August 26, 2025 • 19 mins
Boys today are struggling — with school, with purpose, with identity. At the same time, parents are being told that masculinity is toxic — or irrelevant. Are we accidentally raising a generation of young men who feel lost before they’ve even begun? And how do we raise boys who are strong, kind, and confident without making them feel like they’re not enough?
In this episode, Justin and Kylie unpack one of the most provocative ideas in parenting boys: surplus value. Drawing on research from Richard Reeves, Scott Galloway, and David Gilmore, they explore why contribution and purpose matter so much for boys’ identity, how to frame it in a healthy way, and why ignoring it leaves our sons vulnerable to destructive alternatives.
KEY POINTS
- Why boys often tie identity to what they contribute rather than just who they are.
- The difference between unconditional worth at home and purpose in the world.
- How “surplus value” is not about pressure, but about channeling natural drives into positive contribution.
- Why society has always “made men” through responsibility and service — and why our boys still need this today.
- How to talk about contribution without undermining your son’s self-worth.
QUOTE OF THE EPISODE
“Being useful helps boys feel valuable — not because they’re not enough, but because they’re capable of great things.”
RESOURCES MENTIONED
- Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves
- Manhood in the Making by David Gilmore
- Sign up for updates on Justin’s upcoming book Boys → https://happyfamilies.com.au/boys-book-waitlist
ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS
- Reassure your son daily: “You matter because you are you.”
- Create opportunities for him to contribute at home in age-appropriate ways.
- Talk about purpose and contribution as part of becoming a man — not as pressure, but as an invitation.
- Watch for signs of directionlessness in the teen years and help channel energy into positive pathways.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
This is The Happy Family's podcast. Thanks so much for
joining us today. A mother of four boys, Claire wrote
in gave us a very, very long email. I'm going
to summarize it just here, asking about one of our
most provocative topics recently, the idea that boys need to
bring surplus value to become healthy men. In my new
book due out next year, Boys, I talk about how
(00:27):
healthy masculinity means helping the people around you to feel
safer and stronger. Richard Reeves and his Book of Boys
and Men calls it surplus value.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
So Claire is.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Raising her sons to be honest and kind and brave,
but she's worried that we're telling them that they're not
enough as they are. She says, and here's the quote.
If I was told as a young girl that I
needed to bring surplus value, my confidence and self worth
would have been pretty shaken. So I think that's a
fair enough statement, and it cuts to the heart of
how we develop healthy mass identity in a world where
(01:02):
boys are increasingly told they're either toxic or irrelevant. Today,
we're diving deep into what surplus value actually means. Why
Scholars like Richard Reeves and the very outspoken Scott Galloway
believe that it's crucial for boys and how it's not
actually about worth, it's about something more fundamental.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Hello, thanks for joining us on the Happy Families podcast,
Australia's most downloaded parent in podcast. We are Justin and
Kylie Coulson, parents of six kids, and today an email
about this idea of giving more than you take as
a marker of masculinity. Kylie Cleare sent this email through
perfectly captures the tension that a lot of parents are
feeling today. She's doing everything right raising a boys they're
(01:47):
age ten to seventeen, to be honest and kind, and
she's married to a man who is embodying, in her words,
healthy masculinity and fighting against a culture that increasingly views
boys as problematic by defa and she just says she's
witnessed mums saying that they're soap pleased that don't have
to have raised boys like parents like us at raising
girls in front of the kids, and her teenage girls
(02:08):
question what's the point of boys? And she's obviously concerned
about creating an environment PUSH's young men towards figures like
Andrew Tate.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Whether you agree with it or not. Once upon a time,
gendered roles were very clear.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
There was direction and clarity around what a boy did
and what a girl did, what a man did, what
a woman did. And while we have become leaps and
strides in recognizing that it was actually a really small
box we were.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Defined what were girls were, particularly.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
In so many ways. Opening that up and giving all
of the options that are available has actually taken away
all the parameters. And now there's no clarity. And I
think our boys particularly are struggling.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Well, and the evidence certainly points in that direction. That's
the that's the great challenge. So boys are struggling from
mental health point of view, from an academic point of view,
from a job point of view, from a university and
educational scholastic point of view. It doesn't really matter what
you look at. Yes, boys are usually at the top
of a handful of very important tables, but they're also
at the bottom, right down there at the bottom.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
And overall, on.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
The average, we're seeing girls not just sprinting ahead, but
their leaps and bounds ahead, which is great for the girls,
but we need to create a system that brings everybody
up we don't want to have one. I mean, there
was a sexual revolution and an a gender revolution because
the girls were in that box and they've been freed
from that box. But now we don't want their success
(03:41):
to be the expense of boys. We want everyone to
have the same opportunities for success. So Claire's heard us
talking about this idea of boys needing to first learn
masculinity and then earn masculinity by bringing surplus value. We've
talked about that on the pot a couple of times
while I've been writing my boys book, which will be
out next year. Where so excited about the progress we're
making on it. Now it's going to the publisher in
(04:02):
the next couple of weeks. I know, I know, but
that concept is not my concept. I've put new words
around it, new framing around it, and given it a
new context for the book. It's been popularized in recent
years by scholars like Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway. It
was originally articulated by an anthropologist called David Gilmore, and
it's landing not quite right for Claire, and she's not
(04:25):
the only person. I've had this pushback a couple of
times now, So I think This is a profound, really simple,
but really profound question. Are we telling boys that they're
not enough as they are, that they need to be
more to be different? That's literally what she wrote, and
I love that. Here's what she said in her in
her email. I'm raising my boys to know that they
have value just by being themselves, and the idea of
(04:45):
surplus value feels like it contradicts that fundamental truth.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Let's unpack this a little bit more, this concept of
surplus value, on what it actually means and why it
might be more important and less threatening than it initially sounds.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Okay, so this is a This is not a conversation
about worth, which is where Claire has gone. And it
makes sense because we're using the word value, like my
value is valuable as a person. It's really a conversation
about identity and purpose. What do I mean by that?
It's recognizing that boys and men typically develop identity and
self worth differently than the way that girls and women do.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Well, if you go back to my original conversation around
traditional gendered roles, a man was the bread winner and
the protector.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah, yeah, provide protects appropriate, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
And he no longer has to protect the way he
once did. There's no no dingoes, there's no lions and
tigers and bears. He doesn't have to play that role.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
And society is generally quite safe.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
And then secondly, because women are no longer boxed, he
often doesn't need to be the bread winner.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, and even procreation not necessarily involving men anymore, certainly
in the way they.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
So from a traditional point of view, he's lost all.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Of his roles. The value that men provided, right, that
was the value. That was how they showed up and
made the contribution they protected the tribe or the community
they provided for them.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
You can lose eighty percent of the men in your
tribe and you can still keep that tribe alive, or
your community or your society. You lose eighty percent of
the women. It's not gonna make it like you're just
not it's not going to work. And so one of
my favorite scholars of all time, a guy called Roy Baumeister,
talks about how in every known society we have to
make men. That's literally the line, we have to make men.
(06:32):
So what he says is time allows girls to become women,
but that hasn't been the case historically, in any society
that we know of, for men basically mature, healthy masculinity
is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, and that's why role
(06:52):
models and rights of passage and even institutions and men's
spaces have been so important. Research keeps on showing that
boys are more likely to meaning and identity from what
they contribute or what they produce. Well, girls are more
likely to derive it from relationships and from being valued
for who they are. So this isn't a better or
(07:13):
worse thing, it's just different. Claire rightly is giving unconditional
love and acceptance to her kids, and we're not challenging
that that's the foundation for him to develop for those
boys to develop healthy masculinity.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
But boys also tend to.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Need opportunities to feel useful and needed and make contributions
to develop healthy identity and.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Also have purpose. Yeah, and too often our boys are
coming out of the high school situation lost and they're
completely lost. They've got no direction, no purpose, no, not
even any trajectory of where they might end up. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, they don't even know how to signal to the
people around them that they are going somewhere because they
don't know where they could be going.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, and the evidence is really quite clear about that.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Claire's love tells her boys that you matter because you exist,
and that's what they need to hear.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
That's really really important.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
The surplus value concept adds and here's how you can
matter to the world beyond our family, especially to maybe
the family that you'll have in the future. So after
the break to other vital reasons that this conversation around
surplus value matters. Okay, Kylie, surplus value it matters for
(08:29):
men in ways that we've been talking about already. But
there are two more big things that I want to
talk about. I've already touched on this, so I'll go
over this really quickly and get to the big one.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Number three.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
David Gilmore I already mentioned him before. He's this cross
cultural anthropologist wrote book called Manhood and the Making. He
found that virtually every society across the globe, and virtually
every society throughout history, has had some form of expectation
that boys must demonstrate their transition to manhood through contribution
(09:01):
or achievement or service of some kind. So whether it's
catching fish or slaying the mammoth or protecting the tribal
in nineteen fifties parlance bringing home the bacon. It's not
arbitrary cultural conditioning like this isn't This isn't something that
we've invented. It's not toxic masculinity. It's not some nineteen
fifties throwback. It appears to be a nearly universal human pattern.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
And this conversation intrigues me because I've been thinking about
the idea of what it means to become a woman,
and by virtue of the physiological changes that take place
in my body, i enter into that path.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
What's crazy about that to me, though, is that men
you go through your own.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Physiog there's puberty.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
But this is the thing right, Men have always had
to both learn and then earn their masculinity. And if
you're not doing the stuff that men do, you are
judged as being less of a man now. And that's
not just an our culture and society thing. That is
an anthropologically accurate way to describe most societies and cultures
throughout time and history across the globe. If you're not
(10:16):
doing so once you're a woman, nobody says, oh, because
you're doing that, you're not much of a woman anymore,
Like you don't have your femininity stripped. Once you're a woman,
you're a woman. But for men, they have to earn
that masculinity. And then if they stop producing, they stop contributing,
they stop adding that surplus value that they've added. People
look at them and say, well, what sort of a
(10:37):
man are you like? That is a that's a phrase
that we use in Australia, what sort of a man
are you? But you never look at a woman and
say what sort of a woman are you like? That's
just not asked. It's a different question, it's a different well,
it's not a question at all. It doesn't happen.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
This is really curious to me, and I might be
going a little bit of track, but there's this, obviously
this emphasis that as men we need to bring surplus
value to the world, but we're not asking that of women.
Is that because as women, generally speaking, we're the nurturers,
we're the care is, we provide the emotional framework for
(11:16):
society and as such we bring something to the world
that generally speaking, men don't.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I think that could potentially be part of it. But
more than that, through out of all of humanity's evolutionary history.
Regardless of your perspective on how we got to be
who we are, society has evolved through the centuries and
through the millennia and throughout all of that time. Because
women are the nurturers and the ones who bear children,
(11:45):
what they have always done. What women have always done
is look for the very best genes to pass on
or to mate with and to create offspring with. And
so if you're a female, whether it's an ancient tribe
or in modern Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Australia, whatever it is,
you're looking for the person who is going to be
(12:05):
able to demonstrate their fitness. And how do you demonstrate fitness.
You demonstrate fitness by adding value to the lives of
the people around you. Like if you're selfish, if you're narcissistic,
if you don't look after anyone except yourself, then no
woman is going to look at you and say you
are exactly what I need and exactly what our children
will need. Whereas if you're the one who goes out
and you slay the wooly mammoth, or you catch enough
(12:26):
fish for the village, or you go off to battle
and you win the war and you take the scalps
or whatever it is that you're doing, and you come
back and everyone says you were the hero, and then
you can be modest and humble about it and say, well,
it was a team effort. We all worked really hard.
You become increasingly desirable, and therefore the men across the
(12:47):
eons of time who have consistently produced have become the
ones who are the most a manly, most healthy, and
most sought after. Now that has been abused over time,
I'm not saying that's perfect. I'm not saying that's exactly
the way it always should be, or whatever it is.
The key insight is not that this is how it
(13:08):
should be. The key insight is that ignoring this pattern
leaves a lot of boys and men without a clear
pathway to healthy masculine identity, and society's job is to
provide constructive channels for this drive. If society doesn't, then
boys will often find destructive ones. That's exactly why Claire
is worried about figures like Andrew Tate showing up and
(13:28):
misdirecting her boys. And to be clear, her boys sound
like they're great kids. They're age between ten and seventeen,
surrounded by family, love and really clear values. But what
happens when they hit twenty two or twenty five or
thirty two. A lot of young men today report, as
we've already sort of touched on, feeling directionless. A lot
(13:49):
of them literally say I feel unnecessary. You look at
some of the young men that we work with and
some of the things that they say, no one will
ever love me. I'm not providing anything, I'm not showing
any direction, and I'm being ignored by the girls. And
it's not because they're not loved enough at home. It's
not because they didn't come from stable families. It's not
because they misunderstand their value as humans. It's because they
(14:10):
don't know how to be useful. And if they're not
being useful, they're not signaling to prospective partners and mates
that they're going to.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Be wonderful husbands and fathers.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
That is the thing. Being useful helps men feel more valuable.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
What's the last one?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, we need to wrap this up. So this is
why I've written the book. We're seeing unprecedented rates of
young men dropping out of education, struggling with employment, delaying
traditional markers of adulthood like, that's why we call it
adult essence. Adolescence flows into adult essence now and experiencing
mental health challenges. And I think a lot of this
stems from a lack of clear expectations and pathways for
(14:50):
young men to feel.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Needed by their communities.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
And I think Clare's right to worry about the culture
messaging that boys are receiving today, because it is horrendous.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
If you look at what the.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
News shows about what young men are getting up to,
it is just brutal. But the answer is not to
pretend that boys and girls develop identity identically. That's a
tongue twister for you. It's to provide positive frameworks for
masculine development before the boys gravitate towards the negative ones.
So Colie, I'd probably wrap it up with this. The
(15:20):
surplus value concept isn't about creating pressure. It's not about
creating impossible expectations or about telling boys that they're not
worth anything unless they're doing more than being themselves. It's
about giving boys meaningful ways to channel their natural drives
towards competence and contribution into positive outcomes, which might mean
it might mean taking on real responsibilities within the family,
(15:43):
or it could at an age appropriate time, or it
could mean developing skills that are going to betterfit others,
getting certified, getting educated, understanding that the community has expectations
of them as future men, not because they're insufficient, but
because they're capable of great things.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
And I think that if I was going to tweak
this idea of surplus value, for me, the word is contribution.
What contribution are we willing to make.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
That's why we tell our daughters to look for the
chair stackers at the end of the night.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
That's right. It's not about how much money he earns.
It's not about what job he has, but is he
willing to contribute to the greater good? And that greater
good is in our home, in our community, in the
world in general.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
And I will just add Richard Reeves talks a lot
about surplus value based on what David Gilmore. He calls
it a healthy man, a real men, provision, kith and kin.
That's the words that David Gilmore used in the Making
of Men. The words that I'm using in my book
are healthy Masculinity is about helping the people around you
feel safer and stronger, which sits more nicely with your
(16:45):
idea of contribution, right, How am I contributing to make
things better here? I will just say this at a personal level,
and we're out of time, so I've got to mention
this really fast. I felt like more of a man.
I didn't feel like a man. I didn't feel like
a man even in my and I was married and
paying off a mortgage, and we had kids, and I
was a student. Right, I was not really providing for us.
(17:06):
The government was providing a support so that I could
get my doctorate, so I could go on to become
a contributing member of the community. I've more than paid
back whatever the government gave me in my taxes since then.
But that actually makes me feel like more of a man.
The fact that I've earned enough money so that I've
paid back the government what we took as a family
(17:27):
when they provided support to us because I couldn't provide
for us, because I was getting my certifications and qualifications
and my doctorate. It makes me feel like more of
a man, in spite of the fact that I had
good relationships. It makes me feel like more of a man,
a manly man, not because of my biceps, but because
I add so much value to so many lives because
I don't just I don't just pay our mortgage and
(17:49):
put food on our table, but we have employees, and
I'm responsible for earning the money to make sure that
they have food on their tables and pay their rent
and their mortgage. And I also pay tax, which means
that I'm supporting people in the community who can't provide
for themselves or who maybe you're looking forward to one
day doing the sort of thing that I'm doing that
is earning enough money to pay tax because they're getting
(18:10):
their certification, so my taxes help them to do that.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
But again, I don't even think that this is necessarily
all about finances.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
No, it's about having impact and helping and lifting and
making a difference.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
And so having somebody like Claire come to you because
they know that this is a safe place where they
can have, yes, an open dialogue around how she helps
her sons, you know, kind of move through life in
positive ways, is the biggest contribution that you get to make.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
You can sign up to get details about the Boys Book,
which will be out early next year. If you'd like
to be on our mailing list, just go to Happy
Families dot com DOTU and sign up or check the
show notes. We will link to where you can sign
up for first bites of the book in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
We really hope this has given you something to think about.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
The Happy Famili's podcast is produced by Justin Roland from
Bridge Media.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Mimhammonds provides admin
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Research and additional support, and if you would like more
information and resources, visit happy families dot com dot a
This is The Happy Family's podcast. Thanks so much for
joining us today. A mother of four boys, Claire wrote
in gave us a very, very long email. I'm going
to summarize it just here, asking about one of our
most provocative topics recently, the idea that boys need to
bring surplus value to become healthy men. In my new
book due out next year, Boys, I talk about how
(00:27):
healthy masculinity means helping the people around you to feel
safer and stronger. Richard Reeves and his Book of Boys
and Men calls it surplus value.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
So Claire is.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Raising her sons to be honest and kind and brave,
but she's worried that we're telling them that they're not
enough as they are. She says, and here's the quote.
If I was told as a young girl that I
needed to bring surplus value, my confidence and self worth
would have been pretty shaken. So I think that's a
fair enough statement, and it cuts to the heart of
how we develop healthy mass identity in a world where
(01:02):
boys are increasingly told they're either toxic or irrelevant. Today,
we're diving deep into what surplus value actually means. Why
Scholars like Richard Reeves and the very outspoken Scott Galloway
believe that it's crucial for boys and how it's not
actually about worth, it's about something more fundamental.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Hello, thanks for joining us on the Happy Families podcast,
Australia's most downloaded parent in podcast. We are Justin and
Kylie Coulson, parents of six kids, and today an email
about this idea of giving more than you take as
a marker of masculinity. Kylie Cleare sent this email through
perfectly captures the tension that a lot of parents are
feeling today. She's doing everything right raising a boys they're
(01:47):
age ten to seventeen, to be honest and kind, and
she's married to a man who is embodying, in her words,
healthy masculinity and fighting against a culture that increasingly views
boys as problematic by defa and she just says she's
witnessed mums saying that they're soap pleased that don't have
to have raised boys like parents like us at raising
girls in front of the kids, and her teenage girls
(02:08):
question what's the point of boys? And she's obviously concerned
about creating an environment PUSH's young men towards figures like
Andrew Tate.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Whether you agree with it or not. Once upon a time,
gendered roles were very clear.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
There was direction and clarity around what a boy did
and what a girl did, what a man did, what
a woman did. And while we have become leaps and
strides in recognizing that it was actually a really small
box we were.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Defined what were girls were, particularly.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
In so many ways. Opening that up and giving all
of the options that are available has actually taken away
all the parameters. And now there's no clarity. And I
think our boys particularly are struggling.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Well, and the evidence certainly points in that direction. That's
the that's the great challenge. So boys are struggling from
mental health point of view, from an academic point of view,
from a job point of view, from a university and
educational scholastic point of view. It doesn't really matter what
you look at. Yes, boys are usually at the top
of a handful of very important tables, but they're also
at the bottom, right down there at the bottom.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
And overall, on.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
The average, we're seeing girls not just sprinting ahead, but
their leaps and bounds ahead, which is great for the girls,
but we need to create a system that brings everybody
up we don't want to have one. I mean, there
was a sexual revolution and an a gender revolution because
the girls were in that box and they've been freed
from that box. But now we don't want their success
(03:41):
to be the expense of boys. We want everyone to
have the same opportunities for success. So Claire's heard us
talking about this idea of boys needing to first learn
masculinity and then earn masculinity by bringing surplus value. We've
talked about that on the pot a couple of times
while I've been writing my boys book, which will be
out next year. Where so excited about the progress we're
making on it. Now it's going to the publisher in
(04:02):
the next couple of weeks. I know, I know, but
that concept is not my concept. I've put new words
around it, new framing around it, and given it a
new context for the book. It's been popularized in recent
years by scholars like Richard Reeves and Scott Galloway. It
was originally articulated by an anthropologist called David Gilmore, and
it's landing not quite right for Claire, and she's not
(04:25):
the only person. I've had this pushback a couple of
times now, So I think This is a profound, really simple,
but really profound question. Are we telling boys that they're
not enough as they are, that they need to be
more to be different? That's literally what she wrote, and
I love that. Here's what she said in her in
her email. I'm raising my boys to know that they
have value just by being themselves, and the idea of
(04:45):
surplus value feels like it contradicts that fundamental truth.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Let's unpack this a little bit more, this concept of
surplus value, on what it actually means and why it
might be more important and less threatening than it initially sounds.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Okay, so this is a This is not a conversation
about worth, which is where Claire has gone. And it
makes sense because we're using the word value, like my
value is valuable as a person. It's really a conversation
about identity and purpose. What do I mean by that?
It's recognizing that boys and men typically develop identity and
self worth differently than the way that girls and women do.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
Well, if you go back to my original conversation around
traditional gendered roles, a man was the bread winner and
the protector.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah, yeah, provide protects appropriate, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
And he no longer has to protect the way he
once did. There's no no dingoes, there's no lions and
tigers and bears. He doesn't have to play that role.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
And society is generally quite safe.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
And then secondly, because women are no longer boxed, he
often doesn't need to be the bread winner.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, and even procreation not necessarily involving men anymore, certainly
in the way they.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
So from a traditional point of view, he's lost all.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Of his roles. The value that men provided, right, that
was the value. That was how they showed up and
made the contribution they protected the tribe or the community
they provided for them.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
You can lose eighty percent of the men in your
tribe and you can still keep that tribe alive, or
your community or your society. You lose eighty percent of
the women. It's not gonna make it like you're just
not it's not going to work. And so one of
my favorite scholars of all time, a guy called Roy Baumeister,
talks about how in every known society we have to
make men. That's literally the line, we have to make men.
(06:32):
So what he says is time allows girls to become women,
but that hasn't been the case historically, in any society
that we know of, for men basically mature, healthy masculinity
is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, and that's why role
(06:52):
models and rights of passage and even institutions and men's
spaces have been so important. Research keeps on showing that
boys are more likely to meaning and identity from what
they contribute or what they produce. Well, girls are more
likely to derive it from relationships and from being valued
for who they are. So this isn't a better or
(07:13):
worse thing, it's just different. Claire rightly is giving unconditional
love and acceptance to her kids, and we're not challenging
that that's the foundation for him to develop for those
boys to develop healthy masculinity.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
But boys also tend to.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Need opportunities to feel useful and needed and make contributions
to develop healthy identity and.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Also have purpose. Yeah, and too often our boys are
coming out of the high school situation lost and they're
completely lost. They've got no direction, no purpose, no, not
even any trajectory of where they might end up. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, they don't even know how to signal to the
people around them that they are going somewhere because they
don't know where they could be going.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, and the evidence is really quite clear about that.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Claire's love tells her boys that you matter because you exist,
and that's what they need to hear.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
That's really really important.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
The surplus value concept adds and here's how you can
matter to the world beyond our family, especially to maybe
the family that you'll have in the future. So after
the break to other vital reasons that this conversation around
surplus value matters. Okay, Kylie, surplus value it matters for
(08:29):
men in ways that we've been talking about already. But
there are two more big things that I want to
talk about. I've already touched on this, so I'll go
over this really quickly and get to the big one.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
Number three.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
David Gilmore I already mentioned him before. He's this cross
cultural anthropologist wrote book called Manhood and the Making. He
found that virtually every society across the globe, and virtually
every society throughout history, has had some form of expectation
that boys must demonstrate their transition to manhood through contribution
(09:01):
or achievement or service of some kind. So whether it's
catching fish or slaying the mammoth or protecting the tribal
in nineteen fifties parlance bringing home the bacon. It's not
arbitrary cultural conditioning like this isn't This isn't something that
we've invented. It's not toxic masculinity. It's not some nineteen
fifties throwback. It appears to be a nearly universal human pattern.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
And this conversation intrigues me because I've been thinking about
the idea of what it means to become a woman,
and by virtue of the physiological changes that take place
in my body, i enter into that path.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
What's crazy about that to me, though, is that men
you go through your own.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Physiog there's puberty.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
But this is the thing right, Men have always had
to both learn and then earn their masculinity. And if
you're not doing the stuff that men do, you are
judged as being less of a man now. And that's
not just an our culture and society thing. That is
an anthropologically accurate way to describe most societies and cultures
throughout time and history across the globe. If you're not
(10:16):
doing so once you're a woman, nobody says, oh, because
you're doing that, you're not much of a woman anymore,
Like you don't have your femininity stripped. Once you're a woman,
you're a woman. But for men, they have to earn
that masculinity. And then if they stop producing, they stop contributing,
they stop adding that surplus value that they've added. People
look at them and say, well, what sort of a
(10:37):
man are you like? That is a that's a phrase
that we use in Australia, what sort of a man
are you? But you never look at a woman and
say what sort of a woman are you like? That's
just not asked. It's a different question, it's a different well,
it's not a question at all. It doesn't happen.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
This is really curious to me, and I might be
going a little bit of track, but there's this, obviously
this emphasis that as men we need to bring surplus
value to the world, but we're not asking that of women.
Is that because as women, generally speaking, we're the nurturers,
we're the care is, we provide the emotional framework for
(11:16):
society and as such we bring something to the world
that generally speaking, men don't.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
I think that could potentially be part of it. But
more than that, through out of all of humanity's evolutionary history.
Regardless of your perspective on how we got to be
who we are, society has evolved through the centuries and
through the millennia and throughout all of that time. Because
women are the nurturers and the ones who bear children,
(11:45):
what they have always done. What women have always done
is look for the very best genes to pass on
or to mate with and to create offspring with. And
so if you're a female, whether it's an ancient tribe
or in modern Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Australia, whatever it is,
you're looking for the person who is going to be
(12:05):
able to demonstrate their fitness. And how do you demonstrate fitness.
You demonstrate fitness by adding value to the lives of
the people around you. Like if you're selfish, if you're narcissistic,
if you don't look after anyone except yourself, then no
woman is going to look at you and say you
are exactly what I need and exactly what our children
will need. Whereas if you're the one who goes out
and you slay the wooly mammoth, or you catch enough
(12:26):
fish for the village, or you go off to battle
and you win the war and you take the scalps
or whatever it is that you're doing, and you come
back and everyone says you were the hero, and then
you can be modest and humble about it and say, well,
it was a team effort. We all worked really hard.
You become increasingly desirable, and therefore the men across the
(12:47):
eons of time who have consistently produced have become the
ones who are the most a manly, most healthy, and
most sought after. Now that has been abused over time,
I'm not saying that's perfect. I'm not saying that's exactly
the way it always should be, or whatever it is.
The key insight is not that this is how it
(13:08):
should be. The key insight is that ignoring this pattern
leaves a lot of boys and men without a clear
pathway to healthy masculine identity, and society's job is to
provide constructive channels for this drive. If society doesn't, then
boys will often find destructive ones. That's exactly why Claire
is worried about figures like Andrew Tate showing up and
(13:28):
misdirecting her boys. And to be clear, her boys sound
like they're great kids. They're age between ten and seventeen,
surrounded by family, love and really clear values. But what
happens when they hit twenty two or twenty five or
thirty two. A lot of young men today report, as
we've already sort of touched on, feeling directionless. A lot
(13:49):
of them literally say I feel unnecessary. You look at
some of the young men that we work with and
some of the things that they say, no one will
ever love me. I'm not providing anything, I'm not showing
any direction, and I'm being ignored by the girls. And
it's not because they're not loved enough at home. It's
not because they didn't come from stable families. It's not
because they misunderstand their value as humans. It's because they
(14:10):
don't know how to be useful. And if they're not
being useful, they're not signaling to prospective partners and mates
that they're going to.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Be wonderful husbands and fathers.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
That is the thing. Being useful helps men feel more valuable.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
What's the last one?
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Yeah, we need to wrap this up. So this is
why I've written the book. We're seeing unprecedented rates of
young men dropping out of education, struggling with employment, delaying
traditional markers of adulthood like, that's why we call it
adult essence. Adolescence flows into adult essence now and experiencing
mental health challenges. And I think a lot of this
stems from a lack of clear expectations and pathways for
(14:50):
young men to feel.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Needed by their communities.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
And I think Clare's right to worry about the culture
messaging that boys are receiving today, because it is horrendous.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
If you look at what the.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
News shows about what young men are getting up to,
it is just brutal. But the answer is not to
pretend that boys and girls develop identity identically. That's a
tongue twister for you. It's to provide positive frameworks for
masculine development before the boys gravitate towards the negative ones.
So Colie, I'd probably wrap it up with this. The
(15:20):
surplus value concept isn't about creating pressure. It's not about
creating impossible expectations or about telling boys that they're not
worth anything unless they're doing more than being themselves. It's
about giving boys meaningful ways to channel their natural drives
towards competence and contribution into positive outcomes, which might mean
it might mean taking on real responsibilities within the family,
(15:43):
or it could at an age appropriate time, or it
could mean developing skills that are going to betterfit others,
getting certified, getting educated, understanding that the community has expectations
of them as future men, not because they're insufficient, but
because they're capable of great things.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
And I think that if I was going to tweak
this idea of surplus value, for me, the word is contribution.
What contribution are we willing to make.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
That's why we tell our daughters to look for the
chair stackers at the end of the night.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
That's right. It's not about how much money he earns.
It's not about what job he has, but is he
willing to contribute to the greater good? And that greater
good is in our home, in our community, in the
world in general.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
And I will just add Richard Reeves talks a lot
about surplus value based on what David Gilmore. He calls
it a healthy man, a real men, provision, kith and kin.
That's the words that David Gilmore used in the Making
of Men. The words that I'm using in my book
are healthy Masculinity is about helping the people around you
feel safer and stronger, which sits more nicely with your
(16:45):
idea of contribution, right, How am I contributing to make
things better here? I will just say this at a personal level,
and we're out of time, so I've got to mention
this really fast. I felt like more of a man.
I didn't feel like a man. I didn't feel like
a man even in my and I was married and
paying off a mortgage, and we had kids, and I
was a student. Right, I was not really providing for us.
(17:06):
The government was providing a support so that I could
get my doctorate, so I could go on to become
a contributing member of the community. I've more than paid
back whatever the government gave me in my taxes since then.
But that actually makes me feel like more of a man.
The fact that I've earned enough money so that I've
paid back the government what we took as a family
(17:27):
when they provided support to us because I couldn't provide
for us, because I was getting my certifications and qualifications
and my doctorate. It makes me feel like more of
a man, in spite of the fact that I had
good relationships. It makes me feel like more of a man,
a manly man, not because of my biceps, but because
I add so much value to so many lives because
I don't just I don't just pay our mortgage and
(17:49):
put food on our table, but we have employees, and
I'm responsible for earning the money to make sure that
they have food on their tables and pay their rent
and their mortgage. And I also pay tax, which means
that I'm supporting people in the community who can't provide
for themselves or who maybe you're looking forward to one
day doing the sort of thing that I'm doing that
is earning enough money to pay tax because they're getting
(18:10):
their certification, so my taxes help them to do that.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
But again, I don't even think that this is necessarily
all about finances.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
No, it's about having impact and helping and lifting and
making a difference.
Speaker 3 (18:20):
And so having somebody like Claire come to you because
they know that this is a safe place where they
can have, yes, an open dialogue around how she helps
her sons, you know, kind of move through life in
positive ways, is the biggest contribution that you get to make.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
You can sign up to get details about the Boys Book,
which will be out early next year. If you'd like
to be on our mailing list, just go to Happy
Families dot com DOTU and sign up or check the
show notes. We will link to where you can sign
up for first bites of the book in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
We really hope this has given you something to think about.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
The Happy Famili's podcast is produced by Justin Roland from
Bridge Media.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Mimhammonds provides admin
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Research and additional support, and if you would like more
information and resources, visit happy families dot com dot a
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