They’re a lot. They’re loud. They’re not just basically feral, they are lot even for a feral animal. Plato, with total seriousness (and probably a bit of humor, too), said that “of all the wild things, a boy is the most difficult to handle.”
A lot of parents would agree to that.
He wasn’t saying that boys are aggressive or violent, he was saying that they’re difficult to handle because they’re so smart. They just haven’t been taught how to use that intelligence yet, Plato felt, and it was the job of their parents (and teachers) to do that. Ultimately, to turn these boys into productive and well-adjusted men, it would take parents and teachers “thoroughly devoted to this work of supervising the training of the boys, who will guide their native dispositions into right ways, always directing them to the good and lawful.”
Clearly this is something we are failing at as a society. Young men are fourteen times more likely to be incarcerated than their female peers. And the suicide rate among men has gone up by a third since 2010. As social scientist Richard Reeves talked about in his episode on the Daily Stoic podcast, “Particularly for young men, this question about their role, this question about how to be in the world, is relatively new. I think that the script used to be pretty clear … We’ve torn that up and we’ve replaced it with [nothing].”
Reeves also notes that, in middle and high school, studies show a gender gap when it comes to grades, but not standardized tests—likely due to behavioral reasons. “The space that I think we have to fill here is to be able to have an empathetic, data-based conversation about the real problems of boys and men and not allow the algorithm or the disagreements or the fringe people to push you one way or the other.”
As parents, we have the power to begin addressing this crisis. To help direct the wildness. To model good behavior. To be patient and present. To raise productive and well-adjusted young men who are heard and seen and loved. To help guide them every step of the way.
P.S. Being a dad isn’t just something you are. It’s something you do—every day.
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