Boys Need Examples

You can tell a boy almost anything. He will not remember any of it.

What he will remember is the men.

He will remember the man you became when your father called. He will remember the man you became when the deal closed. He will remember the man you became when the deal fell through. He will remember the man who took him to the hardware store, who taught him to throw, who told him the joke at the table. He will remember the men in your house — the friends who came over, the brother who slept on the couch, the older neighbor who fixed something at the curb. He will remember the way these men talked to each other when they thought he was not listening, which is when he was always listening hardest.

The boy is constructing a man from these. He is borrowing pieces. He is rejecting pieces. He is, mostly without his own awareness, building a composite, and the composite is the man he is going to be, modified by his own decisions, but not, in most cases, modified by very much. Most boys end up roughly the composite they were given. The composite, by adulthood, has hardened.

The implications of this are uncomfortable.

The first implication is that what a father tells his son matters far less than what he shows. This is the same lesson as the dispatch about behavior versus speech, but it is sharper here, because the stakes are sharper. A boy without strong examples will form himself from whatever is available. In a previous generation, this was uncles, neighbors, coaches, the men at the church or the lodge or the bar. In the modern environment, "whatever is available" includes voices on the internet whose entire business model is selling a vision of masculinity to boys who do not have one in their houses.

This is a real thing. It is not a moral panic. It is the predictable outcome of a generation of boys raised without dense local examples of men, who are turning, by the millions, to remote examples instead. The remote examples are not always the worst of the available men. Sometimes they are reasonable. They are also, by design, performative. They are men paid to be a kind of man on camera. The boys absorb the camera version. They are not in a kitchen with the men. They are in a feed.

The second implication is that a father cannot do this alone. This is the part most fathers do not want to hear. The composite needs to be a composite. A single man, no matter how rich and complex, cannot model the full range of what it is to be a man. The boy needs to see other men, in operation, in the regular fabric of his life. He needs the uncle. He needs the family friend. He needs the older neighbor who actually knows him by name. He needs the coach who is more than a coach. He needs, ideally, at least three other adult men who have stood in his kitchen and treated him like a person worth taking seriously.

This is harder than it sounds in a country that has, structurally, gotten worse at male friendship. Most men in their forties have fewer close friends than their fathers did at the same age. Most of those friendships are sustained over text, not in proximity. Most of those friends have never set foot in the friend's actual house. Which means most boys are growing up with one man in the building and no other adult men passing through it at the speed of real life.

If you cannot fix the entire culture, you can fix the building.

The men in your son's kitchen, between now and his eighteenth birthday, are part of his curriculum. You get to influence who they are. You can invite the right brother over for dinner. You can stay close to the friend whose values you trust. You can introduce your son to the older man at the hardware store, the coach who is honest, the neighbor who has a workshop. You can refuse to let his model of masculinity be assembled entirely from a screen and a single tired father.

This is not optional, in the environment you live in. The screens will fill the gap if you do not. They are filling it now, in millions of houses.

Who are the men in your son's kitchen?

The chapter goes further. The question, for now, is yours.

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From the forthcoming book MegaDad — releasing 25 September 2026. To be notified, see below.