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Health & Fitness

Raising Boys By Design: How Fathers Tend To Nurture Boys [BOOK EXCERPT]

As a father, I have seen the power of partnership in my marriage with LaFon as we parent our boys. Through my faith community, I've watched other families combine maternal and paternal nurturance to strengthen their growing children. 

As a counselor, I've seen examples and heard stories that give testimony to the benefits a father and a strong parenting partnership can bring to a person's life. God's plan for families works and can bless all involved.

Sadly, in our broken world, families become broken. In my counseling practice, I regularly hear adult children express a deep and lingering sense of loss, grief, and pain over  their separation from their fathers, whether that separation is due to physical absence or emotional distance. Compounding the problem, we seem to be in a period of social development when the unique role a father serves has become muddled, even denigrated. Yet God designed children to need paternal nurture so much that if fathers are unavailable, other men need to step in, especially during adolescence.

What is it that a father does to make such a difference in a child's life? 

There are eight characteristics of personal nurturance that provide children with unique assets and also powerfully support a mom's love. Twenty percent of the time, these things may be done by the mom just as, at various times, the father may do some of the maternal nurturing. Yet, in general, fathers and paternal nurturers tend to:

  • Bond with children in shorter bursts of contact
  • Teach order, pattern thinking, ritualized action
  • Downplay emotion, play up performance
  • Promote risk taking and independence
  • Increase strength in child response by decreasing vulnerability
  • Promote hierarchical deference to authority if the authority figure is respectable
  • Encourage action as a primary path to self-worth
  • Help children feel stronger, not necessarily better

While not every father will exhibit each of these general characteristics of paternal influence, research shows that most fathers trend toward at least five of these qualities at any given time. 

As boys enter adolescence, starting generally at age ten, this list becomes especially urgent; hormones and brains are changing, and boys need men to guide them in significant ways.

Each of these eight qualities, especially when balanced with the maternal approach, provides developmental support for a boy's design and lays the foundation for him to thrive as a loving, wise, and successful man. If a father doesn't intuitively parent in these ways or isn't present to do so, you'll want to make sure your son is receiving these vital forms of nurture from others in his life.

The above is excerpted from Raising Boys By Design: What the Bible and Brain Science Reveal About What Your Son Needs To Thrive by Dr. Gregory Jantz and Michael Gurian.
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