Novistopheles

06:19 a.m.

While it is interesting to understand how things work, I find it far more valuable to answer the question, “Yeah, but what can you do about it?" Or perhaps even, “What can you do with it?”

Perhaps the best way to handle this next part is for me to share the framework of what is happening for both boys and girls.

Note: If you are not offended that I focus on only two genders, you can skip ahead. If you happen to be either offended or upset that I focus on only two genders, then I offer you this path for your consideration. I do this not to be political or oppressive but rather because it creates contrast. It is much easier to see choices when they are put in contrast to each other. You can think of it this way. It is human nature to take a spread of almost anything and reduce it to binary poles. Rich and poor. Tall and short. East and West. In fact, one of the most common cognitive biases (mental shortcomings) Homo sapiens like you and me suffer from is called the “False Dichotomy”, creating a division where there is none. Personally, I do believe we are predominantly of two genders, but I also believe (and the data shows) that human behavior manifests on a spectrum, and men and women have a lot more overlap than they do difference. There are ample mannish women and effeminate men. So you are free to think of the needs I put below as options, and by watching your own child or the children you care for, my hope is that you are more able to rapidly identify what they need and help them fulfill that developmental requirement. You see, there is one thing I do not accept. I do not accept sameness. Equality, yes. Sameness, no. Our individuality may be our greatest gift. Even genetically identical twins are not “the same” person. If they are not, why should anyone else be? Extraordinarily similar, perhaps, but not identical. Forcing everyone to be the same is the gist of an Ancient Greek tragedy about the Procrustean Bed. I’ll share it when I get the chance.

What Do They Need?

To figure out what to do, it would first be helpful to know what kids need.

While philosophers may argue that much of our gender roles are created by society, the odds of anyone of us changing society in time to help our kids is so vanishingly small, I think it’s better to just sort out why the rules are to the best of our understanding and go from there. These, of course, are changing, but not in a way that any of us seem to understand or can predict.

So I will try to break it down by what kids need, in general, then what girls need, then what boys need. I am most personally familiar with boys because of my coaching background, and well, my own experience growing up as a modern man.

It seems most women are familiar with what girls need for the same reasons: time, exposure, and personal experience.

There, all the caveats out of the way, let’s take a look at my current best understanding of what kinds of experiences kids are looking for.

What Kids (both boys and girls) Need

During that magic window when children develop their cultural identity, there are a few other things happening as well.

With each increase in movement, I saw that my children also took another massive leap in personal development. When a baby went from being held to crawling, more of their personality presented itself. They could move away from Mom or Dad. When they went from crawling to walking, they became even more of an individualized person. They could move about the house and could be trusted to walk themselves, albeit in close orbit to Mom and Dad. Then, when they got a bike, they could rove, moving about the neighborhood and street. Sadly, still in range of Mom or Dad, but that was about the time that they started to go to school and spend time away from Mom and Dad and spend it with other kids their age and with other adults who would look after them.

During the elementary school years, our children learned how to be a part of our family, and then slowly how to make friends. They were becoming well socialized. As they approached the third, fourth, and fifth grades, their development expanded from being part of the family to being part of a “friend group” at school. And this correlated with that window from 5-14. The elementary school and middle school years.

During this time, they also started to expand their identity beyond the family group and started to try and find their place within their new tribe, their same age cohort, their class, their team, their neighbors. What we loosely call their “friend group.”

It is such a natural and timeless process that I think it would have stayed invisible and ordinary to us all if it had not been distrusted by technology.

So what is happening in this friend group? Or, what should be happening?

12:45PM

Monday’s are usually chock-full of meetings, so it is hard to engage in a full thought thread. One thing that popped up for me today: I was able to rattle off a bunch of new cartoons. I will sometimes use a smaller sketch pad with a pen or pencil and block out body language and the “jokes."

These rough sketches let me make mistakes and iterate quickly. I can also do them in batches or a few days in advance, and then when I have time to draw (and my brain is fried), I can convert them into line art, which I later color. So far, I’m up to 96. I’m almost halfway to my first goal of creating 200. Well, not really a goal. A tiny experiment, let’s say. Already, I have learned:

1. What markers work best.
2. I’ve established some conventions for conveying interactions.
3. I learned how to create a comic series (see: atplaygang.thecomicseries.com)
4. I even have a few people that follow me and comment on my comics. That’s fun.
5. I’ve learned about different kinds of markers.

Here’s an attempt to create Sonny in Excalidraw:

In principle, I can make it work, but I personally like the imperfections of the hand-drawn art. At present, it is less fun making vector art look like hand-drawn art.

What Kids Need

What kids need has a shocking resemblance to Self-Determination Theory. Basically, both boys and girls are looking for experiences of:

• Agency (Autonomy)
• Mastery (skill development)
• Relatedness (Community)

What is different between boys and girls is that boys traditionally have sought more experiences of agency. Acting in the world, risk-taking. Risk taking. The explosion of “safetyism” has greatly hindered (some would say harmed) boys’ ability to have these experiences. Video games provide a simulated world of agency and, therefore, instead of channeling a boy’s desire for exploration into fake and unreal ends.

It is hard to say which is worse: video games or safetyism. What is safetyism? It is the unchecked belief that kids are not safe in our neighborhoods or the world in general and must be watched and guarded by adults at all times.

I often share the story that I grew up in the era when I was told to “go outside and play.” I was not allowed back in the house until the street lights came on. I remember one time coming home, and my dad asked, “Are you in for the night?” I said, “No, I’m just getting a flashlight.” He was fine with that. And so was I. I. I ran outside to join my friends as we prowled around Holly Hill Farms, the suburban neighborhood where I grew up in Michigan.

Today, however, when I talk to my friends with kids, the few who want to send their kids out to play discover there is no one to play with. My wife and I moved to our present neighborhood in Tempe, Arizona, because there were so many kids visible. We moved two miles from our old neighborhood, but it felt like we had moved a world away. In our old neighborhood of Pecan Grove Village III (apparently the builders really liked the name Pecan Grove Village), we did not meet a neighbor boy who lived just four houses down the street from us until both boys entered kindergarten. For five years, the two boys lived a few hundred feet apart, but neither boy nor their parents knew anything about the other.

That would have been impossible in Holly Hilly Farms.

I first noticed this strange isolation effect when I started GameTruck. In 2009, as the brand was taking off and becoming popular, I drove to a neighborhood in Gilbert where the family was bragging (well, proud) of the fact that they were the first people on their block to have a GameTruck Party. The very next weekend, we went to the exact same neighborhood and the exact same street, only we were across the street from the other family. This family also bragged that they were the first to have a GameTruck Party in their neighborhood. I thought they were joking, but they were serious. A week later, we showed up five houses down near the end of the block, and that family gleefully claimed that they were the first. That was when I realized that none of them knew each other.

We live next to each other, but rarely, if ever, interact anymore. Each of these families believed that they were part of their community, but the reality is that today’s professional work environment, school choice, and keeping kids indoors all the time has radically changed and limited how boys experience agency.

I remember about ten years ago, Nintendo hired us to do a birthday party event for one of its executives. What made the party special was that leaders from Nintendo Japan were coming specifically to check out GameTruck and our mobile video game theater experience. I made sure to show up to answer any questions they might have about the business.

They were very impressed with the concept, and as I stood there on a beautiful sunny Saturday in Northern California, I pointed out the neighborhood to the group and their translators. “All these families are home. See the cars?” they all nodded. “But what is missing?” I asked.

They shook their heads. It is hard to see what is not present. Or, to be more accurate, it is hard to notice what you can’t see.

“There are no kids. This neighborhood should be buzzing with children, like packs of busy bees floating from one house to the next. But you don’t see any of that. The kids are either at sporting events, or they are cooped up safe inside.”

Safetyism is the overreach of trying to keep kids safe by basically locking them up all the time. Now, this is another one of those gender differences that hides in plain sight. Safetyism is also the outcrop of rising divorce and single-parent rates, coupled with the fact that most of the time it is the mother who ends up with the majority of the custody (if not all) time.

Alison Armstrong, who leads a series of couples retreats in Northern California and has an excellent series of recordings available on Audible under titles like, Making Sense of Men, and The Queen’s Code, asks a room full of men and women, “Men, when was the last time you were concerned for your physical safety?” Most of the men turned and looked at each other. They had to try and remember. When I heard that, I recalled the time I felt 30 feet down a cliff while mountain biking. I remember thinking, “this is going to hurt.” It did, but fortunately I got no serious injuries from the tumble, just a lot of scrapes and bruises, and I lost a really nice bench-made pocket knife. That incident was months (now years ago, as I write this).

However, when she asked the women that question. All of the women in the room raised their hands when Alison asked, “Has it been within the last 24 hours?” To women it was patently obvious the world is a dangerous and hazardous place. The men were taken completely by surprise. You can run this test yourself. When I asked my sons the question, they really had to think about a time and they struggled. When I asked my wife and daughter, they both said it happens every day and they each could describe situations which to me sounded innocuous but to them represented risk, such as walking the dog in the neighborhood, or riding a bike to the grocery store.

Men and women perceive the world of risk very differently. Or at least, we used to.

With more single women raising young boys, more boys are being indoctrinated into the world of Safetyism. With the collapse of male teachers (according to Haidt, the percentage of male teachers is down from over 30% to just above 15% as of the time of this writing), boys are getting exposed to fewer, and fewer men.

In fact, in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy, Robert Glover points out that for most of human history, women did not raise boys. When the global economies were mostly agrarian, boys were kicked out of the house and spent the days with their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, great uncles, and cousins. Men raised boys. If you read the autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (benefactor of Carnegie-Mellon University), he did not start school until he was 10 years old! Benjamin Franklin also did not start education until a similar age. Today that would be like waiting until the fourth or fifth grade to start formal education!

But the Industrial Revolution removed men from the household, calling them away to the factory. As a double whammy, the only careers available to women were largely childcare jobs, including teaching.

So Glover points out that I am now part of the third or fourth generation of men to be raised by women. I will leave it to you to do your own research about what this means, but I can tell you as a man who grew up in a loving home that was nevertheless split up by divorce, I never really had a great idea about what a mature masculine man looked like. I am not trying to bag on my father, but it was not until I was an adult that I realized I would have to take charge of “the rest of my upbringing.”

And that was before safetyism. I am sharing these things with you because it was part of my own journey in understanding what it would look like to become a “good man,” a mature and capable masculine man. It was largely assumed I would just “get it” but from where? From TV? Dear Lord no. And I grew up before social media, before the frenzy of elevating the fringe, novel, and extreme behaviors that dominate the algorithm.

What I’m saying is that, like the observation about morality, finding out what is “good” is actually nontrivial and not obvious. At least, it wasn’t for me. I had to go looking for it.

Now imagine the life of a young boy lost in video games and more or less locked up at home, or in the classroom so they can be “safe.” What are they learning?

Opportunities for physical risk taking, like climbing trees, or crossing creeks, or riding your bike “a little too far"from home have become non-existent. It is no wonder for the first time since we started tracking the data we are seeing boy behavior switch from externally focused to match that of young girls, internally focused.

Traditionally, boys acted out. They were aggressive, or they expressed themselves physically to process their emotions. When I wanted to talk to my boys I would grab a basketball, football, or baseball and we would get moving first. We talked later.

According to Haidt, however, more and more boys are starting to experience their stress and emotion in a manner more traditionally experienced by women. They are turning inward, staying at home, inside, safe, but stressed.

This change appears to be correlated with the rise of Defend Mode in boys.

But what about the girls?

I will have to approach that… in my next post.