Shaun Dawson (00:06.424)
Hi, my name is Sean Dawson and you're listening to Raising Men. You know, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the founding of our nation, which is tomorrow.

And I've been yeah, I'm listening to a bunch of other podcasts and and listening to people talk and and there's there's a lot of people that are

Shaun Dawson (00:39.342)
kind of feeling unmoored or anxious about, you know, or is this really a time that we should be that we should be celebrating? Because things are things just seem difficult a lot of ways. And I heard a great take on that, which

was that this is a particularly important and exciting time.

To be an American. Not precisely not because things are going great. They're not going great.

He said that it's the best time to be an American because the values that built this country: freedom, self-reliance, dignity, courage, respect for other points of view, those values seem like they're under threat. And that

That threat, paradoxically, is what makes it a real privilege to be alive now. Because when something is under threat, you finally get to see what it's worth. And you have to decide in a really physical, meaningful way.

Shaun Dawson (02:23.137)
The extent to which you're gonna fight for it or you're gonna let it go.

It brings everything into really, really stark relief.

Shaun Dawson (02:36.661)
I s I sat with that a little bit and I I thought

Shaun Dawson (02:42.785)
First of all, it really rings true to me. I have a real appreciation. I've traveled all over the world and I have a real appreciation for how special this country is. It really is one of the very few places on the planet where you have the kind of social mobility you have here, where you have the kinds of freedoms.

That you have here.

And it's definitely true that.

we fall short of of the ideals that our founders have set and that we purport to believe in and that, you know, sometimes those ideals are misapplied.

But

Shaun Dawson (03:43.31)
I d I don't know of another place where

Shaun Dawson (03:49.87)
Where that's embraced the way we have it here. Or at least it's in the fabric of what we do, right? You know, we we're a nation that was founded by people that left their home because they wanted something better for themselves, for their children. That takes tremendous courage. And

You know, I think there are a lot of ways in which we are not living up to that standard, but it's there. That standard is in our constitution. It is in our blood.

Shaun Dawson (04:38.037)
And I think that this, you know, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Independence Day is our opportunity to really look in the mirror about how well we're living up to the ideals that we

that we've set for ourselves.

Shaun Dawson (05:05.633)
But here's the thing about values.

You don't notice them really when everybody's in agreement about them. When the air is full of oxygen, nobody talks about oxygen, right? You only start to notice when it's not there. When the air is getting thin or it's for most of the last fifty or sixty years in this country, there was kind of a background assumption.

About what it meant to be a man, about masculinity. You worked, you provided, kept your word, you showed up, you didn't complain, you protected the people in your care, you told the truth, especially when it cost you. And

You know, were we always good at it? Or was everybody good at it? No. everybody, I think, probably failed all the time and it had some drawbacks. Men have always failed, but I think that standard was there. That that that standard, those values were the air. And now for a whole bunch of reasons that that we can and have spent lots of episodes on.

That standard is getting contested. It's getting hijacked, I think, by people who

Shaun Dawson (06:34.721)
Are grifting on it, frankly. I think people disagree about whether or not it's a good standard or whether there's a standard at all. And some people will tell you that the very idea of being a man is old-fashioned. It's a problem. Some people will tell you the answers to go harder and louder and angrier.

You know, if you've been listening to the show, both of them, y I think we've shown both of those viewpoints are wrong. Both of them are reactions. Right?

And neither of them is is the thing. Neither of them is a vision of a healthy vision of masculinity.

Shaun Dawson (07:33.331)
Here's the the thing that that podcast guest that I was listening to that I think that he got right about America.

And that I want to apply to this discussion about masculinity. The fact that it's contested is not the bad news. It's the opportunity we have to really forge a vision of masculinity that is healthy, that is compatible with the future and the past.

When because when something is under pressure, when that air starts to get thin, you find out what parts of it are worth keeping, you pressure test it, you strip away the costume, you strip away the performance.

You strip away the parts that

We're just inherited habit or that we're just performative. And what's left, what what ends up surviving.

Shaun Dawson (08:39.095)
What survives that pressure, that that is the real thing. And I think

Shaun Dawson (08:49.077)
I think that the last time that we were under this kind of pressure was probably in World War Two.

And we emerge from that because of our American values and because of our cultural cohesiveness and all of that. We emerge from that so strong. And I think we have an opportunity to emerge from from our current situation really strong as well. And that's where we are with how we raise men. The pressure is on, and it's part of

The crisis of masculinity is part of kind of a bunch of other crises that we're facing in our current times as well. But that pressure means that we get to find out for our sons and for the boys in our lives and for ourselves what actually matters. Not what we were what we happen to be raised thinking, not what our fathers assumed, and not

what our culture is trying to sell us, but but what what actually matters? What is the important aspects of masculinity?

Shaun Dawson (10:16.237)
The fact is that it's harder to raise a man right now than it was thirty years ago. And I think anybody who's trying to tell you otherwise is probably selling something.

Shaun Dawson (10:36.233)
I think that, you know, three r three there I I can think of three reasons off the top of my head why that's the case. first of all, the the signal to noise ratio is terrible. Your your your your your son, or the young man in your life has access to more voices in a single afternoon than your grandfather heard in a lifetime. More opinions, more

Ways of thinking about things, especially ones that are tantalizing and comforting but not useful. And most of those voices aren't optimizing for him. They're optimizing not for his results, they're optimizing for his attention. There's a big difference, and it's the whole thing. Second, I think that there's the models are.

are thinner or degraded. a boy used to grow up watching three or four men work

Close up, right? A father, an uncle, a coach, a neighbor. And, you know, I mean, he saw them in all the aspects of their lives. He saw them angry. He saw them tired. He saw them get something wrong and what they did with that, whether they owned it or avoided responsibility. He saw them stay. A lot of boys grow up watching men perform on a screen. Obviously, and and in a lot of cases, people who

aren't admirable even on purpose in in you know anti heroes and that sort of thing.

Shaun Dawson (12:18.057)
And performance. I mean and that that performance is happening, you know, as part of entertainment intentionally, but it's also happening as this sort of entertainment that that

disguises itself as not entertainment like like social media and reality TV. And performance is not the same thing as actual presence. You can't learn how to be a man from a performance. it can help, but you can't, you need you can only learn

masculinity through proximity, through trying stuff out and getting the feedback. And the third reason, and I think this one might be the deepest, is that I I think a lot of fathers are uncertain, including me. And

Sometimes I mean I think we're the first generation of of fathers raising sons in a world where we got handed is kind of fundamentally broken. the the script that we got handed and how to raise our sons or how we were raised is fundamentally broken. in a way that I'm not sure has been the case for a long time, i if at all.

Because of how quickly the world is changing, because of the nature of the experiments we're doing with our kids, essentially. And w men aren't wired to say, I don't know, let's figure it out together. we're wired to fake it till you make it, to pretend you have the answers, to go silent or to go rigid and and you know, both are mistakes. We need we need to get together. We need to figure that stuff out. So yeah.

Shaun Dawson (14:16.63)
It's a lot harder.

To to raise a boy into a man, I think. But that's also the gift.

Difficulty is not the same as bad. Difficulty is the price of significance. So when something is easy, when there's a clear clear path and everybody agrees, your contribution doesn't matter. Right? The thing is going to happen anyway. It's on rails. But when something is contested, when the path

is unclear when the air that I was talking about starts to get thin. Now your decisions matter.

Your presence matters, your example matters. It gets battle tested and it becomes really, really clear if you're found lacking.

Shaun Dawson (15:18.015)
The parents and the mentors and the coaches and the teachers who are doing this work right now, being deliberate, being present, telling the truth, modeling restraint, modeling courage, modeling repair, modeling vulnerability. Those those parents, those people are not just raising their own sons. They are holding the line.

For a generation. Think about that. You the person listening to this in your car, your truck, at the gym, on a walk.

When you choose to be a different kind of presence in your son's life today than the average voice that he sees squawking at him on social media or YouTube, when you choose to do that, you're doing one of the most important jobs available in this country right now. You are establishing

the new vision of masculinity. I mean that. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small number of people decided the kind of country we were gonna be. It wasn't obvious. It seems like it was now. But it wasn't obvious then.

Most of them weren't famous. Most of them weren't rich. Most of them didn't come from some kind of aristocracy.

Shaun Dawson (17:07.243)
Most of them were pretty much just guys who decided that in their corner of the world, some things were worth standing for, what they stood for imperfectly, blind spots included, all of that, failures, we're still working through. That has shaped every single life, not only on this continent, but on the entire world.

Shaun Dawson (17:39.073)
That imperfection, that failure, those blind spots, they are not the weakness of America. They are the strength of America. The fact that we can look at those things and reckon with them and improve, that is what got us to where we are.

Shaun Dawson (18:01.63)
And

You don't have to put your life on the line now, right? You don't have to sign a declaration. That is the favor that those people did for us.

Shaun Dawson (18:16.011)
You just have to be the parent that shows up on Tuesday, right? And then again on Wednesday and again on Thursday and again on Friday. Tries to stay calm and stay regulated and create the castle walls and build that courtyard. And you keep showing up when it's inconvenient or when you don't feel like it.

Shaun Dawson (18:41.613)
Particularly when the boy you're raising is being a frickin' nightmare. You show up again and again and again and you do it on purpose.

'Cause that showing up, sticking around, not flinching, telling the truth, apologizing when you blew it, that's the thing. That's masculinity.

That's the whole curriculum. And there's there isn't another one.

Shaun Dawson (19:22.271)
I often think about what that modern view of masculinity is. And I think that there's a lot of voices out there that are trying to flesh it out. But if I had to pick a couple of things that I think travel across every era, the things that our great grandfathers would recognize and that our great grandsons will also recognize, there are four that I think I would pick.

First one is tell the truth. Especially when it costs you something, especially when you're tempted not to. Especially to yourself.

Shaun Dawson (20:09.463)
think a boy can tell from when he's about four years old whether the men around him are honest. He can't articulate it, he can't call it out, but he knows if you lie to him about small things.

Shaun Dawson (20:27.757)
About why you're tired, why you're upset, or why you canceled on going to his basketball game. He learns that words don't mean what they say. And he learns that it's okay to be dishonest. By the way, to himself as well as to other people. I think, you know, so tell him the truth. Tell him it gently, tell him an age appropriately, and then he'll learn that the world

is understandable.

Shaun Dawson (21:03.501)
Think

You know, I I I know some people that

are are are dishonest and and they're dishonest in a way where they don't actually l lie. Like the words that they say aren't untrue, but they

Shaun Dawson (21:29.613)
The sense that they're conveying the

the message that the remote party is getting or that they're the you know, the person they're talking to, that's not an accurate reflection of reality. So they're li they lie by omission or they lie by implication. And they think they're getting away with something.

And I've known several people like this and

Their lives are ruined.

And they step they set on that line that road to ruin the instant they decided that it was a good idea to get that short term benefit.

Shaun Dawson (22:17.847)
To lie and

Shaun Dawson (22:24.289)
I think it's really important that our sons see that we don't do that. Because we want them

Shaun Dawson (22:36.385)
To be honest, people. We want them. And by the way, I mean, it is it keeps them out of ruin.

By telling the whole truth, the truth, and nothing but the truth, you don't have to keep a bunch of different stories straight in your head. You don't come across as somewhat dishonest. And

People who think they're getting away with something don't understand that. There's something that other people recognize in them, that we are tuned to recognize dishonesty in people. Even if we can't really label it, and even if we can't name this is where you lied, i we know that on the whole, this person's dishonest. And if someone comes across as dishonest, they sort of get pushed to the edge of the herd in our culture. Maybe appropriately.

The second is related and that is keep your word.

Don't make promises you can't keep or try not to, and if you fail to keep a promise, own up to it.

Shaun Dawson (23:47.063)
Third thing I'll mention is you need to stay. Whatever's happened, once you've made that commitment.

Related to keeping your word.

Shaun Dawson (24:01.047)
There are lots of things that want to drive you out of the room: anger, failure, embarrassment, conflict, boredom, grief.

But if you run away from all that stuff.

Shaun Dawson (24:18.263)
You're being a boy, right? The biggest difference between boys who grow into solid men who and one who ones who don't, in my experience, which is limited, is whether the men around them stayed when it got hard.

Shaun Dawson (24:37.505)
And the fourth is repair. When you screw up and you're gonna screw up, I screw up all the time. We all screw up. I try to tell the stories of ways I screw up on this on this show to kind of I don't know, exercise my demons and

Shaun Dawson (24:59.585)
kind of show that it's not the end of the world. so the question isn't whether you're going to mess up in front of your son. You're going to. The question is what do do about it? And I I mean I I I feel this tremendous shame actually when there are aspects of, you know, I'll lash out at one of my kids or I just get frustrated or that sort of thing. And I won't handle it well. And I get

I get this tremendous sense of shame. Like I've ruined my my my kids and that, you know, I'm not living up to the values that I that I have and I don't know.

Shaun Dawson (25:40.609)
Maybe it's maybe that's a good thing, that I feel that way. But you know, the important thing is that that motivates you to fix it, to make it right, as opposed to, you know, justify your behavior. Be defensive.

Shaun Dawson (26:02.007)
So tell the truth, keep your word, stick around and repair

Those are the four. Those are the four things that I think they were the four in seventeen seventy six, two hundred and fifty years ago. And I think they're gonna be the four in twenty two seventy six.

And I think every one of those things is actually a lot harder to model in this environment than I was a kid than when I was a kid. And like I said, that's why doing now matters

Shaun Dawson (26:37.695)
a lot more than doing it even ten or twenty years ago.

Shaun Dawson (26:46.093)
So that's it for this episode of Raising Men. If something here connected with you, share it with another parent who might need it. A a brother, a sister, a spouse.

A guy or gal at work. This is this is how this work spreads. And and engage with me. you know, we're all all the links are in sh are in the show notes to to all of our socials, our website, our email address. I'd love to hear from you guys.

So thank you for listening. Thank you for being part of this community. And remember that you are a great parent.