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What you can do about a boy who is becoming a man.
It’s fairly normal for a boy to become very argumentative when he goes from the stage of pre-adolescent to adolescent. That stage of puberty is where they begin to gain the capacity to reason abstractly. They’re able to spot your hypocrisy as a parent in an instant. And they will call you on it.
It’s not at all unusual. In fact, it’s very normal to have some crazy battles with your boys who are going into puberty, who are becoming adolescents.
We’re going to talk today about what they need, and how to help them make that transition from boy to man.
What is the thing that a boy becoming a man most needs?
Well the answer to that question is pretty simple. What does a man most desire? The answer is “a woman.”
But of course, a pubescent boy certainly doesn’t need a woman. A pubescent boy needs the essence of a woman. A pubescent boy needs to measure himself against femininity itself.
That doesn’t mean a girl. It doesn’t mean a woman. It means that as a man – or a proto man – he wants to find out exactly what he is made of as a man.
This isn’t a conscious decision on the part of a boy. This is a drive that comes from three-and-a-half million years of human evolution. To measure himself against the wild things. Against the world out there, the unknown, the chaotic. Chaos is the essence of femininity.
That is why boys are drawn out into the woods, into the wildness, into the mountains, into the ocean.
That is why that call – that internal Call of the Wild – has always been there in a man. It is because the wild things are The Feminine. And it is The Feminine that we must test ourselves against, to see if we’ve got what it takes to be a man.
So what does your boy need? What dos your boy turning into a man need?
He needs to measure himself against chaos itself:
- Athena – goddess of war
- Shiva – goddess of destruction
- Morgana the temptress
He needs to measure himself against that.
That is expressed in our world prototypically in things like the chaos of sport. That’s why things like football or Brazilian Jujitsu are so good for pubescent boys. Because they simulate war without the bullets.
War is the ultimate expression of the feminine spirit. It is chaos itself. A man who measures himself against the spirit of War and finds that he measures up can handle just about any kind of chaos that the world can throw at him.
So, what does your adolescent boy need?
The last thing he needs is to sit and talk about his feelings. Talking about feelings is the way females process themselves. It’s not the way an adolescent boy needs to help himself, to find out what kind of man he is going to become.
For those of you who have boys who are approaching pubescence or are in the middle of it, remember this: they need to find out what they have in them. What kind of man will they become?
Provide ways for them to measure themselves against the very essence of femininity, which is chaos. Give them opportunity to encounter chaos, as much as they’re able to. And be there to help them with the things they can’t manage for themselves.
And they will grow to become men.
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