Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

In the midst of the pressures of child-rearing, it can be easy to forget that your goal is to have an adult at the end of the process. Today on Home School Heartbeat, HSLDA President Mike Smith and his guest discuss launching young men into adulthood.

Raising Real Men

Raising Real Men looks beyond the untied shoes and dirty jeans to what the Lord means your son to be. Learn how to help him focus on schoolwork, find real heroes, stand alone when he needs to, and become a real man one day. Don’t just survive raising boys, succeed at it—and learn how to love them as they really are.

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Mike Smith:
Hal Young, father of six boys and author of the book Raising Real Men, joins me again today to wrap up our discussion of raising boys. Hal, let’s jump ahead in the process. Do you have tips for how parents of sons can define and even celebrate their transition to manhood?

Hal Young:
Mike, we need to remember that history doesn’t show us a ten-year no man’s land that we call adolescence. There are children, and there are adults. Now the Apostle Paul said there’s a time to put away childish things. So what we do is set a time—we chose their 13th birthday—to say, “Son, here’s your stepping off point for manhood.” And from that time on, we try to work with our sons as adults in training. It’s kind of an apprenticeship for independence.

Think about how we teach kids to drive: do we give them car keys on their 16th birthday and say, “Congratulations!”? No, we give them classes, we teach them rules, and then we take them under our arm and show them how to drive, step by step. You can approach a lot of adult life that way. And then when they make mistakes, whether it's driving a car, or balancing a checkbook, or applying for a job, they tend to be small mistakes, and we can help them recover, and teach them how to avoid problems in the future.

Mike:
Hal, it’s truly been a blessing to have you and Melanie on the program with us this week. Thank you for your great work in helping parents raise godly and manly sons! And until next time, I’m Mike Smith.