Shaun (00:01.442)
Welcome back to Raising Men. I'm your host, Sean Dawson. Now, if you're new to the show, usually I sit down for long form conversations with authors, psychologists, and dads who are in the trenches, all trying to answer the question about how we raise sons of purpose, of strength, and of excellence. But today, we're gonna look through the mailbag. And a couple of questions kept surfacing that I wanted to talk about today. They deal with the very beginning of the journey.

that moment that you realize you're responsible for a new life and that jarring realization a few years later that your son is watching you much more closely than you realized. The core truth that we talk about on this show, one of them, is that our sons aren't watching, aren't just watching us, they're becoming us. Today we're gonna dive into some of the non-negotiables that a new father, and look at the mirror principle of emotional regulation.

we're gonna lean on the collective wisdom of our past guests to give you a roadmap. So let's get into it. Our first question comes from a listener who's just found out that he's having a son. He writes, I just found out that we're having a son. I want to raise a gentleman with a backbone, someone respectful but strong. What are some non-negotiables I should be focusing on from day one? So first of all, congratulations that.

I love that gentleman with a backbone phrase. That is really powerful. I am going to steal it. Thank you. And it acknowledges the both and of modern masculinity. I think it is a really, really concise viewpoint of a healthy modern masculinity. We don't want to raise boys who are so soft that they can't stand up to anything, but we also don't want tough guys who are brittle with glass jaws, who are emotionally illiterate.

So here's a couple of things from the archives that might help with some non-negotiables. The first one is that as one of the principles that I like, excellence is failure. Excellence comes through effort, not perfection. When we talk about backbone, we're really talking about character and the ability to persevere. Sean Harvey shared his perspective that

Shaun (02:29.184)
I think is vital from day one. Fatherhood is about trying and failing and then trying again. It is about getting up after the failure. So to raise a son with backbone, you have to model this. You have to model that excellence is actually a byproduct of continuous failure. If he sees you only as perfect, by the way, he won't see you only as perfect. He's gonna be looking for your flaws. If he sees you only as that finished product, if you just have that performance on,

He's gonna be terrified to struggle himself. He's gonna learn that you always have to have this outward veneer of perfection. And that's not true. Sean also reminds us that while we love our sons deeply, that love is paired with accountability and with boundaries. we don't really do unconditional love and behavior. You still have to do right by people. And that's the gentleman side of the

That's the gentleman side of that coin second non-negotiable is that character is more important than performance and This is something our culture is not doing a good job of instilling this in our boys today a world that is obsessed with statistics and social media likes a gentleman is defined by what he does when nobody is watching

Emily Houston points out how in the modern world in athletes, especially through things like social media and image and likeness pressures, this forces kids to always be on and it fuels a kind of toxic comparison. So your job from day one is to anchor his identity in something that is deeper, that is more fundamental than performance. You want to raise a good man, not just a nice man.

Ryan North and Emily both suggest that we need to bridge the systematic gaps in how we care for the internal lives of our boys. So a gentleman with a backbone, as you put it, is a man who doesn't need the crowd's approval to do the right thing. A third non-negotiable is modeling kindness as strength. Strength and kindness are the same thing.

Shaun (04:55.126)
It's one of the most overlooked backbone traits and that is the courage to be kind. Paul Kix emphasized that masculinity must include kindness and empathy, not just raw strength. Raw strength is just performative. He spoke about the tensile strength, the idea that a bridge is stronger because it is built to flex without breaking. And if you built it without that tensile strength, it would just shatter when the wind came along.

So if you want a son who's respectful, he needs to see you modeling kindness. He needs to see you modeling repair. Again, it goes back to the process, not perfection. When you mess up, you need to own it. That shows him what a strong man is and what he does is that he has the backbone to apologize and make things right. Not to his mother, to him, to his siblings, all of that.

So if you want to look at the data, John Gottman's work in raising an emotionally intelligent child supports this connection first and empathy-centered model. And additionally, at the Harvard Center for Developing Child has released numerous studies showing that father involvement as the primary predictor of a child's emotional health and social success. And that is an important, those are important things to think about as we're trying to figure out how to make sure that our sons.

are as powerful and as excellent they can be. Our second question should probably hit home with anybody that has a toddler. My toddler is constantly reading my mood. If I'm stressed, he melts down. How much of his emotional health is actually just a reflection of mine? Man, I feel this really, really greatly. My son is a very, very deeply feeling kid. He reflects all the emotions that he sees.

And this is something called the mirror principle. We often think that we're teaching our kids through our words, and as we've talked about a lot on the show, we aren't. We're actually teaching them through what we do and through our nervous systems. our sons absorb behaviors and emotional rhythms by observing us. This is a process that is called mirror learning. And your toddler isn't trying to be difficult. He is reading the room.

Shaun (07:21.206)
And that's because for an infant or a toddler, reading your emotions is actually a survival mechanism. is a, they will starve to death if you don't love them. And so they are very adept at making sure they're able to mirror you. If you're vibrating with stress, he's gonna interpret the environment as unsafe, and then he's gonna understand that he's gonna feel anxious and because

He doesn't have the ability to make that environment safe. He only has the ability to respond. I often talk about the two brains that we have in our system, the Conan the Barbarian brain and the Sherlock Holmes brain. Conan the Barbarian brain is the amygdala, which is built for survival and fight or flight. And you have the Sherlock Holmes brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is for logic and regulation. Toddlers don't have prefrontal cortexes. So when your toddler melts down, his Conan brain is

absolutely 100 % in charge. You cannot reason with the Conan brain. If you respond with anger, your Conan brain is gonna take over too, and that is just a battle. You now have two barbarians in the room and nothing gets resolved. Moreover, you are teaching your son a maladaptive lesson, which is that using the Conan brain to deal with things is appropriate and works. It does not. It is not ever the right thing to do. You will never be proud of what you do in the Conan brain.

unless you are literally solving a survival problem. If you're jumping out of the way of the car, that's fine. That's mostly not the problems we're dealing with. When we only project strength, or in this case, anger, we actually become brittle. And vulnerability and calmness are what keep us from breaking. It's like the Paul Kix's tensile strength in a bridge. So, what do you do?

You move from a position of judgment to curiosity. This needs to become a reflex. And I have to talk to myself about this every fricking day. Instead of asking, why is my son being such a jerk? You ask, what is he trying to communicate? You back up. You get curious about it. don't, you're not judgmental. You don't need to draw a line into the future and think about when he's 25 if he acts this way, then he's.

Shaun (09:46.019)
then he's gonna have a hard time or he's gonna alienate everybody in his life, you just ask the question. Our us versus them mentalities prevent true progress. When you see your son's meltdown as a reflection of his own struggle rather than a personal attack on your authority, you can stay in your Sherlock brain. You can get curious about it and it's an interesting puzzle to solve as opposed to.

this thing that you need to destroy. So summary here is, you know, model before you try to teach. Your actions are the real lesson. That makes it so much harder to convey lessons. You need to manage your own strong feelings. A father's most important role is to create safety in the household. A father is the safety anchor and our sons need to be able to feel safe.

If you can manage your own feelings, your son never needs to feel that he your son should never have to feel that he needs to protect himself from you. I tell a very emotional story about my role, that realization with my own son when he was about two years old. And it was a very, very powerful lesson for me. The last thing is authenticity builds connection. People, including your kids, relate more to your flaws and how you handle them.

than to your victories. Think about that. Think about whom you relate more to. You relate to authenticity, especially in this modern culture. So for those people who wanna geek out on the science, Daniel Goldman's Emotional Intelligence, explore how we leak emotions to those around us. That is a really good model to think about in terms of how we set the emotional climate in the household. Additionally, Robert.

Sapolsky's work in behave looks at the neurology or the sorry the neurobiology of how our environment shape our responses. So to everybody writing in, thank you so much for interacting with us for having the courage to ask you can always reach us through DMs in our socials and by email at podcast at raising men all those links are in the show notes and the fact

Shaun (12:10.53)
that you are listening to this show, the fact that you're worried about your toddler reading your mood shows that you are an intentional parent. You are moving away from the suck it up culture of previous generations and toward a model of fatherhood that is more integrative, that is more holistic. So if I could leave you with one final thought today, it's gonna be this. Parenthood is not about having

all the answers. It's about modeling how you find answers. Your son isn't learning to succeed. He's not learning to win. He's not learning to be perfect. He needs to learn how to grow. He succeeds merely by learning. It is your job to cultivate that fire in his belly, to constantly improve, and to train him to manage the

Tension that results in being both constantly and never satisfied That is a tension that is so difficult to manage is difficult for us adults But you need to be able to sit with that you need to be able to be constantly satisfied and never satisfied So if you found value in today's Q &A, please share it with at least just one other parent we are rocks in

a rock polisher and we are all polishing each other. I'm Sean Dawson and this is Raising Men and you are a great parent.