At our most recent International Day of the Boy Child gathering, I asked the boys when their fathers last told them, “I love you.”
Some said, “last decade.” Some said, “five years ago.” Others said, “last year.”
It was an emotional moment fused with sadness and laughter.
The sadness I saw in the eyes of those young boys was an indication that many of them were yearning for that affirmation.
The laughter?
Perhaps the boys had already accepted that men are simply not designed to affirm boys emotionally. So was I asking a question they already believed had no answer?
This is a sad reality because boys need consistent doses of affirmation to grow into healthy men.
As I looked around the room, I saw boys who were already suffering emotionally without fully realizing it yet. And I could personally feel their pain because I know what emotional neglect can do to a boy. I experienced some of it myself, though I later found a way out of it.
Many fathers probably grew up without hearing those words themselves and eventually concluded that expressing love emotionally adds little to the development of boys. And this is how boys are silently trained to repress their emotions.
A boy should be trained to know how to manage his emotions, but this becomes difficult when the primary masculine voice in his life hardly affirms him or even recognizes what he feels.
The failure of fathers to affirm their children did not start today. It began with men who themselves were never properly formed. Now they are unconsciously transferring the dysfunction to another generation.
The boys who were not consistently affirmed openly admitted that they mostly received corrections, cautions, and discipline from their fathers. Over time, it becomes difficult for them to fully believe they are loved because correction begins to overshadow affirmation.
Correction works best where emotional connection exists.
Where there is little emotional connection, boys often misinterpret their fathers’ intentions. This is one of the reasons many boys emotionally gravitate more toward their mothers than their fathers.
The issue is not the emotional gravitation itself.
The issue is grooming boys who eventually become men that only know how to correct without knowing how to connect emotionally.
These boys grow into bosses who struggle to build healthy relationships with their workers because every interaction becomes an opportunity to point out faults.
They become fathers who only know how to instruct but never affirm.
They become pastors who harshly judge people while using the pulpit as a decoration for “truth.”
But many times, this is simply inherited dysfunction manifesting in different forms.
Boys need emotional safety to thrive. They need affirmations from their fathers. They need correction wrapped in emotional presence, not emotional distance.
Because healthy masculinity is not built merely through toughness. It is built through identity, discipline, emotional stability, responsibility, and affirmation. The boy eventually becomes the man.
But what kind of man?
Before we ask what kind of men boys are becoming, perhaps we should ask what kind of boys today’s men were allowed to be.
And if the boy is never properly formed, the man may spend the rest of his life bleeding on people who never wounded him.