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A reader asks Heartiste the best way to go about raising her son to mitigate or avoid all of the regularly scheduled programming of spiritual, physical and mental emasculation in our mass media-driven Brave New World Order. For a guy who doesn't have kids, and has expressed many times that he won't, his list is surprisingly good, and echoes many of the same approaches and strategies I have in being a "red pill" parent.
I've been contemplating a post like this for a long while, but have had a bit of writer's block lately that comes and goes, depending on what's going on in my part of the world. Nothing like
I'm going to take the bits of advice I agree with (I don't necessarily agree with them all) and expand on them a bit with my own perspective, than offer my own list on what Fatherhood to boys entails from a red pill perspective to conclude.
1. Boys don’t need to hear about decline. What they need to hear about are enemies to fight.
Too true. I'll add to this that as they get older, they'll need to recognize that the greatest enemy they will have to fight is themselves. That nothing in life comes easy, that anything worth having or accomplishing requires hardship and struggle, and the biggest obstacle to success will be his or her own fears, doubts, laziness and lack of gumption and toughness.
4. Give your son room to grow into a man. Let him take risks and flirt with danger.
As a Father, this is where his most important task lies - being the guard against over-protective smother-mothering. From the time I was 5 to pre-teen adolescence, my mother didn't want me to have a skateboard, ride a bike without a helmet (in the 80's only dorks and dweebs wore helmets while riding BMX...I always took mine off and hid it in the bushes the moment my mom was outta sight), wouldn't let me sign up for tackle football, martial arts classes, nor let me get a surfboard, nor shoot my friend's BB guns. I eventually got to go and do all that on my own, as a rebellious teenager.
5. Your son will learn how to successfully deal with women by observing his father deal with his mother. The best thing Dad can do for his son is game his Mom.
The greatest influence parents have on their children is setting the example and living the way you want your children to become. Don't be an Average Married Chump.
7. Your son will not want to “share his feelings” with you or Dad. If you want to know what’s on his mind, tell a story lesson from your life. He will subconsciously ingest your story and relate it to his own problems.
Now this is one of the best things Heartiste advises in the entire freakin' post. I grew up with a mother, female public school teachers, Churchian adult influences thoroughly indoctrinated in the Idolatry of Pussy worship, and a mass media culture that all promoted the idea that boys and men are stifled and damaged and stunted by society's expectations that they not cry or talk about their bad feelings. I was always told and encouraged to "share my feelings" and talk about how something made me feel. No matter how many times I was told this, I still remember that it just somehow felt wrong and off kilter to talk about "feelings" and emotions. Everyone said it was supposed to make me feel better, but it never did. It just made me feel gay.
Now I KNOW it's doing this precise thing that leads to men becoming stifled, stunted and damaged! You do not make better boys by trying to raise them as girls! Boys need to be trained to ignore their feelings and not let their emotions cripple them with fear and inaction in the face of adversity. Most boys need to be goaded, berated and taunted (age appropriate language of course) to motivate them to overcome their inner fears and doubts, then praised and rewarded when they do so. Don't be a pussy, you fag.
12. Never humiliate his father in front of him. You may find it satisfying, but you’re doing your boy a disservice.
For Mothers, this is probably THE most important thing in the entire post that they need to be mindful of. Not just humiliate, but always speak of the boys Father with respect and deference...even if he's a drunken, abusive, cheating lout that abandoned you and the kids. If you got nothing nice to say about the man you let impregnate you, than keep your mouth shut. Every time you denigrate or humiliate a boy's Father you are doing it to him as well.
For Fathers, if your wife ever disrespects or tries to humiliate you in front of your children, you need to put the foot down and nip that shit in the bud immediately and with forceful authority. Do not tolerate it one bit. This is where you draw your line in the sand, and if she crosses it, you need to let her know that there are consequences for it.
18. If you are atheist or agnostic, swallow your pride and ensconce him in a religious tradition. The presence of a powerful overseer, true or not, will help ground him and gird his will.This makes the very first instance I can ever recall such a hedonistic-nihilist-atheist like Heartiste recommending boys need religion. Good call...just avoid exposing him to idolatrous Churchianity. Especially avoid ANY religion being taught on the tell-a-vision.
20. No social media. No iPads. No iPhones. Boys don’t become great men with their eyes glued to a screen like a plugged in Matrix pod. They become great men with their eyes up and searching the horizon.
No X-box. No computer with internet access in their own room. The Palm Zombie Apocalypse has gone Global and the worst thing for his development and growth is to get addicted to the intermittent rewards of electronically transmitted affirmations or worse, developing a regular compulsion to fap to teh Pr0n.
Quarantine them from it as long as you possibly can so that they don't virtually disconnect from the real world.
Heartiste made his list for Mother's raising boys.
Here's my top10 list for Father's raising Boys in our Brave New World:
1) Be militant about his diet, make sure it is nutrient dense and avoid the NAD as much as possible. Don't feed him fast foods, convenience foods, microwaved meals, nor snack foods. As the child grows up, they will be exposed to these things from family, friends, peers, institutions, organizations and group activities. It's unavoidable unless you micro manage every waking moment of their lives. The only thing you CAN do, is make sure they're not getting that crap at home, and that when they do leave the home, they are already full and fueled up with great, healthy food, so even if they do end up eating the junk, they won't eat as much because they are already full of good stuff. It's also good to let him go hungry every so often. There's a difference between hunger and starvation.
There's a reason why I put diet number one on the list. A well fed child (as in given nutritious food and kept from junk feed) is a well behaved child.The differences in behavior between nutritionally nourished children and SAD junk fed ADD rug rats are astounding and dramatic. It is my personal belief born of experience, that feeding them right over a lifetime, will make everything else dealing with parenting much easier.
2) Learn to identify and avoid all feminizing and potentially long term damaging substances found in food, water and personal care products. Soy, fluoride, MSG, artificial sweetners, BPA, GMO foods, all sunscreen products and Big Pharma's utterly ludicrous vaccination schedules.
3) Unless the boy experiences a serious injury, downplay and ignore all minor bumps, scrapes, falls and bruises. Tell him it's nothing, stop crying (if he is) and get over it. Mother's will want to give comfort and make him feel better. Let her, that's what she's there for. Additionally, as he gets older, you can tell him that the only person in the whole wide world that will ever care if he feels sorry for himself, is his Mom. Don't go seeking sympathy from a single other soul. Nobody but their Mothers cares when males cry. The faster they learn this, the better.
As Dad, your job is to toughen him up. It's a cruel world in current social upheaval and decline, and as things get worse, only the strong will survive and thrive. As soon as the boy is walking and talking, you should be preparing him for this.
4) Let the boy play in the dirt. Let him get covered head to toe in it...and don't let his Mother get upset or try to keep him from getting dirty or from tearing up the grass. Don't be so obsessed with keeping him away from all germs. This will compromise his immune system and impact his long term health. If you're outside doing activities, don't be so freakin' anal about making sure he washes his hands before eating...unless he's been handling raw meat or dogshit, it's okay to eat your lunch with dirty hands. Of course, setting a standard of cleanliness for the dinner table and being presentable amongst fellow diners is a good thing to instill...but don't make Germophobia and the pursuit of immaculate cleanliness an obsession.
5) Make sure you always have at least one family meal a day - preferably dinner, but if it's not possible to have every member present, make it the meal where most if not all can be there. Do not allow the Tell-A-Vision to be on while you eat. Make it a standard daily ritual where the only thing allowed is eating and talking. And most importantly, as a Father, YOU SIT AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE. I cannot stress that last one enough. Do not let anyone - especially your Wife or Daughter - usurp your place at the table. If you're a religious family, either you say the prayer, or you delegate who blesses the meal.
6) Teach him about honor, and keeping his word. The worst punishments he should ever receive is for acting dishonorably and deliberately lying to manipulate people. Don't make promises you know you can't keep, and keep every promise you make. Also come down hard on him for any and every attempt to try and sow dissension between his Mother and yourself. You must support each other as a united front in matters of discipline and punishment.
7) As soon as he's old enough, martial arts and firearms training. Weight training and both solo and team sports if he's interested as he gets older. Whether he gets interested in sports or not, make sure he receives training and discipline in the arts of violence and strength development as soon and as often as possible. Along with the learning of the ways of violence, instill the appropriate lessons of discipline, control and when to use it. Start nothing, finish everything.
8) When he gets older and approaches puberty, it will be time to teach him "Game." As Father and Patriarch of the household, the best way to teach him this, as Heartiste notes in his tip #5, is by example. He should have no trouble understanding the concepts of Game, attraction and the differences between males and females, since he's already spent his whole life observing the example set by his dad. When you sit him down for 'the talk' and say you cover something like Rollo's excellent Lessons for my Son, you should be able to point out your own actions, behaviors and demeanor as the primary examples demonstrating those principles.
9) Controlled, temporarily painful but not damaging, age-appropriate corporal punishment, measured out dispassionately and sparingly, will be one of the most effective means of instilling respect for your authority. In the past, many Father's relied on their belts, or switches etc. Nowadays it's considered abusive and grounds for CPS taking your kids away. Make sure you only dole it out in private, and that you do so deliberately and unemotionally so as to avoid crossing the line from discipline into abuse. I don't believe men should ever use anything other than their bare, open hands for physical discipline. But a little of it, effectively applied, goes a long way. Done right, the implied threat of physical discipline will be more than enough to ensure compliance and obedience 99% of the time. Your boy should definitely fear his Father.
10) Always make regular time for Father-Son exclusive physical activities AT ALL AGES, doing something you can mentor him in. Hunting, fishing, skiing, surfing, diving, skating, dirt biking, rock climbing, hiking, camping, car re-building, woodwork etc. It's good for both of you physically, and it gives you something to bond over for a lifetime.
Now that's my top 10, but there's one more thing I needed to add that I think is so important, it should stand alone from this list. While I have written about avoiding making boys talk about their feelings, etc., as well as instilling healthy fear of his Father into a boy, as Dad, you also have to demonstrate positive masculine affection and love. This is especially important after you've had to give some corporal punishment. Nothing wrong with hugging or kissing your boy, and telling him explicitly that you love him. You have to be a hard ass most of the time, so that you raise him to be a hard ass, ready for a hard, cruel world. But all stick and no carrot will make him come to hate you, and will also leave him stunted and unable to cope with many of his own conflicting feelings. Show him that as a man, he has no fear or shame in expressing love to other males, and that his own feelings of affection for other males (no homo) are perfectly normal, okay and nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about.
As a man, can you look at your male family members or close male friends straight in the eye and unflinchingly and without any hang ups and say "I love you?" If you can't, then you are letting your emotions cripple your actions.
Oh, and my final thoughts on raising boys (and girls) in our dysfunctional age of declining civilization is also important enough to stand alone from the top 10 list as well: institutionalized education.
Homeschool > Private Same-sex Religious School > Private Same-sex Secular School > Running Wild in the Streets.
Avoid the Government
13 comments:
Good stuff.
Positive masculinity content is the best stuff the Manosphere has to offer. Son-raising advice is prime in that category. There can never be too much of it.
There ought to be a red-pill education industry for parents who want to teach their sons and daughters the right way, especially if their kids are being indoctrinated in a school.
Red-pill son-raising advice is useful for older converts to the red pill, too, because we were raised in a blue-pill environments with public education, mainstream television and movies, liberal cities, single-mom homes, no good male role models, etc..
We have to undo the corruption of our formative years for ourselves. It's useful to compare our formative influences from our childhood with red-pill son-raising advice. Doing so helps to identify what we need to do as adult men to fix the blue-pill factors of our upbringing. Except instead of a parent applying the advice to us, we apply the son-raising advice to ourselves in order to clean out the blue pill and change ourselves to positive masculine men.
Perhaps I missed it (although I don't think I did) but dads roughhousing with their sons is a very good thing. They love it.
I wrote a while back about raising a son from a mother's viewpoint. I think, as you said, one of the most important things she can do for her son is respect his father. It will highlight his fathers life in his eyes, as well as ground in him what a good woman does for her husband to help him in his own search if/when the time comes.
Also, she needs to just step back. For the most part, just stay out of it and trust her husband to instill in him what a man must grow into. Too many wives just don't trust their husbands to do this.
As to activities for boys, I think you will really like these videos. They are amazing.
Keoni,
An implicit idea in your post that I would explicitly advise is instilling a healthy, constructive approach to failure, being wrong, mistakes, and shortcomings. There ought to be consequences and penalties, some imposed by parents, but those things are merely the price to pay for learning. In ed psych terms, a growth mindset and mastery learning goal orientation equip a boy to use failures as building blocks. A fixed mindset and performance goal orientation internalize and self-enforce limits.
I would frame this famous Teddy Roosevelt quote and display it in a prominent place in my son's room:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
-President Theodore Roosevelt, from "The Man In The Arena", Sorbonne, Paris, France, April 23, 1910.
Keoni: "A well fed child (as in given nutritious food and kept from junk feed) is a well behaved child.The differences in behavior between nutritionally nourished children and SAD junk fed ADD rug rats are astounding and dramatic."
Due to my food awareness raised from reading your blog, I wonder how much of low-achieving kids' low achievement is due to poor diet.
I buy my food in generic city supermarkets. I don't buy as healthy as you advocate, and I do indulge in some sweet and salty junk, but I try to buy as healthy as I can from what's available on the shelves within my budget. Many of my fellow shoppers use state benefits cards to pay for their groceries, and I assume they're from the several housing projects in the neighborhood. What stands out the most is that they invariably buy a lot of name-brand junk food. As in meal ratio, not just snack ratio. It also stands out they're not cost-conscious and buy more expensive food that's also unhealthier on the taxpayer's dime.
Never humiliate his father in front of him. You may find it satisfying, but you’re doing your boy a disservice.
My parents divorced when I was five. She spent the next fifteen years viciously disrespecting him to me. I cannot even begin to describe how destructive this was to my development as a man. Nothing my father could have done about it, of course, since she denied him any access to his children whatsoever.
Stories are a key element to a father-son relationship. Stories from your own life are of course especially instructive. If you feel you don't have any stories of note to share with him... well that's too bad, but not the complete end of the world. For one thing, you probably do, but you just haven't thought back and come to terms with your life. Also, nothing wrong with a little embellishment to a story if it helps make a point (at least when he's young). You can also tell stories from your father or grandfather, uncles, people you knew.
Of course, I also recommend reading to your son... lots. Most of what you read should be written before 1940, with careful exceptions made after that. You might be surprised at what captures your son's imagination. I read mine a Sherlock Holmes story at the age of 7, and he loved them so much I ended up reading him the whole 400-page anthology, complete with archaic English, complex figures of speech, and lots and lots of cultural references from the 19th century the took a lot of explaining. Great fodder for boyhood imaginations, as well as expanding his horizons on the European/American heritage.
I also recommend reading him stories of real people, especially of men in true acts of heroism and leadership. Americans have an incredibly rich heritage of those sorts of stories, starting with the Pilgrims on through the world wars. Once we get to the latter half of the 20th century, Vietnam and onward, it gets a little more difficult to explain to a boy, of course.
One thing I also did, since I have a flair for storytelling, is to make up adventure stories tailored toward his strengths and interests, or toward overcoming shortcomings that he is uncomfortable discussing.
rycamor: "Once we get to the latter half of the 20th century, Vietnam and onward, it gets a little more difficult to explain to a boy, of course."
Actually, more-recent and current stories of American masculine heroism and leadership from the latter of half of the 20th century and 21st century from the Korean and Vietnam wars onward, most of all stories of American heroism and leadership in the current War on Terror, are a direct antidote to current anti-masculine and anti-heroic American narratives.
It would teach your son that American masculine vigor, heroism, and leadership are not from a by-gone era, but alive and part of today's world - your son's world. Doing so would also teach him not to accept politically correct social narratives at face value that are designed to dilute American masculine vigor.
Notwithstanding the fecklessness of the politicians they work for, American soldiers accomplished great things - goals thought to be impossible - in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. As great or even greater than what American soldiers accomplished in the World Wars.
There are plenty of current stories of heroism and leadership by American military men to tell your son.
This is a WONDERFUL post. I've linked to it, riffed on it, and made a quibcag out of it here:
Boys Will Be Boys, With The Proper Upbringing
Boys need to be trained to ignore their feelings
Just to be clear, do you mean all feelings or just negative ones like fear?
What about feelings regarding honor, duty, protectiveness towards loved ones, righteous anger...?
I don't think men should be emotionless automatons, although I suspect that is not what you meant here...
I also do think that religion is necessary, I was raised as a Catholic and I think Catholicism is a great religious without much feminist BS unlike most protestant churches.
The importance of Religion as a kid grows up be it a boy or girl lies on the establishment of FAMILY RITUALS which is very very important
I would agree with much of this up to the corpal punishment. Long term studies show this damages a child without question other than conjecture. A father can be loved or feared, both will always be in conflict with one another. You are either a great man that your son will respect or you are not living up to your end of the bargain as a leader/father. Kids learn through example and repition. It is the only way the unformed brain can work. Pain teaches nothing from the hand of a loved one. If I hit you its assault, if I hit my wife its spousal abuse. If I hit a child its discipline? This is an old fashioned view that holds no weight in anything but speculation. Dig the blog otherwise! :-)
Hi Keoni,
I saw this short clip in the SF Times and thought of you and your posts about raising sons.
It's about a troubled 10-year old being sent to a bootcamp.
http://sftimes.co/?id=143&src=share_fb_new_143
Anyway, thought you might appreciate it.
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