The Culture Machine is forming your boy. Take him back. The data on what's failing boys. The practices that build good men. Writing Take Him Back.
Santa Barbara
Joined November 2017
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I'm changing what I write about here.
I'm focused on boys, fathers and formation.
I write fiction, poetry, and essays because lectures don't reach boys and fathers don't need another manual.
If you are here for that, welcome.
This is a beautiful story for Father’s Day and perfectly illustrates why dads are so vital to a son’s success.
“The strongest relationships have a combination of high expectations and high support.”
Dads who raise the bar, raise the potential of their son.
Happy Father’s Day.
America is short half a million construction workers.
We spent thirty years telling boys that working with their hands meant failing.
We didn’t just steer them away. We looked down on the ones who tried.
The bill is here.
Comedy is one thing. What a boy absorbs before he can talk is another: his existence is a problem to be managed.
He is listening. He sees it. He hears it. And he has no defenses yet. So inside it goes. To grow. To metastasize.
The machine runs exactly as designed. Treat him as a defect. Withhold formation. Diagnose the wreckage, then call it a mystery.
The contempt is not the punchline. Can’t call it comedy when it’s the entire curriculum.
This is the whole game. A father or grandfather who shows up, invests, and teaches a boy to stand on his own.
We spend ourselves on every fight that doesn’t matter and ignore the one that does.
A shot at greatness, or a shot at a cell. The difference is usually a dad.
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High standards aren’t pressure. They’re respect.
When you expect more from a kid, you’re telling them you believe in them.
Lower the bar and you tell them the opposite. You tell them you don’t think they’re capable.
Wanting kids to succeed means refusing to expect less of them. Every time you lower the bar “for their sake,” you’re the one who stopped believing in them.
Boys are half of all students and two thirds of all suspensions.
We didn’t form them.
We medicated them.
18 million American kids live in a home without their father.
That’s more than every child in California.
Nobody marches for them.
The unemployed 27-year-old. The 37-year-old in a jail cell. The missing college freshman.
They're all the same boy.
We met him at age seven, bouncing his knee under a desk, and called him a behavior problem. Then we spent the rest of his life diagnosing the wreckage.
Jeremy Bodenhamer retweeted
This isn’t a women’s success story. It’s male collapse. Nearly all of that growth is healthcare, where women already hold 80% of the jobs.
Meanwhile male labor force participation just hit its lowest point since 1948 outside the pandemic, with the steepest drop among teenage and twentysomething boys.
You don’t hit 94% because women are sprinting ahead. You hit it because men are walking off the field entirely.
And men don’t walk off at 25. Boys check out at 9, 12, 15, back when school, reading, and nearly every institution around them decided they were a problem to manage instead of a kid to build.
The fix isn’t downstream in the labor market. It’s upstream, in grade school, junior high, and high school. Fix the boy and the man takes care of himself.
Healthcare is eating the payroll chart. But that's not the whole story.
Electricians: 81,000 openings a year. Plumbers, HVAC, welders, carpenters. It's all the same. 1.4 million skilled trade jobs - unfilled - by 2030.
These jobs pay well. They can't be offshored. They aren't going away to AI.
And boys aren't taking them.
Not because the jobs are bad. Shop classes were cut. The men who would have shown them disappeared. Nobody is showing our boys that physical mastery is worth anything.
We'll have plenty of healthcare workers. We won't have anyone to wire the buildings they work in.
Boys want to be influencers. Influencers don't build infrastructure. And they don't build men.
“if you want a one-word answer for why men are doing so much worse than women right now in terms of jobs, it is this: open.substack.com/pub/ofboys…
Healthcare.”
Jeremy Bodenhamer retweeted
Sometimes the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all, Russell Shaw wrote in 2024. theatln.tc/UcNxYu5s
These mothers are terrified of who the boy becomes, but the Slate piece never names a single value, virtue, standard, or source of truth. It’s all vibes and vigilance. “Empathy” floats around as a word but it’s untethered from anything that produces it. They’re trying to raise good men with no theory of goodness, no standard to believe in, and no good men to aim him at.
