The Secret Life of Boys

Many young men have secrets.

As soon as boys start going out on their own with peers, situations like this will occur. Many of them will employ the strategies and tactics taught to them by their parents, teachers and other authority figures. Namely, they will try to ignore, negotiate and be nonviolent. There are times and places for those peaceful strategies but, as seen in this video, there are also most certainly times and places that those actions will NOT work. And the worst part, for me as a mom anyway, is knowing that my son might feel shame, feel inadequate, and feel like a failure as a result of a situation like this and not want to tell me or his father about it.

So many of us raise our children to be good. We teach and model kindness, compassion, cooperation and tolerance. These values are reinforced at school, in religion and in organized sports. Leigh and I are experienced middle school teachers, and we have seen it firsthand. The vast majority of kids are just decent human beings. This is awesome and we would never want to change that, but we both know that something is missing. We know that some, far too many in fact, of our best and brightest former students will experience violence and will have NO IDEA what to do. To us, it is simply an issue of education. It’s obvious that these students are capable of learning. They know what to do in the classroom, they know what to do on the athletic field, they’ll know what to do at a job and with a family one day. But they don’t know what to do when dealing with violence because no one has ever taught them how violence really works. And this sets them up to be victims of circumstance and then feel like they failed somehow.

Castle Defensive offers Personal Protection for Youth classes that help young people identify various types of violent situations and understand what strategies are optimal for avoiding, evading, and defusing those situations more effectively. Our course also teaches students the physical skills they need to protect themselves against a violent attack if all else fails. Please consider protecting the huge investment of time, money and love that is your child. Protect them from physical harm as well as the emotional harm that these types of situations can produce.