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.

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.

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.

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.

Defending Boyhood @AnthonyEsolen

Every week brings new charts on school failure. Kids who can’t read. Boys who can’t do math. Grades inflated to hide it. Diplomas handed out to boys who earned nothing. What I never see: who are those boys spending their time with? I tell my sons almost daily: you become like the people you spend the most time with. Want them to take school seriously? They need friends who take school seriously. Want them to work hard in sports? They need teammates who stay late. Want them off the radical-influencer pipeline? Keep them off social media and around boys who don’t live on their phones. (And don’t tell me those kids don’t exist. They do.) Schools need accountability. Fine. But monitoring my sons’ friends and influences isn’t the school’s job. It’s mine.

Boys without dads fill the prisons. Boys without dads do the shootings. If you actually believe environment makes the criminal, you’d be fighting for dads.

Hard childhoods don't ruin people. Purposeless easy ones do. The difference is whether the difficulty was building something or just happening to someone.

We keep asking why kids don't act responsible. We aren't giving them anything to be responsible for. Responsibility isn't a trait. It's a muscle. You build it by loading it.