Shaun (00:00.398)
Hello and welcome back to Raising Men. I'm your host, Shaun Dawson. Now, if you've been hanging out with us for a while, you've heard me talk about the battle happening inside of us between our two brains. We have a tug of war between our Conan the Barbarian brain and our Sherlock Holmes brain. Conan is that reactive, fight or flight, lizard brain part of us. It's necessary, but...

And he's the one, but he's the one that yells when kids aren't putting their shoes on or that shuts down when things get really heavy. Can't process emotion, it can just react to things. But Sherlock is the observer. Sherlock is curious. Sherlock is the part of our brains that asks, what's going on here? And can plan and can get a better outcome from a situation, but it's slower. So on this show, we're on a mission.

to help parents migrate most of the way that they interact with their kids and their boys, to migrate that from the Conan to the Sherlock brain as we figure out what it means to raise boys into men of excellence. So I'm just like you, I'm figuring it out right alongside of you. And today we're gonna tackle two

of the most frequently and frankly some of the most anxiety inducing questions that end up landing in my inbox. We've got one parent that's worried about the toxic label and consent and all of that and then we've got another one that's looking at their son's phone and wondering how we compete with an algorithm that seems to be doing the parenting for us. So let's get into it. Question one is about the toxic fear

And consent. Our first listener writes, I'm terrified of my son being labeled a predator or toxic. He's only five. Should I be teaching him consent now or should I wait until he's older? Now, first of all, I want to acknowledge that there's a real legitimate fear here and there's a real weight of that fear and I think...

Shaun (02:29.464)
as parents of boys and of girls, this concept of consent and toxicity and masculinity and femininity, it's very complex. it's, you know, we're having trouble wrestling with it as adults. You know, don't really have a prayer of doing a good job of distilling it down to lessons our kids need to be learned.

Now we live in a culture, it is also the case that we live in a culture that is rightfully reckoning with a lot of harm and that has really struggled to get this stuff right. And it can leave parents feeling like they're kind of got a ticking time bomb on their hands. So let's talk about what we've learned.

in previous episodes of Raising Men and how that might help guide how we think about this stuff. Early on, one of our early episodes was with Dr. Daniel Singley and he and I discussed how masculinity is not toxic by nature and that's an important lesson. I think that one full aspect of our culture is really trying to label it that way.

and that we should be ashamed of having certain urges or feelings or those sorts of things. And that's not a productive way to think about it. As Dr. Seely puts it, masculinity is under construction. We often think that the way to avoid toxicity or the way to avoid our sons growing up in a way that we don't like is to toughen them up, right?

to make them less sensitive. But the research actually shows the opposite. And this is what Dr. Daniel Singley talked about. He pointed out that research shows that infant boys are more emotionally sensitive and reactive to stress than girls. The primary source for this is cited as Sebastian Kramer's seminal work, The Fragile Male, which was published in the British Medical Journal. Kramer's research.

Shaun (04:56.012)
suggests that from the very beginning, boys' nervous systems are actually more vulnerable to emotional stress than our girls. So when we tell a boy to suck it up or be a man at age five, we're not making him stronger. We're actually forcing him to wall off the very parts of his brain that allow for empathy and connection. So toxicity doesn't come from being a man. It comes

from the rigidity of being a man who's not allowed to feel anything but anger. So let's talk about the question of consent. Do you wait to introduce the concepts of consent? No, absolutely not. But it's important that you don't start with a lecture on sexual ethics for a five, six, or seven-year-old. You start with what Luke Intrep, one of our guests, called a heart.

connected power. So in our episodes on rites of passage, Luke talked about the difference between power over and power with. I think consent is simply the practice of power with. When we teach our sons that their strength is a tool for protection and connection rather than a tool for dominance,

We're laying that foundation for consent. mean, isn't that the most healthy way to look at it? One of the most practical ways we can do that is through play. And that also helps model the entire thing as opposed to it being a verbal lesson, which has no effect at all. If you've been watching this show, then you recognize that. Teacher Tom Hobson joined us to talk about the importance of wrestling.

and rough housing, he pointed out that wrestling is an act of love between boys. But if you think about it, it's also the ultimate library, or sorry, it's also the ultimate laboratory for consent. So if you're wrestling with your son, I mean, I've had this happen a zillion times, and he says stop or too hard, and you stop immediately.

Shaun (07:23.724)
You're teaching him what consent looks like in real time. Now, this is something that I personally really, really struggled with because I felt like I wanted him to be tougher, right? I wanted him to able to handle it. And so I would push, I would have a tendency to push through that. But that's not the lesson I want him to learn. And I also felt like maybe he was trying to manipulate me to win the game or something like that.

and he did that sometimes. But it's really, really important that he gets to learn that his body is his body and he gets to control the way that other people interact with his body. And so if he says stop to me, then I need to stop. And if he says too hard, then I need to say too hard. And the same is true if we say it to him. Even if we're not ready to stop the game and even if we don't think it's fun and all of that, we stop immediately.

and we're teaching him to read cues. Tom suggests using something called agreements rather than rules. So you think about rules, rules are imposed, they're intrinsic, extrinsic, they're imposed from the outside, but an agreement is something that we both buy into when we come up with in the very beginning. And so if we're gonna be wrestling with our kids, like okay, here's the safe word, right? Or here's when,

we're gonna stop the game. And part of what they're gonna do is they're gonna stop the game earlier than you want to. And that's a good thing because they're actually trying to exercise their independence and they're testing whether or not it actually works to stop, and that's good. So the same is true when you're dealing with things between siblings. By teaching him to respect his sister's nose.

or his friends stop during a game of tag or wrestling or even with you, you're building that habit, the Sherlock brain that will enable him to read those complex cues of a relationship 10 years from now. You're teaching him that a man's strength comes from his ability to listen. And that's a really, really powerful touchstone.

Shaun (09:48.607)
I think, of healthy masculinity. So let's pivot to our second question. Our reader writes, he's always on his phone. I feel like he's living in an algorithm. How do I build some sort of mechanism, like an internal compliance department in his head to make sure that he's getting the right information in and not getting any of the wrong information out?

I like the phrase algorithmic miseducation. I think that that is a perfect way to describe what our social media algorithms and our YouTube algorithm, all that are creating in us. They are not here to make us happy. They are not here to educate us. They are not here to do anything but.

Stick our eyeballs to that screen so that our so so that the social media companies can say We had so many daily active users who spent Y number of hours on the platform That is how they drive their valuations. That is how they get their bonuses That is how they make their money from advertisers It is what they're trying to do and it's what they're supposed to do. They are not

Evil any more than a gun is evil. A gun can be used for evil things. It can be used for good things. Social media can perpetuate misinformation. It can also connect you to people and create movements that can topple governments in a good way. It is a very, very powerful tool. And the listener asked about building on

internal compliance department. So what do we do? How do we train our kids to be able to self-censor and to be able to understand what they should be putting into their minds? Just as we would want them putting healthy things into their bodies, we want them putting healthy thoughts into their minds. The problem is that we often try to build the compliance department through external enforcement, right?

Shaun (12:13.87)
I mean, I have social media controls put on our kids' devices. They are not allowed to watch YouTube. It's turned off unless I'm sitting with them. They are not allowed to access certain apps. That's important when they're younger. But I also want them to learn the kinds of things that they're allowed to look at. We might nag, we might take the phone away, we might...

we might have a really, really negative reaction to something we're doing or something that they're doing. But as Kirk Martin from Celebrate Calm told us, the quickest way to change your child's behavior is to control your own. So again, if our only tool is power over, right, if we are just the external enforcers, by the way, sometimes we do have to exercise our power over.

But if that's the only thing we're doing, the second we're not looking, the compliance department shuts down because it's not his. He's outsourced it to you. So Kirk's advice is to move from being a boss to being a leader. So a boss is someone who demands obedience, but a leader builds a following, builds a disciplined will. We want a son who has the internal strength to put the phone down, not because he's afraid of being caught.

but because he knows that it's numbing him. So how do we do that? We can start with Hunter Clark Field's concept of intrinsic motivation. In Hunter's work on raising good humans, she explains that rewards and punishments actually weaken a child's internal moral compass. If he only does the right thing,

to get a prize or to avoid a fine, he's not actually learning ethics. He's learning to game the system. Now, that doesn't mean you don't have a system. We still have the controls. We still have the consequences of those actions. But in order to build the internal compliance department we're talking about, we have to give them opportunities to practice self-governance. And that's what Luke Entrip was talking about when he talks about connection before correction.

Shaun (14:38.706)
If they're living in the algorithm, the only antidote is education. So we need to provide some digital disconnection moments. And it can't just be don't do that. It has to be do this instead. One of the things that I'm experimenting with is we have screen time set up on our devices and it locks them out. You can't play Roblox for more than an hour. He has to ask for more time.

Now often I'll be willing to give him more time. But I might ask that he do an educational app instead for a little while. Or I might ask that we go to the park for little while and then come back. And so we have to offer them a more compelling experience than what they're getting from their devices. We have to show them that real life, actually wrestling in the backyard or connecting with their friends or being in person,

Building something with our hands, right? Or even having a difficult conversation is more rewarding than the cheap dopamine of a scroll. So building that internal department also means modeling it yourself and modeling humility. If I'm on my phone during dinner, then he's getting the opposite lesson and this happens all the time. I'm just another boss who's...

who's, you know, saying one thing while doing another.

As Hunter says, modeling is the best parenting. And so when we own our own struggles, when we own our own algorithmic struggles, when we say, hey, I've been realizing I've been scrolling too much, or man, I need to get off my phone, or when I call my wife on her use, or she calls me on mine, which is what happens more frequently. If I do that,

Shaun (16:37.514)
if I respond in a healthy way, then I'm modeling that for my kids. I might say, I realize I've been scrolling too much and it's making me cranky, so I'm gonna put my phone into the drawers for the night. I'm showing them how, I'm showing my son how a man regulates himself. So, to our listeners today, don't let the toxic label scare you into silence. Don't let you, don't, don't,

react too much to that. Your son, his sensitivity, it's not a weakness to be purged. It is the very thing that will make him a great man if he is taught how to lead it. He needs to learn that lesson. They don't come out of the box understanding this stuff and they're not gonna respond. Shame is not the right way to deal with this stuff, but it is important.

to teach the lessons, teach him consent in the wrestling ring, right? Model it for him and teach it in the living room today so that he can practice with power with tomorrow. And when it comes to our screens and the algorithms, remember that you are the most influential content creator in his life. You're not just raising a kid, you are forging an excellent man and that man is built

with one Sherlock moment at a time, one moment of curiosity instead of reaction, one moment of connection. And it's the moment of self-controls. And always remember, the struggle is a gift. Don't steal it from them. Let them wrestle, let them fail. But you be the parent that helps them rise and that helps them forge their own manhood.

out of their experiences. My name is Shawn Dawson and this is Raising Men. You are a great parent.