Why Boys Need Spaces to Grow Together: 11 Years of Magic at an All-Boys Boarding School
A reflection on vulnerability, tradition, and the unique emotional architecture required for boys to thrive.
After 11 years working at a junior boarding school for boys (grades 6-9), I am moving on to the next chapter of my professional career (whatever that means).
What follows is a brief reflection on my experience and some of the key lessons that rise to the top for me.
The Magic
The guy who convinced me to start working at a junior boarding school for boys was a mentor from summer camp, where I first felt the magic. He explained that this was the closest thing to camp he had experienced in a school. I was sold.
When you take a group of boys and plop them together in an intimate setting, magic happens. Sometimes it is dark magic, but it is magic nonetheless.
Over the years, whenever faculty candidates asked me why I kept coming back, I’d say it was because of the magic of working with boys, seeing them drop their guard, put their arms around one another, sing and dance on stage, struggle together, say tear-filled goodbyes at the end of a proper adventure.
Whoever thinks it’s a bad idea to organize a group of young men together has yet to experience when boys are at their best—and at their best because they are together. Boys need these kinds of spaces. To grow, they need to be vulnerable, and an all-boys setting makes that distinctly possible.
Good Times, Bad Times
There will be good and bad days. That goes for weeks, months, and years as well. We should not expect otherwise.
When we expect boys to always be good, they will disappoint us. When we expect them to always be bad, they will surprise us. The key is not to grow attached to either expectation but to help boys find their way through their current experience.
Unsurprisingly, I found that we struggled the most as a school community with the bad times. When we rejected behavior or circumstances that did not meet expectations, we traded compassion for anger.
Anger is ineffective. It makes connection impossible. It makes people separate themselves from others because they are drawing a bright line of division: that is wrong, and I do not accept it.
The bad times do not need to be as miserable as we make them. With the right mindset, we should see challenges as opportunities to grow. And it’s because of the bad times that we appreciate the good. If things never went poorly, it would only be a matter of time until we discovered that circumstances were not good enough.
But don’t worry, you can count on things going poorly.
We don’t need to overcomplicate our approach. In fact, we’re better off forgetting about good and bad days altogether and embracing whatever is falling from the sky. Face challenges with compassion. Celebrate success with compassion. The problems arise when we are inconsistent, when we are OK with rain on one day and upset with it on another.
If we can’t be consistent in our own practice working with boys, we will always be at war and never at peace.
Know the Boys, Love the Boys
The first head of school I worked for offered a signature promise to families:
“We will know your boys, we will love your boys—but we will not indulge your boys.” (David McCusker)
This has always stuck with me. It’s so simple and so spot on.
First, you must know the boys. Learning, discipline, and inspiration will follow. This critical step gets skipped far too often, not just in education but in life.
We presume that people will listen to us, perhaps show us deference, before we get to know them. Sometimes, especially with kids, we tell others what to do and expect them to comply with the proper respect, even before we learn their names. This is teaching without connection. It does not work.
To truly connect with boys, we have to show them we love them. Again, this is simple. Or it should be. Because of well-intentioned sensitivity, I have been told not to mention that we will “love your boys.” I disagree with this timidity. Boys are deserving of and benefit from the care of loving adults, and we should be courageous in that love.
So many men fear vulnerability because they were not taught how to love and be loved as boys. We cannot withhold our love for fear that it might weaken young men, or us for that matter.
Where this gets the most challenging is with “unlikable” boys. We often have a difficult time treating misbehaving and misguided young men with compassion, and they are the ones who need it most.
Finally, we will not indulge your boys. What a beautiful way to finish that vow, for this too is a form of love. When we indulge someone, we do so out of fear. We are worried that they will suffer or not love us back if we do not satisfy their desires.
Love is not about preventing someone from suffering, and it is not about exchange. It is unconditionally helping someone in the face of suffering without any expectation of exchange.
Walking the Line Between Tradition and Change
Boys benefit from routines and rituals—this is something that I have written about before—but these need to make sense to them. They need to be relevant. It’s nice when a tradition gives us a sense of connection to the people who came before us, yet traditions become irrelevant when they demand us to be stagnant.
People grow. Study any time in history when authority has tried to prevent that and you will see rancor, rebellion, and ruin. You cannot freeze time.
On the other hand, I’m far from advocating that tradition is oppression. That line of thinking is disconnected from reality. We are the past just as much as we are the future, and when we cut off our roots, we grow weak.
This can be a tricky line to walk with boys, but it’s one worth walking with focus and precision. Boys benefit from a sense of grounding. They flounder without any guidance. They become angry and anxious when they are boxed in, and they become who they truly are when they are given agency. They deserve formal traditions that recognize their passage to manhood, and they need fun traditions that celebrate their identity as boys.
In short: keep boys grounded and let them grow.
Boys Learn from People They Love, Including Their Peers
I’ve already talked about the importance of love...and I have a bit more to add. Boys learn the most from mentors they love. They also learn valuable lessons from adults they don’t get along with, but these aren’t the people who they will go to when their world comes crashing down.
And we cannot underestimate the importance of their peer relationships. These matter to boys. To our dismay, they often matter more than their relationships with adults, but adults should lean into that.
I come back to the magic of working at an all-boys school. We should celebrate how much these young men love each other.
It sounds weird to say this, but it shouldn’t: I have had the good fortune of crying with my male peers throughout my life, namely at the close of soccer seasons and summer camp. These are defining moments in my life, capstones to transformative experiences and a kind of glue between me and my closest friends.
I’ve also had the good fortune, working in an all-boys setting, of seeing countless young men share their own teary farewells. Boys learn so much from these relationships. As adults, we should be cultivating the strength that exists in those bonds to help boys grow.
Boys Should Experience Their Youth
There’s a line from Kevin Wilson’s novel Nothing To See Here that I adore:
“A wicked child is the most beautiful thing in the world.”
There will be disagreement on that score. I suspect/know during the time I served as a dean of students that there were some folks who weren’t psyched when I tossed this quote into a presentation on behavior management. But, I did, and I don’t take it back.
It’s OK for a boy to be a boy. Which adult among us did not participate in some healthy mischief that ignored the wishes of the elders? Who in the days of the undeveloped frontal lobe did not make a foolish mistake and learn from it? And which grown-up doesn’t look back upon those immature days with the slightest hint of a smile? I don’t need to tell you the answer is nobody.
Boys will do silly things. They will cause offense and do wrong. And, with support, they will grow through it all.
Boys are dependents in every way, and they depend upon skillful guidance and mentorship. They are not yet men. If they don’t experience their youth, they will arrive at manhood lacking any real foundation of strength.
How many men are still struggling with issues they did not resolve in childhood? I know I am.
It’s not a race to manhood, or adulthood, or enlightenment. Life is an endless journey of learning, and cutting corners always results in a flimsy infrastructure. We build from the ground up for a reason.
What’s Next in the World of Boys
No clue. I’ll try to stay in the loop. I’m going on 25 years at an all-boys summer camp, and I will continue to advocate for the well-being of boys and men. I’ll say this:
Can we all just relax a little? Boys can sense the anxious energy of everyone around them, and it’s not productive.
After an article I wrote about men and belonging, I received a scathing comment because I suggested that people should feel compassion for men. First, thanks for reading. Second, it is my sincere aspiration that as a society we feel compassion for men.
The more we recognize that the suffering of others is our own suffering, the less angry we will be. Healing someone else is self-healing. Of course, we want men to internalize this insight as much as anyone.
There will always be both positive and negative influences. That’s life. We need to stop getting so upset by the bad actors. Our rage feeds theirs. Boys and men really do just want to belong. May we build communities where they are known, loved, not indulged, and nurtured to grow into ethical men.