, teenage girls with a close relationship with their fathers are less likely to experience eating disorders. 

Simply being a caring presence in your daughter’s life can help mitigate the mental health issues facing young women today. Dads can provide a sense of stability and resilience to their children — the feeling that their home is a safe place where they are loved and protected. If you notice that your daughter is struggling emotionally, don’t just leave it to mom to tend to your daughter. Be proactive, lend a listening ear, and provide comfort and support. 

4. Academic Success

Girls who have supportive fathers in their lives tend to thrive more academically compared to girls lacking a supportive dad. Studies show that dads tend to encourage their daughters to push and challenge themselves academically more than moms do. Moreover, when dads regularly help their daughters with their homework, those daughters are less anxious about school. Mom’s help with homework has no significant impact on academic-related anxiety. 

The influence a dad has on a daughter’s academic success carries over into college. Daughters with close relationships with their fathers have higher grade point averages in college than those with poor father-daughter relationships.

Be an involved dad when it comes to your daughter’s schooling. Help her with homework. Attend parent-teacher conferences. Encourage her to push herself and praise her when she excels. 

5. Romantic Relationships

Fathers also influence their daughters’ romantic lives, including dating behaviors, sexual activity, and the quality of their relationships with men. Girls who have secure and supportive relationships with their fathers are are less likely to engage in early sexual activity and have a lower risk of teenage pregnancy. 

What’s more, daughters who have a positive relationship with their fathers are more likely to have emotionally intimate and fulfilling relationships with their boyfriends and future husbands. In fact, fathers generally have a greater impact on their daughters’ relationships with men than mothers do.

Conclusion

Fathers play a crucial role in shaping their daughters’ lives, influencing everything from their sense of agency to their romantic relationships as adults. If you’ve got a daughter, don’t discount your influence on her. Be a strong and loving presence in her life. Spend time with her and initiate meaningful conversations around life, school, and love. Remember, according to the research, you have a big role to play in raising a happy, cool, well-balanced adult.

Source for post: Father-Daughter Relationships: Contemporary Research and Issues by Linda Nielsen

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The parent-child relationship is unique.

Sometimes you’re looking at someone half your height and thirty years your junior and viscerally feel: “You’re my best buddy.”

But is it good to think of our children as friends?

It is. And it isn’t.

Friendships are based on equality.

Children relate to their parents as dependents.

Some parents, cognizant of this dependence, fret over forcing anything on their kids. They treat their children as peers, allowing them to make all of their decisions for themselves. 

But children, having only been alive a fourth of the time their parents have, lack the context to do so. They need grown-ups to act as guides who apply training wheels to their choices. Kids need the kind of admonishment and discipline that would be inappropriate to offer a friend, but serve as the vital structure that will someday allow them to stand on their own two feet.

While thinking of your child as a friend isn’t helpful in building their character, it is in building a bond.

Parents often worry about the job they’re doing, feeling like their relationship with their children is fundamentally different than every other kind. But when it comes to creating closeness, the same dynamics apply. 

If you had dinner with a friend nearly every night for years, and you spent that meal looking them in the eyes, asking about their day, and taking an interest in their interests, how close would your relationship be?

Very close.

If, in addition, you talked to this friend every night before bed, listening to their hopes and empathizing with their worries, how strong would your connection be?

Extremely strong.

Treat your child like a friend — in this way — and there’s a good chance that even when they’re grown, they’ll not only feel like a best buddy, but truly be one.

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You walk down your hallway and do a double-take.

At about the height that a six-year-old stands, in the chicken-scratch scrawl that a six-year-old uses, someone has written “PoOPy HEAd” in crayon on the wall. 

Your son is six years old, as tall as an average six-year-old, and enjoys saying phrases like “poopy head.”

Hmmm . . . using your keen Sherlock Holmesian detective skills, you deduce it was your son who graffitied the hallway. 

So you confront him about it.

“Hey Jeff, did you write poopy head on the wall?”

Jeff looks you dead in the eye: “I didn’t do that.”

“Are you sure? Because it looks like your handwriting.”

“Nope.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“No.”

Jeff’s well-acted protestations aside, you know he was the perpetrator. 

Now you’re ticked at him for writing on the wall and for lying to you about it. 

So you raise holy hell about both crimes.  

You send him to his room after harshly lecturing him on the importance of telling the truth. 

While he’s in there wailing and gnashing his teeth, you wonder, “Is my kid some kind of sociopathic liar? How can I make sure he doesn’t grow up to be a crook?”

Below we highlight research-backed advice on what to do when your kids lie to you and how to encourage them to grow up to be honest and upright.

The Good News About Childhood Lying

While catching your kid lying can feel like a gut punch that makes you doubt your parenting, it’s not necessarily as bad of a thing as you might think. Here’s some good news about childhood lying:

Lying is part of children’s cognitive development. If your kids are lying to you, then celebrate! They’re developing the cognitive skills needed to become fully functioning human beings. 

Lying requires having theory of mind. Theory of mind is the ability to understand that other people have minds of their own and don’t think/know the same things that you think/know. It allows you to step into other people’s shoes.

When you lie, you understand that the person you’re lying to can’t read your thoughts and doesn’t know stuff you know. So if your kid ate a cookie when you weren’t looking, theory of mind allows her to know that you don’t know that she ate the cookie. So when you ask her if she ate it, she sees an opportunity to get away with her crime and lies to say she didn’t. 

Children start developing a theory of mind around three or four years old. Until then, infants and toddlers think that whatever they’re thinking/feeling/perceiving is what others are thinking/feeling/perceiving too. It’s why when my son Gus was eighteen months old, he would “hide” by simply covering his eyes with his hands. He thought that because he couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see him, even though he was sitting right in front of me in his high chair. While undoubtedly cute, it was a big fail in terms of theory of mind.

Childhood development specialists notice that most kids start lying around age three because that’s when their theory of mind is beginning to turn on. As they get older, it develops more and more.

While it can be a bummer to have your kids lie to you, understand that it’s a sign that their minds are developing as they should. The same theory of mind that allows them to lie about breaking the lamp will one day enable them to become compassionate and empathetic adults. 

Your kid likely isn’t a pathological liar. While it might seem like your kid lies to you a lot, especially in those middle childhood years that span ages five to eleven, you don’t need to fear that your child is a sociopath. 

Research by Victoria Talwar, a psychologist who specializes in childhood deception, shows that most kids who lie a lot in childhood still grow up to be honest adults. Honesty is something that increases as people get older. 

So if your kid is lying, don’t freak out. It’s probably not setting a pattern for life. 

How Do I Know If My Kid Is a Pathological Liar?

Pathological lying is defined as:

“a persistent, pervasive, and often compulsive pattern of excessive lying behavior that leads to clinically significant impairment of functioning in social, occupational, or other areas; causes marked distress; poses a risk to self or others; and occurs for longer than six months.”

If your kid’s frequent lying is getting them into trouble at school and in other areas of life, it might be a pathological problem. Moreover, pathological lying is often associated with other issues like anxiety and conduct and personality disorders. 

If your kid is lying a lot and it’s impairing their life, and you see other behavioral issues related to the lying, consider getting professional help.

But if your kid lies, even fairly often, but is for the most part an otherwise well-adjusted kid, you probably shouldn’t sweat it too much. Just focus on consistently disciplining them so they learn to tell the truth.

What to Do When Your Kid Lies to You

Stay calm. If you blow your gasket every time your kids do something wrong, they’ll be motivated to lie about their mistakes to avoid experiencing your wrath. So when you’re chastising your children for a misdeed, be firm yet dispassionate with your discipline. 

Don’t give them the option to lie. If you know your kid did something wrong, don’t give them the opportunity to lie by asking, “Did you do X?” It’s like entrapment. Instead of making the initial misdeed the issue, you turn it into a test to see if they’re going to lie or not. Your kid will likely feel backed into a corner and will lie to avoid the negative consequences of the initial misdeed. 

Instead of asking, “Did you do X?” say, “I see on the Screen Time app that you were using your iPad at 4 a.m. this morning. Consequently, you’ll have no screens for the rest of the week.”

In cases where you think your kid did something wrong, but you can’t prove it (e.g., you think your kid snatched a $10 bill off the counter, but it’s also possible you lost it yourself), and your child denies the crime, persistently badgering them with “Are you lying to me?!” isn’t likely to get you anywhere. Your kid will just get defensive and double down on their innocence. And you don’t want to continually accuse your child of being a liar when it’s possible they’re telling the truth. Emphasize the importance of being honest even when it’ll lead to negative consequences; but if your kid doesn’t confess, sometimes you just have to let things go.

Don’t call your kid a liar. You don’t want to label your kid a liar. You don’t want a discrete misdeed to become a general, globalized label that your child may absorb into their identity. Concentrate on the particular instance of lying at hand and treat it as a behavior, not a pervasive flaw.  

Establish a clear, consistent consequence for lying. When a child plays a video game, he knows that if he makes X misstep, he gets Y penalty; a mistake dings his life-o-meter without fuss or variability. 

Parent in a like manner: Instead of allowing the severity and consistency of your punishments for misbehavior to vary according to your particular mood and/or how effectively your child pleads for clemency, establish a clear consequence for lying in advance; then, when your kid lies, dispassionately implement the consequence. The type of consequences you establish will vary depending on your child’s unique circumstances. The key is to keep them consistent.

Treat the misdeed and the lie covering the misdeed as separate issues. The most common reason kids lie is to avoid taking responsibility for the negative consequences of their misbehavior. One of the reasons most parents feel so concerned when their children lie, is that a sense of personal responsibility is something they very much want their children to develop.

To help inculcate responsibility-taking when disciplining your children for lying, be sure to separate the consequences for their initial misdeed from the consequences for lying about the initial misdeed. In the heat of the moment, the punishments for the former and the latter often get mixed together, and the child receives one blanket punishment. Instead of bundling their crimes, be clear that they are receiving X punishment for their initial misdeed, and Y punishment for lying about that misdeed. This separation drives home the idea that every decision has consequences. And by emphasizing to your child that they are receiving a punishment for lying on top of the punishment for the initial misdeed, it discourages them from lying in the future. 

Something we always try to emphasize when we catch one of our kids lying is that there’s no reason to follow the making of one mistake with the making of another; it only makes things worse. 

Emphasize the importance of truth-telling. You don’t need to give a twenty-minute lecture about the importance of honesty, but when your kids lie to you, spend a few minutes discussing the importance of telling the truth. Talk about the centrality of honesty to good character. Talk about the centrality of honesty to strong relationships — that if they lie, you can’t trust them, and you want to be able to trust them.

Let your kids know that you expect them to be honest with you in the future. The goal of discipline isn’t just to punish bad behavior but to encourage kids to grow in character and do the right thing next time. To best nudge them in that direction, don’t just tell them that honesty is important — explain why it’s important. 

How to Raise Honest Kids

Walk the talk. Kids imitate what they see. If you want them to be honest, be honest yourself. If you’re always going on about the importance of honesty, but then your children overhear you lying to get the under-age-12 price on a ticket into an amusement park, they’re going to pick up on your hypocrisy. Your actions will always speak louder than your words. 

Talk about honesty. Devote some of your weekly family meetings to discussing the importance of telling the truth. Read stories or watch movies that grapple with honesty. Go through hypotheticals with your kids that involve the temptation to lie. The more your kids stew in the idea of integrity, the more likely they are to develop it.

Acknowledge and recognize honest behavior in your kids. You get more of what you reward. So if you want your kids to be more honest, recognize and praise their honest behavior. Researchers point out that positive feedback is more effective than negative feedback in inculcating good habits. So as much as possible, aim to “catch” your kids being truthful. When they fess up to a mistake of their own accord, tell them that you really appreciate their honesty. And remind them that, while you still have to enact a consequence for their misdeed, their punishment would have been worse if they’d lied about it.

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With our archives now 3,500+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2014.

Throughout this year we’ve been running a series on how to father with intentionality and create a positive family culture.

Whenever we’ve written on this topic, we invariably get comments from some men who have decided to opt out of the marriage and kids route altogether. Often (though not always) the root of these commenters’ decision to steer clear of family life is their own personal experience: they come from families where home was not a haven. Arguing, infidelity, a lack of love, and ultimately divorce are what these men know of family life. Maybe they were even abused as children by one of their parents. Why even get married or start a family if that’s how it’s going to be?

And they have a point. The research strongly suggests that marriage and divorce patterns get passed along from generation to generation. If you come from a family of divorce, your attitude about marriage is less likely to be positive, and if you do get married, the chances your marriage will end in divorce are statistically higher than for folks who come from intact families. Also, research shows that people who were abused by their parents as children are much more likely to abuse their own children. It’s sort of a fulfillment of the biblical idea that curses persist through many generations.

But those studies only tell half the story.

Other research suggests that you’re not destined for the divorce courts and multiple Christmases just because you and/or your spouse come from divorced families.

In fact, the research shows that individuals can consciously choose to break the cycle of unhappy home life by becoming what marriage and family scholar Carlfred Broderick calls a “transitional character.” A transitional character, according to Broderick, is:

A person, who, in a single generation, changes the entire course of a lineage. The changes might be for good or ill, but the most noteworthy examples are those individuals who grow up in an abusive, emotionally destructive environment and who somehow find a way to metabolize the poison and refuse to pass it on to their children. They break the mold. They refute the observation that abused children become abusive parents, that the children of alcoholics become alcoholic adults, that ‘the sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of children to the third and fourth generation.’ Their contribution to humanity is to filter the destructiveness out of their own lineage so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives.

I love the idea of being a transitional character — of forging a new, stronger link in your family lineage. Instead of being tethered to a string of weak links, you can proactively create a new chain and a new story for your family — one that’s much more positive.

I’d argue that being a transitional character applies to more than just family stability. Even if you didn’t come from a family of divorce, maybe you want to be more involved with your own kids than your dad was with you and your siblings. You don’t want your life to mimic the song “Cat’s in the Cradle.”

Or maybe you have a family history filled with overweight and out-of-shape men who’ve keeled over from a heart attack at age 50. You can be a transitional character by leading your family into a life of health and fitness, and sticking around to see your grandkids get married. If debt troubles have plagued your family for generations, be the first person that shifts your family history towards the path of financial responsibility.

Being a transitional character means looking at any vice or problem that’s been a common thread throughout your family history and deciding: “It stops with me.”

With that said, becoming a transitional character is often easier said than done. You’re fighting against the stream of deeply ingrained patterns that you picked up in childhood and throughout your formative years. Becoming a transitional character requires you to completely transform how you see and respond to your world and environment. It’s a difficult task fraught with missteps and backsliding.

But it can be done.

Below we provide some research-backed suggestions on how to forge a new chain in your family history by becoming a transitional character:

1. See yourself as a transitional character.

The initial step in becoming a transitional character is simply to see yourself as one, and to make that mantle part of your identity. This first requires recognizing that you’re part of a negative family story. It necessitates the humility to admit that without intentional, concerted effort on your part, there’s a good chance you’ll continue that negative narrative. We like to think of ourselves as capable of overcoming our parent’s influence, but it’s surprisingly hard. We often think we’re nothing like them, only to see the old familial traits suddenly, and dishearteningly, emerge in us during certain periods of our lives. Certainly it’s a truism of parenthood that you’ll eventually catch yourself doing or saying the exact same thing to your own kid that your parents said or did to you. It’s one of those moments of anagnorisis when you realize, “I’m just like my father!”

Once your recognize the obstacles you have to surmount, mentally and emotionally anoint yourself as the transitional character in your family. Tell yourself that things will be different with you.

2. Imagine your posterity.

To give yourself motivation on those days when you feel like being a transitional character is too much work, take five for a quick visualization exercise. First, imagine the negative effects you could pass down to your kids, and their kids, if you don’t uphold this new set of standards. For example, if you come from a family where most everyone is obese, imagine your kids married and overweight, and your obese grandchildren wheezing as they try to play, being bullied for their size, and getting a diagnosis of childhood diabetes. Now wipe that disconcerting scene from your mind and instead imagine your grown children in another way: fit and happily looking on as their own healthy kids energetically romp around the backyard.

When you get overwhelmed about the effort it takes to reverse negative familial patterns, take the time to think about the kind of life you want for your posterity. Will they be telling stories to their children and grandchildren about how just three generations ago divorce, poverty, obesity, and addiction were the family norm, but that it all changed with you?

3. Marry someone from an intact family.

According to Brad Wilcox, The Director the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, research shows that if you come from a broken home, your chances of divorce decline if you marry someone from an intact family. Someone whose parents are still married has likely picked up some positive habits for marriage and parenting. And by spending time with your in-laws after you get hitched, you’ll also get to see a model of how an intact family operates.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you make your potential spouse’s broken family a deal breaker (you wouldn’t want her to use the same standard on you!), but it’s something to keep in mind as you date. If both you and your spouse come from families of divorce, recognize that you may have to work harder at building a strong marriage than couples where both partners, or even just one of them, come from intact families.

4. Be intentional!

Remember, good families don’t just happen! Not even for folks who come from intact families. If you’re serious about creating a positive family culture, you have to be intentional about it. As social scientist Scott Stanley says in his book Fighting for Your Marriage, we either “decide or glide” in our relationships and families. Gliding gets you in trouble; deciding takes you where you want to go. Following the path of least resistance is not enough — you have to be proactive!

Work to put in place the family culture you’ve always wanted by formulating a family mission statement, establishing family traditions, and making shared meals a priority.

5. Distance yourself from toxic relationships.

If creating a strong marriage and family is your goal, but your parents or friends love to sit around and carp about how horrible and dumb those institutions are, you might want to consider distancing yourself from those relationships. Distancing doesn’t necessarily mean cutting these loved ones off completely. It just means being aware of the possible negative influence these gloom n’ doomers can have on your own familial goals and establishing boundaries with them to limit that influence in your life.

6. Surround yourself with positive examples.

Don’t just limit the time you spend around negative folks — proactively seek out the company of those who have strong and happy marriages and families. Watch what they do in their homes and emulate their best practices. Share what you’re struggling with and don’t be afraid to ask for advice when you feel like you need it. Simply rub shoulders with happy couples and families whenever you can; you’ll be amazed by the amount of good, reorienting vibes you’ll absorb via relational osmosis. 

7. Hold fast to your goal by regularly reading things geared towards helping you become a better husband and father.

It’s easy to have good goals — harder to keep them. We get busy and stressed and lose track of the direction we want to go and the men we want to become. We must regularly remind ourselves of these things by reading as much as we can on becoming better husbands and fathers and creating a positive family culture. We must then “hold fast” to what we have learned by frequently revisiting those books or articles. Becoming a transitional character (or a better man, period) is a never-ending process. We need to constantly remind ourselves of best practices so we can stay on track.

Read the other posts in the series: 

• The Importance of Creating a Family Culture
• How and Why to Create a Family Mission Statement
  
  
• The Importance of Establishing Family Traditions
  
  
• 60+ Family Tradition Ideas
• How to Plan and Lead a Weekly Family Meeting
• How to Get the Most Out of Family Dinners

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A lot of young men today struggle in finding their footing in adulthood. They feel lost, directionless, and unsure of who they are and how to confidently and competently navigate the world.

Part of the reason for this is that most young men today lack something which was once a part of nearly every culture in the world, but has now almost entirely disappeared: a rite of passage.

My guest today didn’t want his son to flounder on the way to maturity, nor to miss out on having an initiation into manhood, so he set out to create a 6-year journey for him that would help him move from boy to man. His name is Jon Tyson, and he’s the author of The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. Today on the show, Jon unpacks the components of the years-long journey into manhood he created for his son, beginning with how he brainstormed those components by doing “The Day Your Son Leaves Home” exercise. We then discuss how old Jon’s son was when he started his rite of passage and why it began with him having a “severing dinner” with his mom. We get into what his rite of passage consisted of, from the kickoff ceremony to the challenges, experiences, trips, and daily rituals Jon used to impart values and teach his son the “5 Shifts of Manhood.” Jon shares how moving his son’s focus from being a good man, to being good at being a man, helped him get remotivated to continue the process, why his rite of passage included a gap year after high school, and how Jon celebrated the end of his son’s journey into becoming a man. We also discuss whether Jon did something similar with his daughter. We end our conversation with some key principles any dad can use to start intentionally helping their kids become well-rounded individuals who can confidently step out on their own and into the world.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Importance of Fathers
• AoM Article: The Importance of Male Rites of Passage
• AoM Article: Male Rites of Passage From Around the World
• AoM Article & Podcast: Man’s Need for Ritual
• AoM Series on the origins, elements, and future of manhood
• AoM Article: The 7 Habits — Begin With the End in Mind
• AoM Article: The 3 Families Every Young Man Needs to Grow Up Well
• James Hollis
• AoM Article: Carry the Fire
• Art of Manliness’ Carry the Fire Zippo Lighter
• AoM Article: What Is Manliness?
• AoM Podcast #527 With Richard Rohr
• The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip and Dan Heath
• The Way of Men by Jack Donovan
• AoM Podcast #49 With Jack Donovan
• AoM Series on the Four Archetypes of the Mature Masculine
• AoM Article: 100 Skills Every Man Should Know
• AoM Article: 80+ Quotes on Men & Manhood

Connect With Jon Tyson

• Primal Path
• Jon on Twitter
• Jon on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. A lot of young men today struggle in finding their footing in adulthood. If you’re lost, directionless and unsure of who they are and how to confidently and competently navigate the world. Part of the reason for this is that most young men today lack something which was once part of nearly every culture in the world, but has now almost entirely disappeared: A rite of passage. My guest today didn’t want his son to flounder on the way to maturity nor miss out on having an initiation into manhood, so he set out to create a six-year journey for him that would help him move from boy to man. His name is Jon Tyson, and he’s the author of The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. Today on the show, Jon impacts the components of the years-long journey into manhood he created for his son, beginning with how he brainstormed these components by doing the day-your-son-leaves-home exercise.

We then discuss how old Jon’s son was when he started his rite of passage and why it began with him having a severing dinner with his mom. We get into what his rite of passage consisted of, from the kick-off ceremony to the challenges, experiences, trips and daily rituals Jon used to impart values, teach his son the five shifts of manhood. Jon shares how moving his son’s focus from being a good man to being good at being a man helped him get re-motivated to continue the process, why his rite of passage included a gap year after high school and how Jon celebrated the end of his son’s journey into becoming a man. We also discuss whether Jon did something similar with his daughter. We end our conversation with some key principles any dad can use to start intentionally helping their kids become well-rounded individuals who can confidently step out on their own and into the world. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/passage.

And away we go. Alright, Jon Tyson, welcome to the show.

Jon Tyson: Good day, mate. How are you? Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: So you got a book out called The Intentional Father: A Practical Guide to Raise Sons of Courage and Character. And in this book, you walk readers through on how you developed and carried out a years-long rite of passage into manhood for your son. So let’s talk about this. When did you first get the idea of doing this sort of… This was involved. This started… This was years long, right? Started when he became a teenager, went through… Till he left the house. When did you come up with this idea?

Jon Tyson: I think the first moment it really hit me was driving back from the doctor when they told me, “Hey, do you wanna know if your son’s a boy or a girl?” And I said, obviously, “It’s a boy.” And I just had this profound sense of being overwhelmed that I personally did not have what it took to help my son become a man. I got married young and faced all the challenges of my own inadequacy, dealing with the complications of life, and I thought, “I have got to do better for my son.” And that’s where the idea was born. So I think another key moment, I was meeting with a local faith leader, and he was talking about the way their community helped young men move from adolescence to manhood, and I thought, “I don’t have anything like that, and I have got to build something like that.” Yeah, so very, very early on, and I spent about a decade reading, trying to figure out how to do it.

Brett McKay: Did you have something like that in your own life when you were a boy transitioning to manhood? Did you get a rite of passage?

Jon Tyson: I had absolutely nothing. I mean, zero. So I was working from a pretty big deficit, and I think a lot of dads are. A lot of folks out there sort of feel there’s a hole in their life, and they’re trying to figure out how to catch up, fill that and then do something better for their own kids.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think a lot of men are like that. They didn’t have that experience but they want it for their own sons, so they’re trying to give their sons the experience that they didn’t have.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: And something you start off in the book talking about is the research. You’ve done a lot of research about what happens when boys don’t have fathers, don’t have involved fathers. What does the research say as to what happens to boys when they lack a strong father figure?

Jon Tyson: Well, it’s actually very, very clear. Sort of the go-to research most people reference is from fatherhood.org, but it’s basically what you think. Kids are four times more likely to live in poverty, more likely to suffer emotional behavioral problems, higher levels of risky and aggressive behavior, two times the risk of infant mortality which is crazy, more likely to go to prison, only one in five inmates grew up in a home where their father was present, twice as likely to be involved in early sexual activity. So the presence of a dad in a home makes an incredible difference. With all of our conversations about justice in the world today, I don’t know why this one doesn’t get more attention, because one of the greatest cultural advantages that someone could have in life is a present, loving father figure. So yeah, the impact is massive.

Brett McKay: Well, and besides, you’re trying to move beyond just having a present, involved dad. Your ideal of a good dad is an intentional father, where a father intentionally thinks about walking their sons through an initiation process. What do you think men lack when they transition into adulthood without having almost like a ritual to carry them into manhood?

Jon Tyson: Well, I think there’s some kind of deep, internal inadequacy. There’s some sense of a desire to bless, pass on, and help, but they don’t have a source to get it from. So I think there’s a lot of confusion. I think there’s a lot of pain. Our culture has gotten rid of most of the sort of life passages other than formal education, and so there’s a lot of people walking around really wondering, “Am I even a man?” When are you a man? When you lose your virginity? The first time you drink alcohol? When you get your first paycheck? When you leave home? No one seems to know when manhood is conferred on them, and then how they distribute it to other people. So yeah, I think there’s a hole in the soul of most men and they’re seeking and striving to catch up with it.

Brett McKay: And something you talk about in the book, one way men often fill that hole is they create self-initiations for themselves.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. You see this… Young people… I mean, you obviously remember this. When you hit puberty, the whole world changes. Your body is filled with testosterone, you got chemicals pumping, you got all of this energy. And the number one thing you’re trying to figure out what to do with it is, how do you channel this in a life-giving rather than destructive way? And that’s what these rites of passage historically were designed to do, to create guard rails, so the gift of male energy could be channeled for the good of the community and the man. Without those guard rails, you see all the damage we see in our world today. Without initiation, young men will seek to do something with their energy that confers a sense of confidence and blessing.

So, whether it’s risky behavior, whether it’s underaged drinking, whether it is sexual behavior or whatever, you’ve basically got young men saying, “Help me figure out what to do with this energy.” And when you look at some of the other rites of passage that other cultures have had, they are… Some of ’em are harrowing. And we would probably take kids away from parents who did some of these ancient rites of passage. They can sound kind of barbaric. But when you look at the levels of anxiety with our young people today, depression with young men, the challenges that teenage boys face, our lack of initiation at scale is more damaging than the initiation cultures, no matter how intense they were, of other societies. So, yeah, I’m a big believer that we have to reclaim rites of passage, create guard rails, so that male energy can be channeled for the good of society. And that’s definitely what I’m trying to address in the book.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that… The idea of… This is… The idea is to channel male energy or masculine energy. And it’s one of the analogies I’ve used throughout the years when I’ve tried to explain difference between masculinity and manliness. Masculinity is just that energy and vigor that’s borne through testosterone, right?

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: And then manliness is a culture that you use to direct that energy, or manhood is a culture that you direct that energy. So it’s kind of like electricity. Masculinity is electricity. You create a culture of manliness or manhood to funnel that energy. But if you don’t have any wires that’s directing that masculine energy, it becomes dangerous.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, definitely. Totally agree. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk about… You had this idea, your son was born, you’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna… I wanna create an initiation for him, to give him things that I didn’t have. And so when you started this planning process, you went through this exercise you call, the-day-your-son-leaves-home exercise. Walk us through that. What kinda questions are you asking yourself as you guide yourself through this thought process?

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I got the idea from Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, where it talks about, Begin with the end in mind. And it has that exercise where you pretend it’s your funeral, and then you go back and sort of ask yourself the question, “What sort of life and legacy do I wanna leave?” And I thought, that’s a great framework to apply to a ton of different areas of life. And I thought, I’m gonna apply this to the day where I send my son off to either college or some sort of gap year or whatever. And I did… I thought about this when he was really young. And I basically just worked my way backwards, try to keep that day very, very vivid and real in my heart, and then ask a series of questions to design this pathway for him. The first one was like, What do I want my son to know? I want him to be a man of wisdom. I want him to be able to navigate the complexities of life. Number two, Who do I want my son to be? And this was about his moral, ethical and character formation. Then, What do I want my son to be able to do? And this is sort of skill acquisition. A man should be able to do stuff, step in a room and add value through skill acquisition. And then, What experiences do I need to design to make this happen? With all the best intentions in the world, without a conscious pathway and designing experiences where these things are developed, it’s never gonna be there.

So, yeah, I basically worked backwards. And just like you do with a college degree, sort of you say, “Hey, in order to get a degree, you’re gonna have to do X amount of classes, and it’s gonna have to either be a two-year associates or a four-year or a graduate degree.” I just worked backwards, starting at around age 13 when he was hitting puberty, and then worked it out till he was 18, and then created a pathway around knowledge and character and skill development and the experiences to help him do that. And then one of the things I did was to basically ask the question, Who can help me with this? I’m a big believer that dads are fundamental in a young man’s formation. But we’re living in a world where a lot of people don’t have dads or step dads or they’re asking the question about mentoring. And so I sort of came up with this idea of building a tribe or a cohort of fathers who do this together, and then coming up, with those dads, with an asset map. And sort of everybody puts in the middle of the room, What assets do you have available in your life? Someone may say, “Hey, we have a lake house.” Someone may say, “I got a second car, and I’m willing to let the boys learn to drive in it.” Someone may say, “Hey, I’ve got a series of key relationships in my industry, and I can… ” Or that, “I’ve got access to some cool sporting events.” And then you sort of start dreaming from there.

So it was like a big white board exercise. And then I worked my way backwards, and that was how I basically designed what I call the Primal Path, which is the sort of six-year journey I came up with.

Brett McKay: No, the-day-your-son-leaves-home exercise is really powerful. I went through it through my head and trying to imagine what my son… He’s 11 right now, and imagine when he’s 18, and he’s leaving the roost. It’s just… It really gets you…

Jon Tyson: It’s heavy. Yeah.

Brett McKay: It’s a gut punch. You’re just like… And you wanna know, like, What is he gonna be like? What do I want him to be like?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: And I like this idea of developing an asset map. So it’s… You get the idea of what… The things that you want your son to know, understand, be able to do. But then try to figure out, Okay, what do I have at my disposal to make that happen? And not just things, but, Who are the other people in my life that can help me make this happen? I think that was… I loved how you focused on that in making this a community project. Oftentimes, when I think… When I hear dads talk about, “I wanna do a rite of passage for my son,” it’s just him and their son. That’s fine. But I think something… There’s a power when you bring other men into the process as well.

Jon Tyson:Yeah. If you put too much pressure on a dad… No dad is gonna be a perfect father. And so to put all that psychic pressure on a dad can be overwhelming, but to distribute that through a community of men where a father or a mentor plays a primary role, but is surrounded by this cast of other sort of like wise, passionate, helpful men, I think that is a real gift. And I think it’s actually something that young men ache for. Why is there such devotion to teams, team sports, having coaches around? It’s ’cause we need that sense of community and belonging as we grow and develop. So it was very important for me, not just to be, my son and I, but it was like my son and I and a cohort of other guys walking through this.

Brett McKay: Well, I think too, part of the… What you’re trying to do in an initiation or rite of passage is help the boy cut themselves off in a way from their family. So if it’s just the dad, that’s a problem. That’s gonna be hard to do. ‘Cause if you’re always there in the process, it’s hard to cut yourself off away from your father. But if you have another man there, you can have those periods where you can experience that. And I’ve noticed in my own life, I look back in my own life, my dad was always there and he taught me a lot of important things. But I remember, it really… Like a lot of times, oftentimes, the things that he told me or he modeled hit home when there was another man that wasn’t my father…

Jon Tyson: Yeah, totally agree.

Brett McKay: Showing me that. Okay. So you came with this idea what you wanted your son to be like, then you did… You started off an initial ceremony, but it was with your wife. It was mom that kick-started this thing off. What’s… That’s… I think that a lot of guys think, what’s going on there? Why’d you do that?

Jon Tyson: Well, that was interestingly enough, the most controversial piece of this period. And this is the place I get the most feedback. Just to take a little half step back, James Hollis who was I think the president of the Jungian society, he’s written a ton of books on midlife, on pathways, on stage development and theory. He basically said all societies have a six-step process of walking boys through adolescence into manhood, and one of those stages is what he calls the death of childhood thinking.

And it’s an environment where you’ve gotta be cut off from the primary influences of childhood in order to enter liminal space. And one of the things that a lot of societies did was consciously severed an overemphasized bond between mother and child, so that he could learn to be formed by the community of men. So I did what I called a severing dinner, which the publisher reduced down to a directional dinner, which sounded less threatening. And it was basically, I talked my wife into doing this, and my wife’s an absolute legend. She’s an incredible woman. And I said,” Hey, look, I need Nate not to shrink back to you for comfort, but I need you to push him back to me for formation and for challenge.” And so she took him out for a dinner to his favorite restaurant. Even though I’m from Australia, she took him to Outback. It’s a cliche, but it is what it is. [chuckle] And he’s at Outback steakhouse and then she gave him a series of gifts.

And then, I come from a faith background, so she prayed a prayer of blessing over him, sort of like an important marking moment. And then she said to him, “Hey, I’m your mother. I love you. I’ll always be here for you and I’ll care for you, but you need to be handed to your father to learn how to become a man. This is gonna be hard. It’s gonna be a challenge, and you’re gonna want to come back to me to ease and find comfort for the discomfort and challenges you’re facing. And I want you to know I’m gonna push you back to your dad and I’m not gonna nurture your immaturity.” And that was a really powerful moment. Now, to fast forward several years, when I was with my son closing out our journey together, I said to him, “Hey, Nate, I’m getting quite a bit of pushback on the dinner that you did with mom.” And he said, “No, no, no, no, you have to include that.” He said, “I cannot put into words how psychologically powerful that was for me, to realize I was entering this journey primarily being formed by men.” And he was like, “That jump-started this whole thing in my heart that I was actually entering into a different stage together.” So, yeah, it began with my wife and then sort of moved to a formal initiation ceremony on a beach off the coast of New York City.

Brett McKay: And what did that ceremony look like? Who was there and what did you do?

Jon Tyson: So I basically got three other dads together. I’ve been in New York city for the last 17 years. So, it was a few other dads who were my son’s closest friends, and basically cast this vision for him about building this pathway from adolescence into manhood. And then we designed an initiation ceremony. So we hyped it up for a few months, so they’d be a little nervous and also excited. And then when the day came, when all the boys had turned 13, this is late summer, we took them out to the beach and sat them in the sand and gathered around, told them a series of stories, shared some of our own personal lessons and learning. And then sort of tried to put… To say it in a good way, sort of inspire them and paint a picture of what was coming, and put the fear of God in them about how hard this was gonna be.

So there was sort of like that anticipatory terror. And then they ran into the water sort of like a religious baptism into this journey, dying to their old ways of childhood. And then, rising into this journey. And then we took them to Coney Island where they played a bunch of games together. And that was the kickoff. I then gave my son some gifts. I’m a big believer in the power of artifacts. And there’s something potent of one generation passing on something to the next generation that they can handle and know that they’re in a part of a continuing story. So I gave my son a really strong leather journal, I gave him a really nice pen. And then along the way, a whole series of gifts to sort of like mark it out and get along. I had this vision before I started where I wanted my son to start on the coast of New York. And I wanted his journey to end on the coast of Spain. And there’s a little town called Finisterre, and it’s a place where pilgrims, after they do this long hike, leave behind something at the end of their pilgrimage. And I had planned to sort of like go into the ocean in New York and go into the ocean in Spain. And so I had it planned to bookend and so that’s why it was done at the beach, and that’s why water was an important part of that.

Brett McKay: You were thinking way… You were thinking with the end in mind, again going back to Stephen Covey.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And when he leaves home, I really just… And this is one thing I would encourage dads or mentors to do. A lot of times men get into the workplace and they have…

They’re casting vision. They’re thinking abut sales or strategy or how to build things out, how to take ground, and they’ve got a ton of energy and gifts of vision casting, and that sort of stuff. But when it comes to their own kids we don’t apply any of the skills we have in our jobs to our parenting. And, if you were to put me on like a strength finder test, strategic would be number two for me. So I was like, “Hey, I’m a pretty strategic person. Why not apply this to fatherhood and then build this out?” So yeah, I had thought through this journey and tried to figure out the core components of it, and that certainly took away a lot of the panic and fear, even though there still was a ton of that being a dad.

Brett McKay: So when do you think a son should start the rite of passage? Like how do you know that they’re ready?

Jon Tyson: I think, universally through history, it’s sort of around the age of 13 or so. And I don’t know if that is… I don’t know if there’s anything culturally specific around that. Certainly not in our world anymore. Turning 13, I guess you’re a teenager, but that’s not that big a deal. I think it’s more connected to puberty. It’s when your body’s beginning to change. It’s when testosterones coming in. It’s when you start to think about sexuality. It’s when you start to think about your strength. It’s when competition really sets in. That’s when you start thinking about even a sense of vocation. You stop wanting to be the things you say when you’re four or five, and you’ve got a bit more of a realistic sense of where it is. You’re getting into sports or into academics in a new way. And so I think, again, it’s about that male energy. You’re trying to figure out “What do I do with this?” It can be very, very confusing and disorienting energy too. So right around the time this is happening within you, you want a community of men to come around you and to tell you the energy is good. It’s a gift. It must be channeled the right way and here is the path. So yeah. Universally, it seems to be sort around 13, around the age of puberty.

Brett McKay: Okay. So your son does the ceremony with his mom. You have the initiation ceremony with his friends and some other dads at the beach. The first part of this initiation, year’s long initiation process, was you actually took your son back home where you grew up. Why did you do that? What was the point of this?

Jon Tyson: Well, I mean, if I could sum up modern culture in one phrase, it would be this, project self. Project self. We live in a world that’s telling you all the time, “You are the center of everything.” Narcissism is at epidemic proportions in our world today. And particularly when you’re a teenager, you can be pretty inwardly focused. It is a confusing time. And you can think that there’s nothing outside of yourself and that there’s nothing that mattered before you showed up. And I wanted my son to have a bigger picture of life. I wanted my son to realize what shaped me, what was gonna be shaping him, and I wanted him to step into sort of a family narrative. Various family traditions, some ethnic, some religious, record family trees for different reasons. I happen to have a cousin who was a history buff, and has got a PhD in history, and he traced our family line back to the 10th century. And so he presented me like this hundreds of pages of book of our family story. And, I mean the whole thing, family crest, family mottos, it was amazing. And so, I presented that to my son, “Hey, you’re a part of a long line of Tyson men and this is what it means.” And then I wanted him to see where I grew up and what it was like for me to develop my own values.

So I took him back to Australia where I grew up, I’m from a city called Adelaide, and basically had him go through the places that formed the values of my life so that when I talked about something, he’d knew where it was. I wanted him to have a context for the story that he was stepping into. And I think without… Alastair McIntyre said this, “We can only ask the question, what am I to do if I can answer the previous question, what stories am I a part of? Or what story or stories am I a part of?” And so if you’re gonna figure out your role you’ve gotta figure out the story that you’re in, and I really felt it was important to give my son the sense of continuity and history so he could understand the story that he was extending.

Brett McKay: Now, I think that’s important. I think another way you could sum up modern life is lack of context. A lot of people were just… You’re kind of thrown into this milieu where it’s just, you’re getting bombarded by all these different stories, and you don’t have a story that you’re embedded in. And so, you’re disoriented. And I think telling your kid like, “Hey, this is… You’re part of this story. This is our family story. This is what you’re part of,” gives them some context. Now, I think this is important because it can give them, one, they could step into that and lean into it. But even if they decide not to, by giving them that story, they’re able to know like, “Oh, how can I make myself different?” It gives them something to push back against if that makes sense.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think a lot of young people, they’re just kind of flapping their arms. They don’t know what they’re doing.

Jon Tyson: And I think there’s a… I think it’s important too to tell the family story in a compelling way and an honest way. The whole idea of a family reunion where it’s like a bunch of people you don’t really like wearing weird t-shirts, I wasn’t trying to do that with my son. I was trying to let him know, “Hey man, our family has an incredible history. It’s a history of people who have taken big risks. It’s a history of people who’ve sacrificed. It’s a history of people who’ve paid a real price for you to be where you are in the world today. And I want you to know you come from good stock. To be a Tyson, Tyson means fire brand, like carry the fire.” I have the Carry the Fire lighters from Art of Manliness.

But like that whole concept man, this you are born into a legacy and you don’t get to invent a universe from nothing. And there’s good things I want you to have. There’s bad things I wanna warn you about that could flow into your life because of the things we’ve been through, and then I wanna figure out how to help you carry this forward through your calling and your personality. And that was actually a really, really amazing time. I’ve had a pretty wild life. I dropped outta high school, worked in a meat factory, bought a house when I was 19, immigrated to another country. I’ve had pretty wild teenage years, and I wanted my son to sort of like see that and feel the weight of that so he could understand the context that I was parenting out of. So he really enjoyed that time even though I was heartbroken that he came back saying, “Dad, American food is better than Australian food.” But what can you do?

Brett McKay: And what I like about what you did too is you would take him to places where you made really big decisions in your own life.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I think that’s a really great idea cause it allows your son… It gives him a pattern to follow, when he’s making his own big decisions.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. My values were vision, passion, discipline and risk. When I go back through history, I’ve always valued visionary men. They look beyond the horizons of what is possible, and they dream bigger dreams for themselves and for the culture. I’ve always loved men of passion. I’ve respected men of discipline, who have channeled again their energy to something redemptive and something good. And then if you’re good at those things, if you’ve got vision and passion in your discipline, you’re gonna get opportunities that’s gonna require risk. So, I took him to the four places I learned those values. And again, I totally agree, when something emerges in your life, in order for it to be internalized and to become a sacred part of your story, you go to market. The power of ritual and recognition, so our life is not just a blur of ordinary days. So yeah. And I see my son doing that now. My son will take time and say, “This place matters to me. This is an important part of my story. Those sorts of things.” So yeah. He learned that by seeing it on that trip.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So one of your big goals through this whole entire process was to teach your son values, family values, to help him develop his own personal values, but you also had this idea like, “I wanna inculcate masculine values into my son.” What were those values and why do you think that was important?

Jon Tyson: It is a confusing time in our culture to ask the question, “What is a man? What does it mean to be a man?” There’s a lot of stereotypes out there. There’s a lot of negative press in there. One of the things I try to emphasize to sort of get away from the controversy, and there is a lot of controversy, was the power of classical virtues. So the four classical versus: Justice, wisdom, courage, and self-restraint. I felt like the men we need in our world today are embodied in these values. We need just men in a world of tyrants. We need restrained men in a world of excess. We need wise men in a world of fools. And we need courageous men in a world of fear. Again, as someone from a faith tradition, the most important values according to St. Paul are faith, hope and love. And so to extend that I’m like, “We need faithful men in a world of compromise. We need hopeful men in a time of despair. We need loving men in a world of hate.”

So, I try to take these noble historically proven virtues and make those the baseline. And, particularly in Greco-Roman culture, these were masculine values. These were values that were associated with men. And so rather than just sort of pluck from thin air, choose random cultural values, I tried to find something that was a little more timeless and rooted.

Brett McKay: And one way you passed on these values or taught your son these values, you did this, you’d take him on trips and you’d of you’d just show it. I think that’s a very… I think that’s probably the most powerful way. But then you’d have these… Every morning you’d sit down with him and you’d have these little talks, and you’d also assign him books to read. Tell us about that.

Jon Tyson: Yeah. Well, again, I think I got the vision of just college or high school, which is, “What do you need to cover in order to graduate? How do you graduate into manhood? What do you need to have passed?” And again, getting back to know be and do as the sort of core tenants there. So yeah. I got a calendar and I worked back through a series of months, and I just said, “Here’s the content I wanna cover in this time,” and then I just broke it up into little chunks and then we just talked through it. So yeah. I just wanted to have this point every day where I was connecting. When you ask the question, “How does somebody grow? How does somebody change? How are they really shaped or formed?” It’s normally two things. It’s big, powerful, catalytic defining moments, and then it’s like the ordinary everyday habitual repetitive stuff we do in our lives. And so, that’s what I was doing in the daily little check-ins. Sometimes they were 15 minutes, sometimes they were 40 minutes, depending on what we were talking about. But it was just getting up early before school and then picking the theme we were working on, whether it was like one of the archetypes or one of the shifts.

And then I’d just come up with content and we’d just talk it through. So, I think just sowing those small seeds every day over the course of years produces a massive kind of fruit. So, I asked my son like, “What are some of the takeaways that you got from that?” And a lot of it were like pithy little phrases. My son said the number one thing that I’ve taken away from all of these years of content was this idea, “You are who you are when no one’s looking. That’s your true self. When you’re accountable as your own man in the world before your creator, that’s who you really are, without people pushing you.” And that was just something like I winged one morning. It was just like, “Okay, let me just throw that in. You know?” So again, you never know by sowing those seeds what’s gonna stick and what’s really gonna like impact and help.

Brett McKay: And then also throughout the process, you’d read books together or you’d even watch movies. So if you were talking about courage, you would watch Band of Brothers, for example.

Jon Tyson: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean we just churned through the movies. If you’re a busy dad, I can tell you, come up with a few discussion questions, watch a movie, make him thoughtful, and you can have a great night together. Yeah, the Band of Brothers and barbecue was a very, very strong season that we did. So we would just like talk about… Watch an episode, talk about what we learned in the characters, and then we’d go out and eat meat. And we sort of went through the… Because I used to be a butcher, we would go to different barbecue restaurants, and we honestly sort of ate our way around New York City as a reward for doing these nights together. So that was a lot of fun. Build your traditions. With my daughter, we did it with cookies. She didn’t wanna eat brisket every week, so…

Brett McKay: Yeah, I wanna talk about something, what you do with your daughter, in a bit here. Okay, so one of the things you did with this right of passage process is you used the work, or looked at the work of Richard Rohr. We’ve had him on the podcast before. Franciscan Monk, who’s thought and does a lot about male initiation. And you took this idea that Rohr has, of the five rules of manhood that every boy needs to learn in order to become a man, and then you modified it to… And you called them the shifts of manhood. So what are the five shifts of manhood?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, I mean, Rohr is obviously a sage. He spent half a lifetime thinking about this stuff and has some very, very strong works on that. But I felt like, I mean how do you say to a 13-year-old kid, “You are gonna die. You’re not that important. Life is not about you.” And then how do you help him see that he’s making progress on that? And so, I sort of converted him into these shifts. Yeah, so the shifts are from ease to difficulty. Boys embrace ease men embrace difficulty, from self to others. Boys are about themselves, men are about others. From the whole to a part, boys are all about themselves, men realize they’re only a part of a greater story. From control to surrender, boys think they can maintain control, men understand the mysterious power of surrender. And then, from the temporary to the eternal, boys only think about what matters right now, but men think out of a larger picture. And then, yeah. I designed these units to help him really learn these lessons.

And so, to be able to say, “Hey, boys are about ease themselves, the whole thing, control and temporary things, and men are about difficulty, others, humility, surrender, thinking big picture.” So yeah. I would take a couple of months on each of these, have a little daily talk about it, do this weekly thing that we call man school, and then at the end of it we would do a challenge.

So from ease to difficulty, for example, my son’s terrified of heights. So I took him in Australia to the highest ropes course and Mike, this thing was… I hate heights too. This was horrific but I wanted him to see, “Hey man, if you do this, you’ve passed like you have now embraced difficulty. Like you’re ready to move on to the next unit.” And so it was a real joy seeing him do an actual challenge that kind of scared him a bit where he had to overcome something. But it was just a way of showing progress. I think there’s nothing more demoralizing for men than working hard and seeing no progress from your labor. And so I wanted to build in this sense of “I am taking ground. I am moving down the path. I am heading down the road from adolescence into manhood” and this was something that, particularly with my son, was very, very effective.

Brett McKay: No. And I love one for the shift for temporary to the eternal like you took him to a graveyard and that was really impactful. That was one of those other things that really stuck with your son when you asked him, “What was some of the things that stuck?” And he was like, “This pithy off-the-cuff remark about “You look at a gravestone and you see the date someone’s born, then a dash and then the date they die.” And you said, “That dash, that was their life. And what’s gonna be what’s gonna be your dash?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. What’s your dash? That was actually a really meaningful moment. And my son, anytime we go past a graveyard would to this day be like, “What’s your dash, dad? Make it count.” And it is kind of amazing to think there’s that person, their life is over. They’d do anything to get a second chance at it. Gosh. Don’t squander your life man. Time is a gift. Time is the most important commodity. And so, think properly and steward your time. And I think to this day, my son is very time-conscious as a result of that moment.

Brett McKay: Okay, so these five shifts, you would spend a few months and would you revisit like, say if you did… From whole story to part of the story, a year before, would you revisit it and say, “Hey, we’re gonna talk about this and more?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I’m always just… When we talk about how memory works, we forget in a week 75% of what we’ve heard a week earlier. And so you’ve got to do what they call deep encoding. And that primarily comes through spaced repetition. And we all know that you can cram overnight and pass a test and learn nothing, or you can study, which means like every couple of days you’re like loading it back into your mind, and yeah. I was constantly trying to reinforce the core ideas. And I did that over the course of several years. So yeah. Spaced repetition is really important. Keep hitting the same things again and again and again, and I think all people that educate well get this just like refocusing, putting the emphasis on these things, so they go from external into an internal component where they can carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Brett McKay: Another thing that I really, I like that you talked about in the book is this idea of preparing for moments that your adolescent’s gonna face as they go through puberty right into adulthood. And I think these moments are often, if you don’t have a conscious, intentional rite of passage, these moments often become the rite of passage.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But what you’re trying to do with this idea of preparing for moments is making these moments part of a larger rite of passage. And so these are things like, first shave, when your kid gets their first cell phone, when they get a driver’s license. And you thought about like, “What can I do to make these… Make my son see, these moments are part of a bigger picture?”

Jon Tyson: Yeah. I’m a big believer that the book, The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath, that was just a masterclass. As a leader… As a person, your life is really a series of defining moments that have shaped you. If you were to sort of map out your story, you’re basically gonna pull out some disproportionately impactful moments, either of pain or of wounding. And I was like, okay, so these moments like we’re gonna be shaped by these moments. Is there a way to consciously cultivate them, to prepare in advance when the young men ones happen, but then sort of have a framework on how to do it? And so I was very, very aware. And I think scientists tell us as well, like the memories we form in our late teens and early 20s tend to be the strongest memories we carry our whole life, because we’re going through so many firsts and they find their way into our long term memory, they’re converted into long term memory by the potency and novelty of the event.

So, yeah, I was trying to figure out how to do those things and how to and how to build them up. A classic, my son got his driver’s license. He passed his test in New York City, and you wanna talk about a harrowing adventure, taking your driving test in New York City. And when he comes back, he didn’t even know if he passed or not. The lady just said to him, “You need to work on your three-point turns.” And then hands him a sheet. And I was like, “Did you pass or not?” He was like, “I don’t know.” I thought, “What a missed opportunity.” She could have said to him, “Young man, congratulations. You now can drive to California if you want. The car is yours, the roads are yours. Welcome to freedom.” She could have built this into a thing, and he would remember that forever. Instead, he had a terrible moment and he barely remembers it. So I had to mark that moment for him.

So, how do you make these moments and use them in ways that bring healing and blessing to our kids rather than our wounds? One of the big ideas they say in the book that I love is “Beware the soul-sucking voice of reasonableness.” And you can blow a moment out into a lifetime memory by adding 15% or 20% more energy to it. So just by adding a few more little details to it, you can change the whole experience. So I’ll give you a practical example. I had some dads who read my book, who flew in from Colorado to have a cigar and talk with me about the book. So here’s what I could have done, I could have sat them down and I could have said, “Hey, thanks for coming fellows.” But that’s not what I did. I went and brought a couple of bottles of very, very exquisite beverages to pair with the cigars. I got them a box of these Melanio cigars. I had this elaborate presentation and when they sat down, they were kind of dumbfounded. “Who’s this for?” I’m like, “This is for you. You came all of this way, I wanted to create a great experience for you.” And at the end of the night, I let him keep the glasses so that every time they use that glass they can remember the story, and it’s like those guys will remember that for a very, very long time because a normal moment was turned into a powerful moment.

And so I wanted to get a black belt in creating moments that shape people. And so I encourage dads that to be intentional, to think about these in advance, to have a plan. What are you gonna do if you find out your kid’s looking at porn, which statistically almost 90% of kids at some point will look at porn. How are you gonna respond to that? Are you gonna create a culture of shame or are you gonna help them understand sexuality and who women are? Yeah, so I just went through those moments and I’ve got a list of them in a book. Some of the big ones that you can think through and begin to plan around, but to me, getting those moments right is a huge, huge part of helping our son move through the world with blessing rather than wounds.

Brett McKay: So as you went through this process, I’m sure your kid was really excited at the beginning, ’cause beginnings are always exciting and new ’cause you’re doing new things.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But then your son hit wall with this process.

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: He kinda started to lose interest, he’s like, “Ah, jeez. Dad, do we really have to do these morning talks?”

Jon Tyson: Yes.

Brett McKay: But this is hard part in any endeavor, this is the part where whether you’re starting a business, you’re doing a fitness routine, start training, start a fitness routine, this is the wall.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: You made a shift at this point to make the process not just about becoming a good man. So here’s what your trying to do. You’re trying to help your son harness his masculine energy to be… For the good of the community, but then you shifted it to about becoming good at being a man. What’s the difference and why did that shift reignite the fire in your son?

Jon Tyson: Yeah, you’ve had Jack Donovan on before. In his book The Way of Men, and he’s a somewhat controversial figure, I wanna note. But he had a core concept and I think really, really shook me, and his concept was he talked about Christian men’s movements, and that’s a part of the tradition that I come from, and he talked about a vision of good men in our society today looks typically like an overwhelmed suburban dad struggling to get his life together, and that’s basically it. It’s an overwhelmed, somewhat bored dad driven by obligation, trying to get his life together, and that’s what we think a good man is. He’s defined by what he doesn’t do. He’s not cheating on his wife, he’s not out there wasting his money, and it’s actually a pretty kind of time vision. It’s not super compelling at all, and he says, “What men actually want is to be good at being a man.” Which means when a man walks in the room, he should have a sense of confidence that he’s adding value. And so when you’re good at being a man, which means like, “I am good at understanding how women work. I am good at understanding what money is. I am good at practical skills around the home.” Obviously which your website is a…

You are a part of our central curriculum. There’s thousands of articles on practical stuff. And so I said to my son, “Hey, why do you think we’re doing this?” And he says, “You want me to be a good man.” And I said, “I do not want you to be a good man.” And he was kind of like, “What?” I was like, “No, I want you to be good at being a man” I was like, “Do you wanna walk into a room and understand how women think and not be intimidated?” And he’s like, “Yes.” I said, “Do you wanna be able to get through your high school years and have social skills where you can navigate bullies and build friends?” He’s like, “Yes.” So just like I’m trying to do the Winston Churchill which is like, get them saying yes or no. And I said, “Well, that’s what we’re here for. Man, I am here to help you be good at being a man, not to be some opaque kind of good man.” And that’s when it really kicked in, and that’s when I sort of unleashed the archetype content which is about like how to understand women and be a lover. How to understand and influence and be a leader, how to get in the fight, or how to have a cause and be a warrior, how to be a friend. What does it mean to be a brother, how do you be a sage in the world of fools, that sort of a thing.

And so when I sort of rolled out that those components, his motivation was so high, setting his own alarm, disciplining his life to get involved with it. So yeah, I kind of bland feeble morality with the stereotypical roles that has no passion, no teeth, no consequence, I’m not interested in that. And I think a lot of people today are sort of living half their lives because they’ve been shoved into these passionless scripts, and they think that this is what it is to be a man. I wanted to turn him loose, give him a bit of, as they say, fire in the belly. And that just had a massive impact on him. So it went from me trying to get him up to him voluntarily getting up. It was a real breakthrough.

Brett McKay: How old was he when this happened?

Jon Tyson: Oh gosh, he was 15.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you…

Jon Tyson: 15, so a couple of years in.

Brett McKay: And I liked how you took this idea of being good at being a man and tied it into these different roles that you started talking about. As a man, these are the roles you’re gonna have to fulfill as an adult. How can you be good at fulfilling that role? And I think that gives some direction for that, again, that masculine energy that teenage boys are starting to turn on.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, I totally agree. If you don’t… There’s nothing worse than standing in a room and feeling awkward. I don’t know how to talk to people, I don’t feel like I’m good at anything, and I don’t know why I’m here. If you’re projecting that sort of emotional field, it’s not gonna go well, for you, and that’s gonna lead… That’s gonna spiral into unhealthy places, so to begin to logically, sequentially, strategically break down the elements of how to be a man in the world and tell him, “You can do this, you can do this, man. And I’m gonna train you to be able to do those things.” That produces a ton of confidence, and I said… And then here’s what you do when you don’t know. You don’t fake it, you ask people who are better than you, and then you compliment them, and then they feel confident in themselves because they’re teaching you and they’re endeared to you, so… Now we did so much stuff on all the practical sort of like archetype stuff of how to be in the world.

When I asked my son today, he turns 22 this next week, I said, “Okay man, we’re a couple of years out for this. You’re a junior in college now. What’s your number one takeaway?” And he said, “The number one takeaway is the mental framework that I can figure out and handle anything.” And I was like, “Touch down, mate, that’s it.” If you can get that kind of internal confidence in a young man’s heart where he feels like he can face the challenges of life, that just felt like such a win for me.

Brett McKay: Oh, so just… You’d mentioned some of these roles. You had lover, so you talk about, okay, how can I be… How can I get along with women? How can I attract a mate? I think a lot of boys, they’re interested in that ’cause they just feel awkward. A leader, you had that.

Jon Tyson: Yep.

Brett McKay: I guess if you’re going back to union archetypes, to be the king, that would be the…

Jon Tyson: Yeah totally. Yes.

Brett McKay: Go ahead.

Jon Tyson: Yeah, the leader, the warrior, the brother, the wise man. There’s probably a few more you can put in there, but these… I try to sort of put these in things I felt my son from my tradition needed. And so one of it was a faith one, which is being a disciple, one was understanding women, one was about how to have the influence in the world through leadership, how to get the fire, there’s so much. In many ways, we’re driven by two forces, hope and hate, we’re driven by what we want to happen, and the thing that’s stopping it, the threat against the thing that’s stopping it. That’s what the warrior energy is, it’s like going after the thing you want, and then fighting off the thing that’s a threat to that. Then the power of friendships. Male friendships are so awkward, particularly that age, social media has definitely complicated it. But how do you be a faithful brother to somebody else, how do you stay the course, how do you build long-term friendships?

And I’m so grateful for that. My son did a gap year and in that gap year, he just got a crew, and because of some of the stuff we’ve talked about, they now do an annual reunion, so they’re three years removed, a couple of them have gone on and gotten married, but every year they’ve got this little tribe that gets together to mark the milestones of their life and just talk about the joys and sorrows they have been through the previous year. So it’s been a real joy to see him build a little brotherhood. And then how do you be a wise man? And the world’s filled with fools, it’s filled with pain, regret, lack of certainty, confusion, and how do you navigate some of the complexities of life? So we spent a lot of time talking about what is wisdom, what is the wisdom tradition? And how do you learn to grow in wisdom? The book of Proverbs talks about five kinds of fools, and there’s five ways of being foolish in the world and there’s five kinds of wisdom to overcome the five fools. So we spend time talking through that, that sort of stuff.

Brett McKay: One idea that I really liked and I’m gonna swipe from you, I’m gonna use it with my own kids is the life arc interview.

Jon Tyson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: What is that? And what did your son get out of them?

Jon Tyson: Well, the life arc interview is basically saying life is a series of seasons, it’s a series of stages, and without a sense of knowing what stage you’re in, what season you’re in, life can just feel very long and very painful and very, very confusing. But if you realize that hey, there’s certain things you gotta get right, certain things to look out for, certain things to avoid at these various stages, you’re gonna go in with your eyes wide open. And so it’s sort of a stage orientation. When you’re a freshman at college, they do a campus orientation, they do a freshman orientation and they’re basically trying to say to you, open your eyes, and here is how to navigate this well. So I wanted my son to go through life and figure out what to do with each decade or each stage of life. So to sit down with someone and basically ask, hey, what did you most enjoy about this stage and why? What are three or four of your favorite memories from this stage, what are the biggest regrets you had in this particular stage of your life? If you could do it again, what would you do differently? What do I have to get right? What do I… What must I absolutely avoid?

And then you begin to get a bit of an arc of what life is, and so one of the great challenges with young people today is they want the lifestyle in their 20s that their parents worked for in their 40s. And so if you say, hey man your 20s are not for wealth accumulation, as much as they are about vocational experimentation and understanding yourself, you’re gonna put some relief valves from the pressure of success and confusion. And then hopefully they’ve gotta have their own chronology, their friends got their own journey to walk, their own challenges and their own pace that they have to navigate, but then at least get some sense about like, “Here’s the territory,” if you go on any journey, at some point, you’re gonna break the journey down into stages. Hey, there’s a mountainous stage, there’s a flat stage, there’s a hot stage, there’s a stop here, see this. We do this on all trips in life, why don’t we do it for life itself? So that was my vision to sort of break that down and send him out talking to people older than him who have navigated this with some measure of skill, so he can get their accumulated wisdom and have an idea of where to go from there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, when I read that, I was thinking, man, I need to do this for my kid, like get… Or find an 18-year-old or a 20-year-old who’s just on it, who was a great kid, had a great teenage part of their life, and to be also to have my son just talked to him, what did you do? I was… I’m thinking when… If when I was a kid, when I was like 12, 13 and I got to rub shoulders with some really cool 18 year old that has a big impact.

Jon Tyson: 100%. And, you know, it’s amazing you’re actually helping form that 18 year old because you’re gonna make him sort of like codify what he’s learned. He’s gonna realize, hey, “I’m 18, but I’ve learned a lot.” So that’s gonna be a gift to him as well. And that’ll be something they could pass on to someone else, people… You do the best… You learn your lessons best when you teach it to other people. So yeah, I’m definitely grateful to be a part of a community that is multigenerational and living in the middle of New York City. My son’s growing up in Manhattan for 17 years before he left home. And… So for him, you know, he was surrounded by some like very, very accomplished people, but also people with a lot of pain, like, you know, unhealthy ambition and lack of focus. And so like, yeah, that being surrounded by a multigenerational community was a real gift. I encourage everybody to try and find that… This I think is… This sort of multigenerational long term thinking doesn’t happen in our world at large. And this is definitely something that I think kids will appreciate.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned your son took a Gap Year. Was this part of the initiation process?

Jon Tyson: 100%. 100%. All of these traditions, like when James Hollis talks about this, he says that all traditions have this thing called the ordeal. And the ordeal was to send the young man out into the world to see whether or not he has internalized and taken on the lessons that have been given to him from the community. And again, various traditions have done this. Some communities have a mission that they go on, they send people off. I grew up in Australia very, very common to do a Gap Year which is basically debaucherous hitchhiking across parts of Europe. Here’s what my vision was. I was like, “Okay, I’ve put a lot of content and a lot of experiences in my son, and college is such a formative experience.” I mean, it just swallows you whole. And I was like, I need to give him a little bit of space before he just rushes headlong into college to sort of see the kind of man he has become away from me where he could test it in the real world. So I also had a goal I wanna know, like I’m surrounded by a lot of wealth in Manhattan where he grew up and a lot of privilege. And I was like, “I wanna irreparably break my son’s heart for the global poor.” I want him to see that the privilege is growing in the disparity in the world. I want him to feel the pain of that gap, and I want him to be exposed to other places in other cultures.

So he’s not just like, “An American only in terms of his worldview and his thinking”. So he did a nine month trip. He went to a Swaziland, he went to Guatemala. He went all over the place and has since traveled all over the place. And he came back. And I gotta tell you, he was a different kid. He was like being being with a few friends. Like I said, “He built this little brotherhood, this little tribe and stuff that like so… ” The biggest example my son and I don’t say this to to sort of put him down. He’s actually a remarkable young man. But like he was a whiner. He would just complain. He just would just complain. And it was like such an unattractive quality to just complain. And, you know, I’d have my wife’s daughters come over and talk like how attractive… Like a little panel. So, like, here’s five women and here’s my son interviewing these five women on the panel. And I’d say, like, you know, do you think… What do you think about men who complain? They’re like, oh, it’s so unattractive. But even that these like attractive young women in their twenties on this little panel that my wife had formed, not none of that worked. But he comes back from this trip. My son is like, Yes, sir on it, sir kinda kid. And I’m like, “Where did this come from?” He said, “Dad, two weeks in, I realized I was a whiny, complaining child and I had a mirror amongst my peers of how unattractive it was.”

And I was like, “I do not want to be that guy.” And to this day, my son just like owns it and solves it. That that never would have happened with all of my years of effort, I couldn’t get that done. He gets in the world, sees the world, that sort of stuff is formed in him. He also just came back from… He just did another three month trip that he went on and he was in Turkey for that trip. And again he came back and I was like, “The maturity that was developed by getting out of his regular life in context was massive.” So I’m a big believer, you know, one bad year of college can undo 18 years of good parenting. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom in having a liminal space where they can go through the world and sort of figure it out. So, yeah, that’s… That Was the vision for that. And he was willing to do it, interestingly enough, like my daughter did not want to do that. So that was something I had to sort of cast some vision for, for my son. He was worried like, hey, “All my friends are going to college, I’m gonna get left behind.” And we processed that. And eventually he came over and realized, “Hey, this probably be good for me.”

Brett McKay: So part of this Gap Year, we’re getting to the end, right? This is the ordeal.

Jon Tyson: Yes. Six years.

Brett McKay: Six years. He goes through his ordeal, he passes it changes him. This mission accomplished. You have this capstone ceremony. How did you cap this journey off into manhood with your son?

Jon Tyson: Well, one of the things I realized by talking… So, I said, “There’s quite a few sort of different groups and different organizations that will facilitate a Gap Year.” I think it’s becoming more and more popular. And one of the things in my research about sort of the comedown from the high of the Gap Year is that they didn’t debrief him too well.

So I said, “I’m gonna to do the Camino de Santiago.” Which is a 500 mile hike across Spain. And it took us 33 days to do it. I said, “We’re just gonna walk 500 miles.” There’s nothing to do but talk and we’re just gonna debrief this journey together. We’re gonna debrief the Gap Year. What happened in him? What did he learn? We’re gonna debrief all the content we went through. So I did like a series of questions every day. So to recap, in the six year journey, just trying to again, deep in coding reinforcement and then we just had a ton of fun.

And at the end of the 33 days, you come to the city, and there’s this big cathedral, it’s actually like, it’s overwhelming. You weep, if you talk about it, it’s such a profound experience, and you come into this cathedral of the city, and then it’s another 80 kilometer walk or so where you end in this village called Finisterre.

And you know the idea of a pilgrimage was you’re leaving something behind. And our idea for this pilgrimage was his leaving his childhood behind, so we end up in the city called… This little town Finisterre, and we go to this cove on a beach, and I’ve got all these letters from these men who’ve been journeying with him spoken into his life, men he respects, and I take him down on this beach and I’m like, “May I wanna tell you right now, man, this is well done, you have passed every test, you have earned this for the rest of your life, you need to know in your heart you are a man. You’re a blessed man.” In the Christian tradition, there’s a scene in the life of Jesus where he is baptized at the start of the gospels, and a voice from Heaven says, “This is my beloved son, who I love, in him I’m well pleased.” And because Jesus knew He was beloved at the start of his ministry, he had the courage and security in His identity to heal the sick, confront hypocrisy, fight off evil forces in his confrontation with the devil, so he was blessed to…

His sense of identity enabled him to overcome, and I wanted to say to my son, “You have my blessing, you are moving through the world, a blessed man, and you can overcome anything because you have what it takes within you.” So anyway, so he runs into the ocean like he did when he was 13, but now he’s 19. And he comes out and I do this big booming voice, like my god voice or whatever, and I’m just like, “Who is this man emerging from the ocean? Behold this is my son.” And then he comes out and we just cry, it’s a super, super powerful and emotional moment, and it was just. It was a blessing ceremony, and we both have a tattoo on our arms, the only tattoo I have, he’s got a few more, but it’s of our journey together to my inner arm, it’s the route of that Camino that ends in this little bay, this little cove where we did this journey, and that’s it. He left his childhood behind. So if you were to ask my son, how do you know you’re a man? He will say, “I died to childhood psychology, I went on a journey, I’ve learned the archetypes, I’ve made the shifts, I’ve done the ordeal. I’ve been blessed by my Father, I know I’m a man because I’ve earned it.” Bingo what a gift. So that was such a definitive moment that was six years in the making. So it wasn’t just the moment itself, it was marking a journey that he had been through that we had sort of done together, and a really, really significant a real gift to be a part of.

Brett McKay: That’s really powerful. See you have a daughter?

Jon Tyson: Yes, yes, I have a daughter, 19. She’s in… Studying Nursing in university.

Brett McKay: Well, have you and your wife done anything similar with her?

Jon Tyson: We did. It’s a little different, my wife played sort of the primary role in the formation of my daughter, so she’s got a whole thing she did, you know starting when she hit puberty and walked her through her teenage years. In her senior year, she came to me and she said, “Dad like I want you to just give me a year of your best development into adulthood.” So I did a thing with her that I just, I’m a bit of a branding guy, I’m a bit of a program guy so I created this thing for her called 50 pieces of my heart, 50 key deposits every dad has to make in his daughter’s life before she leaves home. So I did 50 weeks, and it was like a little daily check-in, and then one dinner a week where we talked about like the 50 most important things I wanted her to know about life and… Yeah, so we did that for a year. Sadly, her senior year was in COVID, and my daughter loves beauty, like my son loved the challenge, so on the Camino, when we’re walking 500 miles, it’s a heat wave, we’ve got blisters that are almost down to the bone, we lost 20 pounds, it was like a wild ordeal, my daughter loves beauty.

So one of the only countries that was open in COVID was Iceland, and so we did a ring road together, we rented a car and we drove around the country of Iceland, and I sort of created this experience for her recapping these important things and just like filling her heart with beauty. It was framed by a Frederick Buechner quote. Buechner ‘s obviously a very, very prolific, gifted author. And the quote says, “Here is the world, beautiful and terrible things will happen. Do not be afraid.” And so our whole year was based around beauty and terror, like the terror of life and the beauty of life, and not being afraid to enter into it, and so that Iceland trip was an immersion in beauty and again, that was like a really powerful time, so very very different relationship with her. My daughter is a very feminine in the traditional sense, and wonderful, wonderful young woman, she’s a helper, very kind studying Nursing and so. But my wife will have to write the book of what she did with her, I was just intentional in my relationship with her, but really did a strong year with her to sort of close out her adolescence and not to send her off.

I tell you a very, very, very, very moving moment about the importance of seizing time, I was the last person to drop her at college, my wife left the day before and I had one bone to stay with her, and after 18 years of meeting with her, every week this really intense year. We spent an hour together every day for a year, and at the end of it, we had our final dinner, and I’m walking back to my car and she’s walking to her dorm so we have this one last hug, and she hugs me and she will not let go. And she says, “Dad, I need more time. I need more time with you, I don’t have the wisdom, I don’t have everything, I need you, I need more time.” And I was like, “Sweet girl, you’ve got what it takes. This is in you. You’re gonna be fine. I’m still with you. And I walked off in tears. But I was like, Oh, those words, I need more time. I was like, that was the thing. I was like, “Gosh, our kids had gone before we know it,” and so a lot of times people say, “Jon, this sounds pretty intense,” and listen man, I am a busy man in the middle of New York City, I got a lot on my plate, lot of responsibilities, lot of stuff I handle, so it was a real sacrifice to take the time to do this for my kids, but now that they’re both gone…

If I had my time again, I’d go harder, I’d sacrifice more. Those days like I just entrusted into the hands of God and say, “Hey, I did what I could, I did this with love, I did my best and I’m gonna have to trust Him and them.” But I tell you, I’d go harder again. So it probably yeah, maybe someone’s listening to this and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, this sounds like a lot.” Yeah, it is a lot, but it’s worth it. Absolutely worth it.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s say you guys listening to this is like, “Well, maybe I just… I can’t do everything. This is awesome, what you do is awesome.” Then maybe some guys just don’t have the bandwidth, creativity, etcetera. What would you say? Okay, just to get the ball rolling, ’cause I think oftentimes once you get the ball rolling, you pick up steam and you start adding to it. What are a few practices that you would think could help that?

Jon Tyson: I would say this, consistency is more important than intensity. I would say, it’s like if you wanna lose weight, yeah, you can do a liquid fast for 30 days and then intermittent fast and then eat one meal a day. And you’ll probably do that for six weeks and put all the weight back on. Or you can cut out soda for three months, and then you can cut out soda, and then you can cut out dessert. It’s just like it’s what can you do consistently? That’s what has the formative power. You gotta find like every kid that is different, you’ve gotta find that tension of like, is this actually making a difference in their life or not, and how much does each kid need in what season after that? I would say this, let me give you a larger principle rather than a specific because that’s so personal. I think the number one goal is to build and maintain an emotional bond, that is the whole thing.

Because if that bond is there in the relationship, you can pass anything through that bond. That bond can handle any teenage rebellion, that bond can handle any hard conversation, but if that bond is not there, it is very, very hard to reinsert yourself because it just sounds like moralizing or lecturing. To me it would be like whatever it takes to build that bond. You might do something as simple as I know on your website you’ve got a list of quotes, you might just do something as simple of like sit down and create a ritual where you read one quote a day about a thing. Or maybe it’s like one night a week. But whatever it is that keeps that bond alive that’s the most important factor, and then play the long game, put a date on your calendar and work backwards and just say, “Okay, here’s what I’m gonna do from now till then. And then I’ll also say two other thoughts.

Number one, something is better than nothing. Do what you can do, don’t be overwhelmed by what you can’t do. Something is better than nothing. And then secondly, if your kids are gone and maybe you’re sitting here with a sense of regret, I would just say to you, it’s never too late. You just don’t know the power of a father or a mentor’s heart moving towards a kid with repentance and with hope. They just like I’ve got so many stories. Part of what I do is I lead the faith community in New York, and over the past almost 20 years, thousands and thousands of stories of impossible relational reconciliations. When you’re willing to move with forgiveness and humility. So don’t give up hope, set your heart and move towards your kids slowly in love and you just… You’d be amazed at the blessing they ache for, the relationship they ache for, and the power of restoration if you do it with humility and consistency.

Brett McKay: Well, Jon, this has been a fantastic conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jon Tyson: I’ve got a course on this, it’s at primalpath.co. That’s dot C-O. And on there there’s a link for a weekly email. Every week I send out like a short thought for dads and men about how to navigate the complexity of being a man in the modern world. You can sign up for that, absolutely free. And then if you go to Amazon and just look at The Intentional Father, you’ll see that that book is there available in all formats.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jon Tyson, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Jon Tyson: Okay, cheers mate, thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Jon Tyson. He’s the author of the book, The Intentional Father. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at primalpath.co. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/passage where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness and check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out. As always, thank you for the continued support.

Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you all listening to the podcast to put what you’ve heard into action.

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A recent survey by the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that reading for pleasure among kids is at an all-time low. 

The decline is, no surprise here, likely attributed to the increased use of screens.

It’s likely that these non-reading children will become non-reading adults.

I don’t want my kids to be those kids who don’t read for pleasure and then go on to become adults who don’t read for pleasure either.

I want them to be readers. 

Reading not only enhances a child’s academic performance and cognitive development, but even more important, to me at least, reading is simply one of life’s most enriching and edifying activities. Reading has had a huge impact on my own life. I’ve had my world expanded by reading. I’ve been entertained for hours by reading. I’ve made friends thanks to reading. I’ve even made a career out of reading.

I want my kids to experience that same life-affirming power of reading.

It seems like they’re — fingers crossed — on their way to becoming lifelong readers. Both Gus and Scout have their noses in a book before they go to sleep at night. When we go on long road trips, they willfully mix shorter sessions of screen time with longer stretches of reading. One of my favorite sounds is Gus laughing out loud at something he’s reading in a book. 

If you’re looking for some advice on how to raise a reader, here’s what’s seemed to work for us so far in nudging along the reading habit in our kids:

Keep a well-stocked home library. When I read the biographies of eminent men who were voracious readers (which interestingly enough, nearly all were — there’s definitely a correlation between reading and success), so many of them talk about growing up in households that were filled with books.

It’s not just that keeping a home library allows your kid access to lots of books (while they hypothetically could pull a book off our shelves, my children have yet to do so — they have their own taste in literature), it’s that the library acts as a potent signal that reading is important to you as parents, and is important in your family culture. And it’s a reminder that tons and tons of knowledge exists in the world — more than they might imagine trodding the familiar, well-worn courses carved by their digital surfing habits — and it’s all there for the discovering and taking!

While you could build a digital library of books, this is one of the many reasons concrete, paperbound copies are really superior. Your Kindle app is never going to act as a continual pique to your kids’ curiosity. 

Of course, a home library isn’t going to have a big effect, if its books are merely decorative, and your kids never see you actually opening them. So:

Be a reader yourself. Your kids are always watching you. They’re more likely to do what you do than do what you say. So set an example for them and be a reader yourself. Let your kids catch you reading.

I’m grateful to my parents for many things, but one thing I’m especially thankful for is their example of being readers. Growing up, I always saw both of my parents with their noses in books. They made it seem like reading was a normal part of life — just something you do. They never lectured my siblings and me to read, but we all followed their lead and read ourselves. 

Read out loud to them when they’re little (and beyond). Just because your kids are too young to read themselves, doesn’t mean you can’t start inculcating the reading habit in them. Read out loud to your kids when they’re little. It will set a pattern for them that reading is just a normal part of life’s routine. Like brushing your teeth.

Even when your kids are old enough to read on their own, keep reading aloud to them. It’s a great way to spend time with your kids, and it reinforces the idea that reading is just something you do in your family. We’ve been reading out loud to our kids since they were tykes. We’re now reading chapter books to them before they go to bed. It’s been a chance for Kate and me to expose our kids to books that we enjoyed ourselves as children (and to discover new books we missed when we were growing up). 

Let your kids read what they want. Some well-intentioned parents have this idea that if their kids are going to be readers, then they’re only going to read the Great Books or only the classics of children’s literature. So they put their kids on some reading program and make their children slog through books they have no interest in. 

That’s a great way to turn your kids into non-readers. If you go that route, you’re turning reading into something like eating your lima beans or taking medicine. Not something you want to do, but something you should do. Yuck! 

Instead, let your kids read whatever they want. Well, not whatever they want. I don’t recommend letting a nine-year-old read Devil in a Blue Dress (though I do recommend reading that and other hard-boiled detective novels when you’re an adult). But let them read whatever they want . . . that’s age-appropriate. You want them to learn to enjoy reading. As professor of literature Alan Jacobs puts it, let your kids read based on Whim.

This hands-off approach means your kids may read some lowbrow books for a while. Gus went through, and Scout is still in the midst of, the little kid graphic novel phase. Think Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Captain Underpants, Big Nate, etc. Are these books that I would personally pick out for my children? No. But they enjoyed reading these books, so we let them read them. Gus eventually emerged into straight text chapter books, and Scout is getting there too.

Your kids have the rest of their lives to read the Great Books. Your primary focus as a parent is to make reading something your kids enjoy doing so that when they get old enough to read the Iliad, they’ll actually want to read it.

Get them a library card. Most libraries allow your kids to get a library card when they’re fairly young. Get your kid one and take them to the library frequently. Free books! The idea here again is to make books a regular part of life. 

Buy your kids books with abandon. While we took our kids to the library a lot when they were little, as they’ve gotten older and developed the ability to read on their own, we more often take them to the bookstore and let them pick out books that we then buy for them.

Not because we’re spendthrifts, mind you, but because there are a few reasons I think buying books for your kids is a good idea.

There seems to be something about buying a book for your kids that gets them more pumped to read it. I’m guessing it’s the dopamine that comes with buying stuff. I’ve noticed that my kids are more likely to jump into a book that we’ve bought them than a book they check out at the library.

Buying books also helps your children build their own home library. Our kids often enjoy reading the same book twice (or more). 

Additionally, the fact that we buy books for our kids, while making them use their own allowance money to purchase things like toys and video games, makes books seem less like a special treat indulgence, and more like the other basic necessities we fund like clothes and food.

By my lights, books are a real bargain, especially children’s books. A new children’s paperback costs just $10 (or less!) and will give your kids hours of entertainment, all sorts of cognitive, emotional, and academic benefits, and another nudge along the path to becoming lifelong readers.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

In Finland, children don’t start formal schooling until age seven, aren’t subject to standardized testing, and always get at least one hour of physical activity a day, broken into 15-minute free-play breaks every hour, which take place outside no matter the weather. Finnish parents and teachers espouse mantras like, “Let children be children,” “The children must play,” and “The work of a child is to play.” Yet despite this emphasis on play, Finnish students still achieve enviable academic outcomes, and grow up to become some of the happiest adults on earth.

My guest today says that the Finnish model of education and parenting, with its heavy emphasis on play, is worth replicating in other countries. His name is Pasi Sahlberg and he’s a Finnish educator and researcher currently living in Australia, as well as the co-author, along with William Doyle, of the book Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive. Pasi begins our conversation by sharing what the data says as to how much less kids are playing today than they did in the past, and the factors that have led to this decrease both at school and at home. We discuss the fact that even the play kids do now engage in is more structured and adult-directed, even sometimes involving something called a “recess coach,” and how this has led to the sad phenomenon of children who no longer know how to play on their own. We then discuss what is lost when kids don’t play enough, from a decline in physical and mental confidence to a decrease in creativity. We end our conversation with the elements of healthy play that educators and parents who want to revive it can look to incorporate in their children’s lives.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #300: How to Raise Free-Range Kids
• AoM Podcast #532: How to Create a Neighborhood Where Kids Play Outside
• AoM Podcast #599: The Science of Physical Intelligence
• AoM Podcast #320: The ADHD Explosion
• AoM series on the causes and solutions to overprotective parenting
• Sunday Fireside: Is It Safer to Be Cautious Than Brave?
• Sunday Fireside: The Secure Base Philosophy of Parenting
• The LEGO Foundation’s research on the state of children’s play

Connect with Pasi

• Pasi’s Website

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Read the Transcript!

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. In Finland, children don’t start formal schooling until age seven, aren’t subject to standardized testing, and always get at least one hour of physical activity a day, broken into 15-minute free-play breaks every hour, which take place outside no matter the weather. Finnish parents and teachers espouse mantras like, “Let children be children,” “The children must play,” and “The work of a child is to play.” Yet despite this emphasis on play, Finnish students still achieve enviable academic outcomes, and grow up to become some of the happiest adults on earth.

My guest today says that the Finnish model of education and parenting, with its heavy emphasis on play, is worth replicating in other countries. His name is Pasi Sahlberg, and he’s a Finnish educator and researcher currently living in Australia, as well as the co-author, along with William Doyle, of the book, Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive. Pasi begins our conversation by sharing what the data says as to how much less kids are playing today than they did in the past, and the factors that have led to this decrease both at school and at home. We then discuss the fact that even when kids do play today, it’s often more structured and adult-directed, even sometimes involving something called a “recess coach,” and how this has led to the sad phenomenon of children who no longer know how to play on their own. We then discuss what is lost when kids don’t play enough, from a decline in physical and mental confidence to a decrease in creativity. We end our conversation with the elements of healthy play that educators and parents who want to revive it can look to incorporate in their children’s lives. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/play.

Alright, Pasi Sahlberg, welcome to the show.

Pasi Sahlberg: Thanks, Brett. Good to be with you.

Brett McKay: So we got this book, Let the Children Play, and it’s all about encouraging parents and teachers to let kids play, which is… It’s weird that you have to have a book to tell, “Hey, kids play”, which is this thing that all mammals do.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And it’s just sort of natural. So let’s talk about the state of play in the west, particularly in the United States. And I think you can say generally in the west, ’cause it’s sort of… It’s been spreading. You make the case that children in the US are playing much, much less than children a generation ago. Do we have any numbers on this? Do we know how much children played, say, the start of the 20th century compared to how much play they’re getting now?

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, the first piece of evidence that we need to mention here is the kind of bold facts that come from parents, and we have been asking the same question in the United States or my colleagues have there… I speak to you now in Australia, we’ve done recently the similar type of study and service here, asking parents, particularly mothers, that if you look at your own children today, how much do they spend time playing outdoors and inside the house compared to what you did when you were that age, which is kind of an interesting question to compare yourself, your own experience to what you see in your own children. And in the United States, North America, and here it’s exactly the same. It’s about 90% of parents respond that if they compare their own play experiences when they were kids, that they used to play much more, often significantly more than their children. This of course, is not a kind of a scientific proof of declining of playtime, but it’s an interesting indication.

But you’re asking for numbers, and I know if we go back in history, now looking at the United States, people often refer the 1960s as a golden era, or decade of many things, freedoms and civil rights and many other things. But that was also the time when recess and play in the US, particularly primary school, elementary school, was considered as part of the formal good education. So you were a good school if you were giving your children enough time to play, not just under the supervision of teacher and adult, but just play with other kids in the schoolyard. So until the 1980s, and now we come to the numbers here, it was a common practice in the US schools, and it was a common practice almost anywhere else, that the schools typically had about three or four, 10 to 20-minute recess breaks every day throughout the schooling. When we came to 1990s in the United States, and now we come to the kind of a part where there’s… The data and evidence is a little bit more mixed because they are not exact numbers, it’s hard to get the exact numbers, but some indication that in the early 1990s, almost all of the school districts in the United States reported that they have a practice of recess in their schools or that they have the policy in place. So this was in the 1990s, so we’re talking about 30 years ago.

Now, what has happened ever since, and this is where the story gets interesting, depends a little bit what type of data or surveys or research you look at, but in the beginning of the 2000s, around 2005, there’s one survey, a larger survey that indicates that 57% of US districts or school systems had recess, so it had declined significantly in about 15 years. Five years later, about 10 years ago, 2010-11, 40% of the school districts in the US reported that they have a policy of recess and play in school in place, but only about 20% were implementing that policy according to their own information. In 2016, we are coming closer of the situation today, only 16% of the US states required recess in primary schools, and now the situation is that… We know that about 40% of the school districts in the US have either significantly reduced or completely eliminated the recess in their schools. So that’s what we… So we see this evolution of coming from the kind of an ideal situation where recess and play were considered as a normal part of education and learning in school, to the situation where it’s becoming a kind of a very rare thing. But now we’re talking about the United States.

Now, I don’t know if you wanna hear any good news, but the good news now is that there has been a recent turnaround in many states. Many US states have begun to understand that this has been the wrong thing to do, and they have gradually introduced legislation and regulations that will actually mandate that the school should have at least 20 minutes every day for recess, some states have done it more. So we have seen… During the last 50 years, we have seen this kind of a curve of seeing recess and play almost disappearing from schools to now then gradually, luckily coming back.

Brett McKay: What was driving the decrease of recess in primary school?

Pasi Sahlberg: Well, if you’re an experienced teacher or principal listening to this conversation here, you know the answer immediately, because you see that something happened in the 1990s and particularly in the 2000s, in the beginning of this century, that probably has something to do with this decline. And in the 1990s, if you’re an American teacher or principal, you’ll remember the 1990s was the time when the standardization began to take place in the schools, meaning that all the schools were expected to follow the similar standards and expectations, and then came the ways of standardized assessments and tests that were used to check whether these standards were met. And these were not the standards for play, or recess, or creativity, or arts or social sciences, they’re mostly standards for mathematics and reading and science.

So the more of the education systems in the United States began to get standardized and the more the schools began to be held accountable for those standards, using these standardized tests, particularly following the No Child Left Behind legislation in early 2000s, the kind of a less focus and opportunities there has been on recess and play. And so that’s… Obviously, we can prove exactly that there is a kind of a causal link between those two things, but it’s very clear that the more schools are seeing education as a high stakes game that they need to play in order to survive and keep things moving, the less focus there has been on those things that have been considered as less significant for these stakes.

Then there’s another issue. I think that this is kind of a strictly educational reform movement issue that is probably explaining this, but then there’s another one that is simply the safety thing, that there are schools… I remember in my time… I spent about almost 10 years living in the United States, and I saw tens or hundreds of schools, and I was always kind of surprised about the safety concerns that were increasingly there, particularly whenever there was these horrible incidences of violence in the schools that the school gates were closed and locked and all the kids were kept inside. And I think that in some places, some districts or schools, and particularly the urban area schools that they kind of learn to live with this fear and danger and thought that we’d rather keep kids indoors during the school days in case something happens. So there are those two kinds of a major things that have really negatively affected the time that kids have for themselves in the school for play and do other things, and this implementation of recess policies overall.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about even when schools do have recess, you gave an example of this in the book, it’s the nature of it has changed. So when I grew up, recess was… The teacher’s like, “Just get out of here, go play, jump on whatever, do whatever you wanna do. It’s free play.” There was one school you highlighted where there was a coach, there was a recess coach, and you’re like, “Well, it’s a gym class,” and he’s like, “No, no, this is a recess. I’m the recess coach.”

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, yeah, that’s the… That’s not only the US phenomenon, and I think this is something that my co-author Will Doyle saw in New York, that he saw a lot of kids playing in a schoolyard, but not as they normally do, if they have the recess and play freely, do whatever they want to do but there was an adult there that was called Coach, recess coach, that was doing all kinds of activities, often physical activities. And for us, it looked more like a typical gym class that was just taken outside of the schoolhouse, and that’s… But I must say that here in Australia, I live in Sydney, and it’s a very common thing here as well, that after school, when children sometimes need to stay in the school a little bit longer after the school hours that rather than allowing them to play and self-organize and figure out what to do with the other kids, that they have these almost like a teachers or coaches there to make sure that everybody has something to do.

And in most cases, I think the reason is also that they, the parents and the schools, they want to… They kind of think that kids are safe when there’s an adult watching over and asking them what to do. I think this… The William’s story in this book is also interesting because I think the coach there responds to him that… When William is asking that, why do you just don’t let them play and watch over, and the response is that there are so many kids now who don’t know anymore how to play that they haven’t been experiences as a kind of a free self-directed play that much that they would know what to do, and that’s a kind of a sad part of the story.

Brett McKay: It is a part of the story. Okay, so in schools, there’s less recess. What’s driving that? It’s hard to say, but the hunch is whenever the increase in standardized testing in the United States, the pressure on faculty for the students to do well on those tests cause them to spend less time on recess, more time in the classroom, getting ready for the test. And also the safety is an issue, parents just being worried about that. That was a factor. But besides decreasing recess, you also talk about just in the classroom, play has been reduced. You talk about in the ’60s, even in the ’50s, pedagogy in the United States, really for primary age students, it was very play-based. Can you give us an idea of what that looked like and then what does school look like now without play?

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, I think it’s more about… Mostly about understanding what the play is all about, and that’s something that is often kind of a narrowly understood by many… Particularly parents, not so much of teachers. I think all the teachers understand it. But for example here, when I asked parents about play, the very common view still is that play is something you do when you’ve done all the serious stuff.

If they look at their parents or adults, they say that, play is something you do when you’ve done your work, or when you completed your work. And this is unfortunately how play is often still used in schools. It’s almost like an award that you are given if you’ve done your homework, if you’ve been successful in school, if you’ve done well in a test, that you are awarded a little bit of extra time to play. Unfortunately, sometimes you are also punished by that. If you’re not a good boy in school that you don’t… When the others are having their 20 minutes to play, you don’t do that. But I think that in a… Kind of a good school, for me, the play manifests itself in a way that is seen as it was in the 1960s, in the US schools as you described, as a normal, natural part of the way of life for young children. And it’s seen also as an integral element of good learning, that this is how children naturally learn, particularly when we’re looking at the young children, how the children learn about themselves and learn about the world is primarily through play, different types of play activities.

And so if the school is kind of a well designed and well thought around this idea of learning through play and having play as an important element, it should be there everywhere, and not just that we give children little playtime when they have done the serious work, but that the play would also enter into the classroom and these teaching and learning situations whenever that is kind of sensible. I’m not saying that the school should be play all the time, but it should be designed in a way that the kids would also learn to understand that play is actually an important way of them to learn about the world and learn about other people and learn about themselves.

Brett McKay: Well, I think back in my own early childhood education, the memory is very foggy, so this is like the ’80s. So kindergarten, first grade, second grade. I remember there being a lot of play, like you’d sing songs and clap your hands, you’re singing the ABCs, that’s playing. It didn’t feel like it was work. Dressing up, there’s like a dress-up section, I remember in kindergarten, you dress like a policeman, or a doctor, or whatever.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And like math, it’s a lot of just like you’re playing with blocks and you’re counting and… But now I guess it’s… The push is, we have to get kids at an early age… There’s a pressure, I guess, and parents are worried about this too, it’s like, “Well, I gotta have my kindergartener doing math as soon as possible ’cause we gotta get ready for them to do well on the SAT in 18 years, and I need my five-year-old to know how to read because the earlier they read, they’re gonna do better on these standardized tests.” And so there’s this pressure to… That’s another pressure. Taking play, in order to do that, you have to sort of have this drill mentality with your teaching. But you’ve highlight research that this concern that parents have, or teachers have about making sure your kid can do all this stuff, math, reading really early, it doesn’t really do much for them.

Pasi Sahlberg: No, there’s no evidence that would support this argument that you made, if you learned to read younger, that you will do better in school and life in general. Or, let alone that the younger you learn to read, the better you will do in school. That’s not the case, not even mathematics. And I think all of these correlations between the academic abilities that are learned younger and how they correlate or explain your success or failure later on, have no kind of research, evidence-based, so we should not believe in these things. The good example I often… When I think about the US schools, I often say that, “Go and see what the parents in the places like Silicon Valley do with their children, what type of schools they go. They often go to this alternative pedagogy, Montessori and Steiner Schools, where there’s a lot of play and music, and hanging around. Learning in your own pace and own ways, rather than insist that kids learn to do these things earlier on.”

 So I think that parents need to be very careful and mindful with that. I think what is predicting success in school and life much more than this early learning of academic stuff is to learn to understand who you are and learn to value your own capacities, and skills, and curiosity that you have. And this is exactly where the play comes into the picture, let alone the other kind of non-academic skills, like social skills, with being able to be with other kids and solving problems collectively in a sandbox. That often is a kind of interesting thing to follow. And also the physical development of yourself, that you grow up healthy and happy. So those things are often much more important for children, young kids than at what age do they learn to read or write.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

 And now back to the show. So okay, there’s less play in school, what about when kids are out of school? I guess it is kind of harder to figure out if they’re playing less, ’cause you can’t look at recess data. But I guess the data we have is you ask parents or mothers, “What are your kids doing out of school?” and I guess kids aren’t really playing that much.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, there’s a lot of evidence that indicates to that type of conclusion, that children are playing less today than they did even 10, 20 years ago. And as you say, the research is quite difficult to find that would show this entirely. You know LEGO Foundation is one of those that is kind of both doing and coordinating research on play around the world, and they often look at the state of play globally, and their conclusions from different countries around the world have been exactly the same. Interestingly, in one of the most recent state of play reports by LEGO Foundation, they realized that 20% of children, themselves, in these surveys report that they are too busy to play, that they would love to play, but they have too many things to do. And I don’t know how the 5-year-old can say that “I would love to play, but I’m too busy,” other than being busy because of the things that they are asked to do by the school. But I think, Brett, there’s an important factor that is often linked to this conversation about children playing less when they’re not in the school, when they’re spending their time at home. And its the very rapidly growing time that very young children, from early on, that they spend with technology.

And it’s not at all uncommon in the US that you have a tween, somebody who’s a 10-year-old who spends six, seven, eight hours every day with an iPad or gadget or smartphone or computer at home, and it’s obvious that if somebody… All of a sudden, if the kids are spending hours and hours every day on something new that they didn’t use to do, that this time is away from something else. Often it’s away from sleep, that they sleep a little bit less than they should, but in most cases, this time that you see kids spending with their digital gadgets, it’s often… Often this time is away from them being outdoors, playing basketball or games with their friends or just playing indoors their own way. But as I said, this an area where we have much less of a solid evidence and data to say anything exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think it’s a lot of antidote. I think everyone understands that the kids are spending a lot of time on screens more, and I think the other issue too, it’s keeping kids away from play, which is… Just sort of traditional play, open range, free range, kid-directed. So a lot of kids are just in organized events, whether they’re playing sports, or doing piano, or they’re, I don’t know, Boy Scouts, Cub Scouts, whatever that is, that’s a lot of their time is being spent doing that.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, yeah, and this is one of those trends that we have seen, certainly here in Australia, and in the United States, and many countries in Europe, as well as… It’s the time that children have spent on what is called play is now much more kind of a controlled and directed by the coach, somebody, a coach or music teacher, or somebody who is leading the stuff rather than seeing children outdoors, leading their own learning and play, and that is the… It’s not necessarily a seriously bad thing, but it’s a significant change of the children’s experience that they have had before when they have been playing by themselves. And the condition that is missing in this kind of a new form of playing where it’s much more supervised and controlled by adults is that the children have much less opportunities to experience that they are in control of something. And that’s, for me as a father of two boys here, is an extremely important thing that I give my children opportunities to experience what it means to have a control of your own… Your own doings for a while, every day.

And at the same time, if you look at the typical in the city… Here, for example, here in Sydney, they have very very few moments and opportunities to have this experience that… How does it feel to have this kind of a sense of controlling your own life and doing it for a while, and that’s such an important skill to learn, to take this responsibility and understand what happens, but we still give our children less and less opportunities to do that. So that’s why I’m so much favoring this free outdoor play as the… I often call it the highest order of play, that when parents ask me here, “So what should I do with my kids to really make sure that they get the most of the benefits of play time?” I say just take them outdoors and step aside, just let them find a way to do these things, because that’s where the likelihood that these miracles would happen is the highest.

Brett McKay: Well, I’d like to talk about the consequences of this lack of play, and I think this is a good segue, you’re talking about this… What play does. When kids are doing self-directed play, they’re training their executive function, they’re in that really vital period in their life when they’re in their childhood years and going into their adolescents, they need to learn that skill of making decisions on their own. And like you said that there’s kids they… Who don’t even know how to play, they can’t even do that. So if there’s a kid who doesn’t know how to play, what’s he gonna be like when he’s 20-30 and he has to make big important decisions on his own? That’s sad. I don’t wanna… I just think about that. There’s a kid who doesn’t know how to play, it’s like an adult that won’t be able to make decisions on their own very well.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And this is really good news for parents and teachers as well, who often feel that it’s difficult to teach my children or my students how to play, or it’s difficult to make sure that they get all these benefits, but it’s actually very easy because as I said earlier, that the easiest thing to do is just to give these children the freedom to play and exercise this kind of a sense of being in control and step aside and just see that… You know what happens, and often people come with the comments like, but there’s a hazard there, there’s kind of risk of getting hurt and even more. And of course, it’s a responsibility of us parents and teachers to make sure that all these kind of serious risks are somehow controlled. And that’s why I think it’s important that we parents don’t provide all the kind of a safety that is possible for kids when they are… For example, when they’re playing in the forest, or outside, or in the park, but we make sure that all the necessary safety measures will be considered so that they don’t seriously hurt themselves. But that’s exactly… If we don’t ever have our children in a situation where they have to consider risks or think about whether they get hurt if they do something, how do they learn to live their lives that is full of these hazards and risks around them if they haven’t learned that in the younger age?

And when we were working on this literature on playbook, we went to see some of these risky play schools and the risky playgrounds and parks here in Sydney. And it’s the same story we hear all the time from these people who are running these places, is that the kids actually experience much less incidences of accidents or harm because they are allowed to consider themselves what is a safe way to play or use this place, that often when we adults, when we do this and we give these kids a list of things that they must not do in this playground or in this camp, that they don’t think about this risk anymore. They try to remember all these rules that we have given them, but they don’t actively think about what they mean, why this is not allowed, compared to the situation where they should just be left alone and think about… Consider yourself what it’s safe here, and that’s why this free play outdoors is so important.

Brett McKay: That reminds me of something. We’ve had guests on the podcast, psychologists who are specializing embodied cognition, and they talk about old people who fall, and they said one of the reasons why you see old people fall more is ’cause as you get older, you tend to choose environments that are less complex, so you’re gonna avoid stairs or curbs or being outdoors where there’s a lot of complexity in the environment, and basically your body and mind forget how to navigate that, and so when you do encounter a crack or a step, you don’t know what to do and you trip and you fall, and that cause a lot of problems. They said it’s happening to children too, ’cause kids are not spending time in outdoors, this really complex environments, and they don’t learn how to navigate different… Their body and mind can’t… They don’t develop like they should, and so you’re seeing kids, they fall down more, and you’re showing kids who play in dangerous areas, they actually are less prone to trips and falls ’cause they know how to navigate those complex environments.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is the good way to further develop your executive functions that you mentioned, and that’s why many of the pediatricians, for example, in the United States, the American Academy of Pediatricians is so… Kind of are strongly encouraging parents and schools to make sure that children have time to free play outdoors, because it’s a good way to develop these functions exactly, as you mentioned, that people… For example, when the kids are in the playground and they have to pay attention to different things simultaneously, like they might be walking without their shoes somewhere and where there are kind of a risky things that they have to look at the situation where they are in and think about where they’re going and all these other things that is so important to develop these abilities. But if you’re always walking holding somebody’s hand and people are removing all these things for you, then you need to… You cannot really experience these things. And again, this goes back to this… The importance of free outdoor play and the power it can have on your overall growth and development.

Brett McKay: Alright, so outdoor play or the lack of outdoor play, free play, can hinder executive function development, it can hinder mind-body development. Let’s go back to grades in school. One of the reasons why we’re… Kids are playing less in schools or doing less recess is that teachers thought, “Well, this will improve academic performance.” Has that panned out?

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, again, kind of a strictly speaking, this is a question that is very hard, it’s hard to prove that less play would be the reason why the academic results have not improved, or actually they have gone down a little bit. But in the big picture, and we may take a look at the United States as a whole, but let’s take it the whole globe, just for the sake of curiosity here and as this thing that when the children are playing less than they used to. Let’s say 20 years ago, and also that the quality of this play has probably declined what has happened to the academic learning outcomes, and as you said that this has often been excused to play less is to have more time to learn these all important core academic skills. But the kind of a bold conclusion in this global scene is that the students are not learning better or more than they did 20 years ago. In many places, the quality of learning outcomes, the academic learning, has been declining. For example, in the OECD countries that you see, the wealthiest part of the world, the United States, and Finland, and Australia are part of that, students are…

Students quality of learning outcomes has been declining during the 20 years. And of course, at the same time, the time that they spend playing at home or in school has also been declined, but we cannot prove that there would be a kind of a causal connection between these two things. So it’s hard to argue anything about this, but I think the important question here is as well that what is this declining play time or play deprivation, as it sometimes called? What is it doing to children, is it good or bad? And as we write in the book that there’s ample of evidence showing that when we take the play away from children’s lives, whether it’s in the school, or at home, or degrees that that can have a serious consequences to their… Particularly their mental wellbeing and health, but also physical development that we see all kinds of… And I think the United States is a good example of this, that how the health of young children has been declining, particularly now the mental health because of the lack of opportunities to play.

So this is a kind of a conversation that is going on. If I want to have evidence from anybody to this question, I would definitely turn into the children’s medical doctors, pediatricians, to ask their opinion and their view on this, and they are very clear about what happens when the kids are not playing enough, and in turn, what the kind of a healthy and high quality play can do for children.

Brett McKay: So grades have been declining, we can’t prove… It’s hard to prove that the lack of play is a causal factor. But when you talk to teachers who have been teaching for 30 years, and they start off where it was very play-based, the kid’s got a lot of recess, and they got moved to that period where they had to like… Less recess ’cause they gotta focus on the test, they would note that it got harder to teach, particularly younger kids, because the kids they’d… Kids are kids. They wanna move around, they’ve got the short attention spans, they’ve got a lot of energy, and by not letting them play, they just got harder and harder to corral them, make them focus on learning multiplication tables when they’re six years old.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, that’s true. But it’s not necessarily just play. I think the teachers are right when they say this, but there are many other forms that are close to play, like physical activity, for example, that has been equally declining in many schools in the United States that the children don’t have daily physical activity as they should compared to the schools in Finland where the regulation… The national regulation basically is that every child must have at least one hour of physical activity, not the physical education but physical activity every day. And this is something that has been declining in the US schools.

Physical activity and play are… In many cases, it’s the same thing, but it can also have different different forms. So I think this movement in general, that the kids… If we keep children inside the classroom, staying on their seats and focus on stuff that the teacher is giving them, it’s no wonder that teachers see more and more children who are not able to concentrate. We often say that half an hour, 30 minutes is about the maximum time that a primary school student can concentrate on practically anything that requires a kind of a serious intellectual effort to understand or do something, and then they need to have a break to move around. And of course, the play is the easiest thing to do that just to let the children play a little bit or do something, but the physical exercise, physical activity is equally important. So we need to have… We need to have both of those certainly.

Brett McKay: And then another connection is mental health issue, you talked about there could be a connection with the lack of play or physical activity in schools contributing to… You’re seeing this increase in numbers of children being diagnosed with ADHD. And it could be… We’ve actually had a psychologist on this talking about… There was probably… And it’s probably gotten… He said… Maybe it’s gotten better, but there has been an over… ADHD has been over diagnosed.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yes.

Brett McKay: And the argument is that the reason why it’s been over-diagnosed is you have kids who, they’re required to focus on learning math, or reading, or science for long periods of time without any physical activity. They can’t do it, and so the teacher’s like, “Well, you go see the counselor” and the counselor is like, “Well, maybe it is ADHD” and they go to the doctor and then the kids on Ritalin or Adderall.

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Actually, in the book, we have a story about my own… My older son here, who was young when we lived in the United States, and there was American psychologist who were spending one morning with my wife when I was in a meeting at the same time, and the psychologist came back to me, after this morning session, looking really serious, and her question to me was that you didn’t know that your son has an ADHD and he was less than three that time. But this point that’s… When we look at the children, it depends on what type of experience or culture we have behind us, because for us, of course, as parents, when we look at our own son, who is… He’s a wild kid, like many young boys are that he cannot stand still, he wants to climb trees and collect plants and ants and those things, rather than sit and listen to boring stories of the adults, but in some other places, this is considered as a kind of a disturbing factor. And I must say… It’s just like you said it, I think that ADHD, in the United is highly, highly kinda over-diagnosed.

I’m not saying that they wouldn’t be individuals there who would need this. And I’m also belonged to those who believe that if only we would be giving children more opportunities to play and do the things that they want to do, that we would probably have less… Less of these cases where we really need to consider the kind of medical treatment for the kids.

Brett McKay: Another consequence, potential consequence of lack of play that I was intrigued by and also worried about, is there may be affecting… The lack of play is causing a decrease in creativity. What’s there? What does the research say there, and what do you think is going on?

Pasi Sahlberg: Yeah, I think it’s a similar trend that we see in the overall school achievements among kids that there are… There’re some studies that indicate that the creativity overall has been in decline during the last 20 years. Again, it’s a difficult… Creativity is even harder to measure than learning in general, but some indications say that creativity has been in decline. But again, it’s a difficult to prove that this would be directly linked to the declining time of play or experiences that children have, particular free outdoor play. So we cannot really speculate too much on that. But again, I think what we can say is that if you’re really concerned about the state of creativity among young people, then the one thing you can do is to ask yourself, are we allowing these children to experience free, unstructured play enough where they’re a good experience and exercise and further develop their imagination, curiosity and creativity?

So rather than wait for the evidence that would indicate that, I think it’s better to start action and try to make sure that the kids would continue to have these experiences over time. The other interesting thing is that, again, and there’s probably more research on that front, that is creativity as such seem to decrease also when the children are growing older. Sometimes people say that the more time you spend in school and learning in school, the less creative you will become, because you kind of learn to do things as they should be done in the school rather than figure out yourself, different things. But there is this trend. I think it’s equally important that the… When the kids are growing older, and this has been there for probably forever, so it’s not anything new that more the children are spending time in a school environment and exposed to teaching and learning as it is, the less creative they seem to become, at least their own kind of a sense of creativity declines.

And then there’s this other trend, is more like a over time, like evolution, what happens… What has happened during the last 20 years. And that’s why we need to do something about it, and if you wanna do something about it, just make sure that your students and children have enough time to exercise and develop these important elements of creativity that you can do equally, whether in school and also at home.

Brett McKay: So parents who are listening to this are like, “Okay, play is important, I wanna get my kid playing more.” Is there… I’m sure you’ve researched this, what does healthy play look like? What other factors that we know is like, “Well, if these factors are there, then this is good play?” Or should parents get really hung up on that?

Pasi Sahlberg: It’s a great question, and I think… My advice to parents who are listening to this, and are curious about their own children’s play or current children’s play is to really… At first, ask that, “What do I understand? How do I define play? What is play to me? And because that’s something that needs to be figured out first, but then, again, when we’re working on the Let The Children Play book, this was one of those hardest questions that we had in trying to basically answer the question that you were asking that, “What makes a good play?” So we were identifying some elements that, again, parents or teachers can consider, when they are thinking about how they want their children to play, whether it’s indoors or outdoors. And one of those important aspects is… And indicator or factors is the… What we call self-directedness, which means that the kids should be allowed to take a lead, and lead the way when they’re playing, rather than somebody telling them what to do or giving them the rules and regulations.

Sometimes this is good as well, but in a higher order play, this self-directed action and activity is a good one. And then the other thing is that I think the children should… When they’re playing, that they should really feel that they do it because they want to do it themselves, that they are not playing because their mother or father asked them to do or they’re not playing because the recess coach is asking or expecting them to do something like this. I think the play also has to have a positive emotion, that it has to be… The kids have to feel more of this positive emotions, joy and happiness, than they feel a negative excitement or fear, sometimes belong to the play as well. And then I think another important part that parents can also consider when they’re thinking about the children’s play is the… To what extent this activity will engage them in using their imagination? How much the children feel that they’re curious about things that they’re doing, whether it’s a play or something else? Because the curiosity and using… Actively using your imagination, are the key things for this creative action and creative thinking to take place.

So these are some of those things that… We describe this in detail in the book, those people who are interested in different qualities or different levels of play. And particularly if you want to make sure that your child, when she or he is playing, is really getting a good experience, that these are some of those questions that you can ask and make sure that they are included in this process of play well.

Brett McKay: Well, Pasi, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Pasi Sahlberg: Well, you can come and see me here in Down Under in Australia, happy to see anybody who is traveling this way, at some point when the borders are open. But I have my own website, it’s called pasisahlberg.com, where I try to keep all my work-related things. And obviously I invite everybody to read our book, Let The Children Play, that has… It’s like a longer story written for… Particularly for North American parents and teachers to have these conversations that we have been having here this morning. But take a read of the book, and if you like it, let me know. If you have any questions, I’m very happy to have a chat.

Brett McKay: Alright. Pasi Sahlberg, nice time. It’s been a pleasure.

Pasi Sahlberg: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: Well, my guest here is Pasi Sahlberg. He’s the author of the book, Let The Children Play. It’s available on Amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, pasisahlberg.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/play, where you can find links to resources, where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Make sure to check our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, where there’s thousand of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of The AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “manliness” at check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of The AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to The AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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