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Raising Men is a podcast about parenting, masculinity, and the lifelong journey of raising sons—and ourselves—to be men of courage, character, and purpose. Hosted by Shaun Dawson, each episode features real conversations with parents, leaders, and thinkers redefining what it means to raising men in today’s world.
Welcome back to Raising Men.
I'm Shaun Dawson, and we're in the business of raising men of purpose and excellence.
Today, we're going to open up the listener mailbag for another direct QA episode.
We have two specific situations from dads who are dealing with some intense family
dynamics.
We're going to draw from the collective wisdom of
All of the guests that we've had so far on this show.
So let's jump straight into the first question.
The first question is a father who contacted us because his sons are constantly fighting
with each other.
He writes, My son is constantly fighting with his brother.
Should I let them slug it out like we did?
Or should I intervene?
You know, the old philosophy of letting boys simply slug it out.
In the backyard feels like lazy parenting to me.
And I think that it has a problem of it's valuing short-term compliance over long-term
character development.
And it's not giving them a healthy way of resolving their distant differences.
So when you tell your sons to fight it out until someone quits or wins, then you're not
teaching them how to resolve.
A disagreement in a way that society finds acceptable.
You're teaching them that physical dominance and emotional intimidation are tools that
they can resort to, and that they're the ultimate metrics for settling human dispute
disputes.
And that doesn't actually work once they become adults.
and it can lead them into a place where.
They're just not really getting along well with society.
The biggest boy wins, the smaller boy bides his time, and resentment maybe comes up with
ways to get back at him.
And both learn that conflict means that one perspective wins and the other perspective
loses.
They are not seeking win-win solutions.
Now, flipping to the opposite extreme.
is also damaging if you step in as a frantic referee and you know and and you do that the
second your sons start raising their voices and you separate them immediately and you
don't and and you and you resolve the issue for them, you're not letting them grow either.
You're not teaching them, you're not enabling them to learn how to resolve their
differences in a healthy way.
Either.
You become kind of a rescue mechanism.
And your sons never learn to manage the friction of life, of a shared space, because
you're constantly removing the friction for them, just like you would be if you're
helicopter parenting them at school and interfering with their school's corrections and
that sort of thing.
So uh Damien Gomes shared a framework.
During our show, during the episode eleven, that provides uh an interesting path to look
at.
He spent years, um, continues to spend years, leading young boys in the Boy Scouts.
And conflict is basically an absolute certainty when you have young prepubescent boys
running around in the woods.
And he introduced us to a team building concept called storming, norming, and performing.
So he pointed out that chaos is precisely where real world leadership and communication
skills are built through active trial and error.
And that's what he called storming.
There's gonna be chaos.
There's gonna be having to figure it out.
There's going to be battles in between each other.
And he noted that his hardest job as a leader.
Was resisting the urge to rescue the boys too early.
Once you get down to the norming part, where you're actually trying to get the result
instead of figuring out how to get to the result.
And then, of course, during the performing part, then you need to be involved differently.
But ultimately, you need the boys to be able to figure it out for themselves, giving them
Gentle nudges in the right direction.
He, the way that he put it is that he wanted them to experience the discomfort of a broken
process so that they could invent the solution themselves.
So you can apply this exact methodology to your living room.
When your sons begin to argue, your immediate job is to monitor the safety of the
interaction, not to fix the problem.
You're gonna step back.
And you're gonna observe, and you're not gonna be opinionated about how it gets resolved.
You're just gonna watch.
Let them experience that tension.
Give them that space.
They're storming right now.
Give them the space to try and to stumble and negotiate.
If it gets physical, then maybe you call out and maybe you, you know, say, we don't hit in
this family.
By the way, this approach aligns really well with.
Some of the research that I've read from Dr.
John Gottman.
He wrote a book called Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child.
So Gottman's long-term studies on sibling relationships show that children who learn to
manage interpersonal friction without parental guidance, without the parents coming in and
erasing their experience, they develop significantly higher emotional intelligence down
the line.
However,
Gottman's data also shows that if structural aggression is left completely unchecked and
completely unguided, it will devolve into a destructive bullying pattern that erodes
family trust.
So there's like everything we talk about on the show, there's a tension.
So your role, the way to think about it, I think.
Is to move from a referee to an active coach.
You let them storm, but you establish boundaries against physical violence or even verbal
abuse.
If the argument starts to cross from a healthy disagreement into destruction, then you
step in and you manage the environment.
You're not managing the verdict.
You don't get to decide who wins, who gets the toy, or you don't get to resolve.
The issue.
Instead, you help them look at the reality.
And you say, and and this is one of the things that a number of our guests have talked
about.
Just to be an observer.
You say, I see your flin fists are clenched, and your brother's voice is shaking.
Call attention to each other's physical attributes, to both boys' physical attributes.
We're gonna pause this conversation until your systems cool down.
Once their brains are back online, you make them execute what Damien called a redo.
You sit them down and you have them restate their needs calmly.
You ask, okay, what can we do to solve the problem so both of us can move forward?
And you force them to take total ownership of the situation and of the resolution.
So by stepping back during the storm, and then by stepping in, only to guide.
Recovery, you're teaching your sons that conflict is an opportunity as much as it is a
problem.
So they get an opportunity to strengthen their relationship, to repair their o their
relationship, as opposed to an excuse to fight, an excuse to have a war.
Our second question comes from an adoptive father whose son is starting to ask heavy
questions about his biological father.
He says, My son is adopted, and he's starting to ask about his real dad.
How do I handle his feelings of being discarded?
Now, I don't have any direct experience to this, but I did talk to Ryan North, and he's
the co-founder of One Big Happy Home, and he had some great wisdom about this issue.
And I urge you to go back and listen to his episode.
I think that I can imagine that when your adopted son starts talking, asking about his
biological father, that might be a challenge.
Right to your own insecurity.
And that insecurity might try and hijack the room.
I think that it would be easy to default into viewing these questions as a direct threat
to your authority or a sign that the love that you have poured into him isn't sufficient.
You might feel a defensive urge to minimize the conversation or to
protect your ego or just avoid the subject entirely.
And I think that along with everything, along with, you know, similar to the way that I
talk about how I experience my son's uh dalliance with sports, you gotta drop it.
It's not about you, it's about them.
Your son's questions, moreover, your son's questions are not a rejection of your
fatherhood.
They're probably just a cry for identity.
And safety, which are things it's your job to provide.
He's not trying to replace you, he is trying to understand the missing pieces of his own
story.
And that's something that you should be encouraging, not discouraging, as you know, uh
assuming that your reflex is the way I think mine might be.
So Ryan North walked us through this.
exact reality.
And and that was episode nineteen, if you want to go back and look for it.
And he has raised six children.
Four of those children entered his family through adoption.
And he reminded he reminded us that a foundation a foundational principle that every
father should memorize is that all behavior is communication.
So
When an adopted child begins articulating feelings of being discarded, they're not just
making a statement about the past.
In fact, maybe they're not making a st uh a statement about the past at all.
They're really testing the structural integrity of the present.
They're asking, are you able to handle my grief?
Or will my anger cause you to leave me too?
So Ryan's core framework for running a household is that nurture plus structure creates
safety.
So if your son senses even a flicker of defensiveness, of anxiety, of irritation from you
when he brings up his biological father, you're damaging that safety.
And he reads your tension as a sign that the topic is dangerous.
So that closes his jawbridge and he pulls back into his armor his armor.
And that dynamic is supported by work of John Bowby and Mary Ainsworth on attachment
theory.
And that's kind of all the rage these days, and it's worth understanding.
And they've done extensive research that demonstrates that a child requires a secure base.
To explore the world.
And again, you know, our job as parents is to give them that secure base.
And that exploration includes their own internal psychological history.
So if the base becomes unstable or threatened by the child's behaviors or the p child's um
emotions, they're gonna experience.
Profound sense of anxiety and isolation.
So your son can only process his grief if he knows that his relationship with you is
strong enough to hold all of the questions that he wants to bring to bear.
That's another kind of another thought that occurs to me there is that these are tough
questions, and this is a way.
That you have of modeling how to deal with tough questions.
It also comes to mind that you don't have to be perfect because not being perfect and then
apologizing for not being perfect is a way of modeling healthy masculine behavior as well.
So one tool that you have to bridge this divide, to approach this um kind of situation is
to move directly toward it instead of away from it.
But bring curiosity.
And so whatever he's bringing to the discussion, you don't try to fix it.
You don't try to offer solutions.
You don't try to make the pain go away or or
Make the discomfort go away.
You don't tell him why he should feel glad to be in your home or why, you know, why you
deserve more respect or whatever it is.
You just want to validate his feelings.
You just want to be curious.
And it it means that you need to figure out how to stay re completely regulated.
You look him in the eye and say, you know.
It makes sense to feel this way.
And I can imagine that that's really heavy to wonder about these things.
And it's fine to feel angry or or sad about it.
But then you need to also establish a culture in the home where his biological history is
treated with honesty and it's respect.
It's not being swept under the rug, and it's not something that you need to avoid talking
about.
It's not a shameful secret.
If you don't know the answer to his questions, that's fine too.
You can say so without having to panic about it.
You tell him I don't know the answer to that right now, but I don't know, we can figure it
out together.
Another thing I might mention is We all have varying degrees of success in handling
conversations like this.
And this applies to all difficult conversations, not just this specific one.
But if you've snapped or you've gotten defensive, or if you've shut them down, then you
should execute a formal apology.
And Ryan North also gave us a refer repair framework.
You go to your son and you own your own mistake explicitly.
You apologize.
You explain what you're apologizing for.
You explain how you view how your reaction impacted him.
You say you're sorry, and you commit to doing better next time.
That's the recipe for a good apology.
When your son sees you handling his deepest kind of emotional wounds or
Really, just any difficult conversation with steady presence.
He's gonna learn that he's wanted.
You don't have to tell him that.
You will be showing him that by your example.
And you will replace whatever fear he has, a fear of abandonment, which I can imagine
would be totally no natural in this circumstance.
You will replace that with a fe with an unshakable foundation of belonging.
Maybe even one that is stronger than one than the one that he would feel if he were your
biological son.
So that brings us to the close of this QA session.
You know, we talk a lot about how fatherhood is not about running a flawless script.
It's not about being perfect every day.
It's not about having a clean answer for every complex emotional dilemma our kids throw at
us.
It's about being relentless with your willingness to stay in the room, to connect with
your son.
Manage your own baggage, to stay regulated, and let our children teach us what they need.
Like I say, your son is watching your daily movements.
They're tracking our own steps.
They are walking in our footsteps to learn what it means to be a man.
So if we want them to grow up, if we want them to have purpose, if we want them to have
strength, if they want them to be
excellent men, we have to start by demonstrating those exact qualities in our own actions.
Thank you for listening to Raising Men.
And remember, you are a great parent.