Guiding Your Son Through Boyhood

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Guiding Your Son Through Boyhood

Guest:                        Dennis Rainey

From the series:       Stepping Up (day 2 of 5)

Dennis:   You ever been lost?  Really lost in the woods?  Well, you know what?  I got lost, and there were no markers.  The land was flat, it was cold, and the sun was going down.  I didn’t have a GPS on me.  I didn’t have a compass.  I had no way to tell where to go or how to get out of there.  I admit that I was on the verge of panic.  

That sense of being lost is what a boy can feel growing up today without a father guiding him.

Bob:  This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, March 8th.  Our host is the President of FamilyLife Dennis Rainey, and I’m Bob Lepine.  We’re going to talk about what we can do to help boys get pointed on the right path and pointed in the right direction as they step up to manhood.  

Welcome to FamilyLife Today; thanks for joining us on the Tuesday edition.  Just wondering what’s in the water there at the Rainey house?  Your wife writes this devotional for families around courage.  Now, you’ve got this book for men on courageous manhood.  Are they spiking you with something out there?

Dennis:  You know it is in the country.  There is no telling.  I do think Barbara and I have been preaching to one another.  Do you think?

Bob:  I just sense a little bit of this passion in your souls to see men, women, and children kind of step up and be courageous.

Dennis:  Bob, I think this culture is robbing us of our courage.  I think it is discouraging us.  I think many are losing heart in well-doing as a result.  If there has ever been a time when, frankly, men needed to be encouraged, I believe it’s today.

Bob:  Well, now, this is a theme that has been simmering in your heart for almost a decade, maybe longer than a decade, as you’ve been in a number of settings challenging men to step up to courageous manhood.  Now, you’ve written a book that’s called Stepping Up: A Call to Courageous Manhood.

You break the book down—this is interesting—into six sections to help orient guys to the progression that you’re calling them to.

Dennis:  We do.  The first section is just all about courage.  Then, each of the following five sections are about the steps: stepping up to boyhood, adolescents, manhood, mentor, and patriarch.  Each of those six sections of the book begin with a story of courage.  

Bob:  Let me ask you about boys stepping up to boyhood.  It seems like boyhood is something that just kind of happens to you.  It’s not something that as a boy you’re all that intentional about.  In fact, you’re just kind of going through life, and the question is are you heeding direction or are you just following your own impulses?

Dennis:  I clipped a cartoon out of a magazine that had a picture of a five year old boy barefoot and no shirt in cutoff jeans walking down a dusty, dirty road.  He had two cats that he was carrying, whose tails were tied together.  He was carrying them, you know, where the tails kind of were caught in the crook of his arm.  The caption on the cartoon read, “And he was bound to acquire experience rapidly.”  

<laughter>

That’s what boyhood is all about.  He’s growing up through the childish years getting all this experience, but what has to happen?  He has to have an older man in his life directing that experience.  So, that as he grows from boyhood into adolescence, there is character there; there’s the wisdom to know the right from wrong and enough of a conscience that he can begin to turn away from evil and make right choices.  

Boyhood does just seem like a time when life does happen to him, but it’s a time when every boy needs a father.

Bob:  Tragically, we live a culture where there are a lot of boys who don’t have fathers.  If a boy doesn’t have a father or someone stepping in to provide direction, to say, “Here’s where manhood is, come on follow me. Come this direction,” then, the carnal impulses take over and what you have is masculinity gone amok.

Dennis:  Yes.  Newsweek, a few years back, ran an article called “The Trouble with Boys.”  They said in that article that one of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school rests upon a single question, one question: does he have a man in his life to look up to?  Unfortunately, in many cases, the answer is no.  

I ran across this quote.  I’ve not been able to find out who said it, but it has a pound of wisdom in it.  It says, “A boy without a father is like an explorer without a map.”  That’s what a boy is.  He’s starting out life, and it’s uncharted.  He doesn’t have the experience to know how to deal with it.  Who is he going to look to, to gain the experience he needs to know how to navigate the valleys, the danger spots, the mountains?  

There is a lot of life that just happens to us, but as we know, there is a lot of evil that can occur in a boy and for that matter a teenager’s life before they make it to manhood.

Bob:  I don’t think when I became a father for the first time that I understood the responsibility of calling sons to manhood.  I don’t know that I understood that mantle being put on my shoulders.  Did your dad assume that responsibility in your life?  Did he understand what it was that God had called him to do, do you think?

Dennis:  This is one of the more fascinating stories of my life, Bob.  My dad had a profound impact on my life, but I have no idea where he got the training to do it because his dad deserted him as a boy.  He was in his early teenage years when his dad basically abandoned the family of eight children and kind of went his own way.  

I grew up in a town of thirteen hundred people—I like to say I had a big dad in a small town.  My dad was big in my life because he was involved in my life.  He coached my little league team.  The first game we got beat twenty-two to nothing to the Early Birds.  Three years later we played them for the semi-finals.  If we’d won, we’d gone on to the championship of our age group.  They beat us again, but it was only three to two.  Now,...