Boys to Men: Raising three sons has helped me appreciate the masculine
virtues.


http://tinyurl.com/3xpo4z

BY TONY WOODLIEF
Friday, June 15, 2007 12:01 a.m.

I think Father's Day ought not to be a celebration of every man who
managed to procreate, but instead a time to honor those increasingly
rare men who are actually good at fathering. But what makes a good
father? This question holds more than philosophical interest for me.
Though my father left when I was young, and my stepfather found me
uninteresting, I now have three sons of my own (ages 7, 5 and 2). Not
knowing any better, they think I have fatherhood figured out. They
believe Father's Day is rightly my day.

Judging by the greeting cards, Father's Day is like a Sabbath for many
men, a day Dad puts his feet up. I think the Almighty was able to rest
one day a week because he had just the two kids, only one of whom was
male. I could really use a restful Father's Day, but recently I found
my sons huddled over a book on traps, which makes me fear that they're
planning for my gift to be something live. Already this spring they've
captured a snake, a bullfrog and at least one deadly spider. While
other men think about golfing or napping tomorrow, I'm praying I can
weather the day without getting bitten.

There's more than a little irony in the fact that I have three sons.
I'm not what you'd call a master of the manly arts. I can't start a
fire without a match, or track a deer, or ride a horse. I don't know
how to fix cars, and my infrequent forays into home repair usually
necessitate medical attention. But these are the things little boys
want to learn--I remember wanting to learn them myself. Or maybe it's
that boys yearn to do things with fathers, and those things usually
involve a little danger. A new wildly popular book of essential boy
knowledge recognizes this in its title: "The Dangerous Book for Boys."
My oldest has dog-eared nearly every page.

I'm allergic to most danger. I get a stomachache at the thought of
confrontation. I'm grouchy and self-centered, and have few of the
traits that William McKeever, in his curmudgeonly 1913 classic,
"Training the Boy," considered essential to manhood: "courageous
action in the face of trying circumstances, cordial sympathy and
helpfulness in all dealings with others, and a sane disposition toward
the Ruler of All Life." I'm hardly qualified to be a role-model for
three boys.

Many academics would consider my lack of manliness a good thing. They
regard boys as thugs-in-training, caught up in a patriarchal society
that demeans women. In the 1990s the American Association of
University Women (among others) positioned boys as the enemies of
female progress (something Christina Hoff Sommers exposed in her book,
"The War Against Boys"). But the latest trend is to depict boys as
themselves victims of a testosterone-infected culture. In their book
"Raising Cain," for example, the child psychologists Don Kindlon and
Michael Thompson warn parents against a "culture of cruelty" among
boys. Forget math, science and throwing a ball, they suggest--what
your boy most needs to learn is emotional literacy.
But I can't shake the sense that boys are supposed to become manly.
Rather than neutering their aggression, confidence and desire for
danger, we should channel these instincts into honor, gentlemanliness
and courage. Instead of inculcating timidity in our sons, it seems
wiser to train them to face down bullies, which by necessity means
teaching them how to throw a good uppercut. In his book "Manliness,"
Harvey Mansfield writes that a person manifesting this quality "not
only knows what justice requires, but he acts on his knowledge, making
and executing the decision that the rest of us trembled even to
define." You can't build a civilization and defend it against
barbarians, fascists and playground bullies, in other words, with a
nation of Phil Donahues.

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

The good father, then, needs to nurture his son's moral and spiritual
core, and equip him with the skills he'll need to act on the moral
impulse that we call courage. A real man, in other words, is someone
who doesn't run from an Osama bin Laden. But he may also need the
ability to hit a target from three miles out with a .50 caliber M88 if
he wants to finish the job.

Not only do I believe that trying to take the wildness out of boys is
a doomed social experiment, but I'm certain that genetic scientists
will eventually discover that males carry the Cowboy Gene. That's my
name for whatever is responsible for all the wrestling in my house,
and the dunking during bath time, and my 5-year-old's insistence on
wearing his silver six-shooters to Wal-Mart in order to protect our
grocery cart. I only pray that when the Cowboy Gene is discovered,
some well-meaning utopian doesn't try to transform it into a Tea Party
Gene.

The trick is not to squash the essence of boys, but to channel their
natural wildness into manliness. And this is what keeps me awake at
night, because it's going to take a miracle for someone like me, who
grew up without meaningful male influence, who would be an
embarrassment to Teddy Roosevelt, to raise three men. Along with
learning what makes a good father, I face an added dilemma: How do I
raise my sons to be better than their father?
What I'm discovering is that as I try to guide these ornery, wild-
hearted little boys toward manhood, they are helping me become a
better man, too. I love my sons without measure, and I want them to
have the father I did not. As I stumble and sometimes fail, as I feign
an interest in camping and construction and bugs, I become something
better than I was.

Father's Day, in our house, won't entail golfing or napping or
watching a game. I'll probably have to contend with some trapped and
irritated reptile. There's that cannon made of PVC that my oldest boy
has been pestering me to help him finish. And the youngest two boys
are lately enamored of climbing onto furniture and blindsiding me with
flying tackles. Father's Day is going to be exhausting. But it will be
good, because in the midst of these trials and joys I find my answer
to the essential question on Father's Day. What makes a good father?
My sons.

Mr. Woodlief's pamphlet "Raising Wild Boys Into Men: A Modern Dad's
Survival Guide" is available from the New Pamphleteer. He also blogs
about family and faith at http://www.tonywoodlief.com

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