My son still hasn't forgiven me for school.
We picked the best one we could find. But it wasn't enough, because it was still school.
My son hasn’t forgiven me for school.
He’s 22 and he still brings it up.
And this wasn’t public school. It was the best school money could buy.
I was working in the White House. Our values mattered, and so I hunted down the most faith-based, boy-centric school I could find. All boys. All male teachers. Sports in the middle of the day. Kids hanging off tree branches instead of chained to desks. I walked in and thought: this is a boy’s paradise.
He hated it. Intensely.
It wasn’t the school I picked. It was school itself.
I sat down with Casey Harper at The Washington Stand’s Outstanding podcast to talk about this - about why our boys are cratering (5x lonelier than men their age a generation ago, 70% of overdose deaths, falling behind in every educational metric we can measure), and what I wish I’d understood before I made the choices I made for my son.
We get into:
Why I’m not sure I believe in school for boys anymore
How we medicalized normal boy behavior of risk-taking, stick-wielding, wall-bouncing and called it a disorder
The “chickified” culture (thanks, Rush) and now we can’t tell the difference between a boy who wants to climb a tree and a boy who needs Adderall
Why the same fire that drives a 9-year-old to beat dents into an oak is the fire that makes a 19-year-old willing to die for his country (and what happens when we extinguish it)
And the question I’m wrestling with live on the air: what would it actually take to homeschool my grandkids while running my businesses?
I don’t have the answers.
(I keep telling people this. They keep asking me anyway.)
I’m a Gen X mom with a son who won’t let me forget the choices I made. I’m also a naturopath who’s spent years watching the “health” system manufacture sickness in adults, and I can see how we are doing something similar to our boys in real time.
Nobody at HHS is coming to save your son. Nobody at his school is either.
His teachers are lovely women. They don’t love him.
Read the article. Watch the full conversation.
Share it with the dad getting pressured into signing his 5-year-old up for kindergarten. Send it to the mom who just filled an ADHD script and feels weird about it. Forward it to the grandparent who still thinks daycare is progress.
We’re going to have to raise this generation ourselves.
Radically. Creatively. Generationally.