What's It Take to Make a Man?:

What’s It Take to Make a Man?

By R. O. Bloch

Copyright 2012 by R. O. Bloch

Cover Design by Eric Lindsey

Cover copyright by Park East Press and Untreed Reads Publishing

The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

Previously published in print, 2011.

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What’s It Take to Make a Man?

By R. O. Bloch

Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1: EVIDENCE

How some experts address the fact that so many boys are unsure of their role in society and lack a sense of self-worth

CHAPTER 2: MAN THEMES

The Essential Manly Virtues: Honesty, Selfless Family Service, Team Playing, Faith In Oneself, Common Sense, and One’s Relationship to All Things

CHAPTER 3: THE DECLINE OF HONESTY

Honesty is the Universal Virtue, common to all men and women, in all societies on the face of the earth.

CHAPTER 4: SELFLESSNESS THROUGH SERVICE

Family service as a way to strengthen today’s family and as a mechanism to teach boys how to relate to others.

CHAPTER 5: RIGHT vs. WRONG: To Team, or Not to Team? That Is the Question.

Teaching respect for other people; how to make proper amends for misdeeds and thereby strengthen relationships.

CHAPTER 6: COMMON SENSE: Fairness Vs. Equity

How to identify and teach common sense approaches to problem solving.

CHAPTER 7: THE HOLE-IN-THE-SOUL GENERATION

Boys with no character training from home live their lives with a huge hole in their soul. Filling them up with character lessons, thereby making Men of Character.

CHAPTER 8: RAISING vs. NURTURING

Why many families are their own undoing; how nurturing rather than raising sons can turn their fate around.

CHAPTER 9: NEW ROLES FOR NEW MEN

A plan for parents with sons who don’t fit the college-bound model

CHAPTER 10: THE CASE FOR TOUGH LOVE: Teaching Self-Discipline to the Unconvinced

Despite adults’ best efforts, some boys require stern measures to learn self-control; how to persuade the unconvinced.

CHAPTER 11: PARENTING WITH CONVICTION

An appeal for the essential elements of good parenting.

PREFACE

All I am, or can be, I owe to my angel mother.

Abraham Lincoln

Early on in the authoring process, one of my readers suggested I call this book Boy-Raising for Dummies. Still another offered A Grumpy Old Man’s View of Raising Boys as an appropriate title. I’m sure if I had used either of those titles sales would skyrocket. What’s more, knowing those two prospective titles in advance may actually help you understand some of what you are about to read. Nonetheless, they didn’t really give the right overall impression of my hopes for this work. Besides, it’s probably safe to say that if you are reading here you’re no dummy, and if I were a grumpy old man I’d probably be fishing instead of writing.

With the above in mind, you may then be wondering why I chose to call it What’s It Take to Make a Man? Especially, why did I choose to use the word Make in the title? Why not call it What’s It Take to Produce a Man? or why not…to Grow a Man?

If you’re inclined to think that men are nothing but apples and bananas, perhaps the first iteration might do pretty well. But to my mind, produce has more to do with horticulture than with human culture. Likewise, grow is similarly botanical. In fact, other infinitives would have missed the mark in one way or another in just the same way.

Indeed, I might very well have called this work, What’s It Take to Upgrade a Boy to a Man? for that concept is closer to the process we’re talking about. These days, we can upgrade everything from our computer hardware to our very way of life (if we believe the advertisers and marketers). To upgrade simply means to go from a lower level of existence to a better one. But that word too did not quite hit the mark.

Then what do I mean when I say to Make a Man? Let me assure you, it’s not a trivial matter of word choice. In this work, we discuss the very idea of turning a young male person into a Man, which is to say, making a Man. Note the capital M. In these pages, we are not just talking about hormonal changes that produce secondary sex characteristics. We are talking about turning the very mindset of the male from something weak and animal-wild into something strong and humanely self-controlled. As you will see, this is not easy.

Now you might think I intended this work primarily as a handbook for young males to read as they mature. I hope some of them will read it, but most will not. And frankly, if boys wait to open these pages until their muscles bulge and their peach fuzz pops, it’ll probably be too late anyway. Yet no doubt this book will be helpful to men of almost any age who sincerely wish to become Men of character and feeling. If that is you, then these words will serve you well.

But as you might have guessed, this book will be most useful for and welcomed by parents, which we will define as all the committed people who parent. Our job will be to fix in your mind humanity’s oldest and most successful method of filling the void in their characters that all too many boys these days profoundly sense and recoil from. We’ll talk about building character, using family service as the first step and most effective way of imbedding or building character into boys from day one, not simply appending it or adding it to them as they grow along.