Hello and welcome back to To Be a Boy with Me, Jolie Brilly.
Me, Elliot Ray. We really would love you to
click subscribe. I know we keep saying that, but
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From rising mental health struggles and record rates of
male suicide to the challenges faced in education and health,
the landscape for men and boys is rapidly shifting and support
along the way has often been limited.
Just the idea that men and boys need support can sometimes be
met with hesitation and pushback.
It's essential that we engage boys and men in conversations
around positive masculinity. Conversations that ensure our
sons, brothers, friends and colleagues can live happy and
healthy lives and contribute positively to their families and
communities. Today we are joined by Owen
Thomas and Chris Stein from Future Men.
Founded in 1988, Future Men is a multi award-winning specialist
charity that supports boys and men along the path to becoming
dynamic future men while addressing this is the
stereotypes around masculinity and engaging in the wider
conversation about what it means to be a man.
Future Men support boys and men from childhood to 25 plus to
help them improve their mental health and well-being and guide
them to become dynamic and future healthy men.
Welcome Chris and Owen to the podcast.
Great to have you. Nice to see you.
Yeah. Thank you, Elliot, and
congratulations both to you and Jolie on your Mbes.
Very, very well deserved. And you know, we really support
all the work you guys are doing. Oh, lovely.
Thanks so much, Chris. I appreciate that.
Let's get straight in. Let's get straight in.
So the conversation around men and boys has never been so
divisive, controversial, amplified and platformed.
And as people have been doing this work for many years, we are
really interested in your thoughts about how do you see
the conversation evolving. What are your reflections on how
the conversation around the plight of men and boys has
evolved in recent years? I'll do the, I'll do the sort of
maybe the headline stuff. And I think first of all, the
idea of plight. I, I think that's an interesting
framing because we do still live in the UK and probably more
globally as well. But I want to be clear that
we're speaking about the UK situation in in a patriarchy and
one where misogyny is rife at very many levels, from from
banter all the way up to serious violence.
But equally, the conversation around boys and men more
generally often skews to the most violent and the most
successful. But for the vast majority of
boys and men, that might not reflect their lived experience
whatsoever. And so I think that that framing
is not inclusive and it can create some division because of
its lack of inclusivity. I would add from our
perspectives of future men, our target cohort of men and boys,
whilst we really, really are keen to spread our reach as wide
as possible and contribute to the wider conversation in
society around the role of men and boys, I think our focus, our
articles focus on more marginalised men and boys.
So people who are maybe more on the fringes of society, who
don't have the agency or the personal skill set, education or
opportunity to maybe reflect within their own mind on who
they're being and how they're being and who they want to be.
I think the narrative very much is framed, as Chris has kind of
alluded to, in the deficits that we see within men.
So a lot of the discussion at the moment around men and boys
is around the problems that they are posing society and the
challenges that poses to our ideals of how we want society to
be as we move forward. I think your introduction was a
really on point when you said like, how do we help men live
happy, healthy lives where they contribute to wider society?
I think that's all we want. I think the models of
masculinity have been shared with many of us for so many
years are not conducive with that.
They're conducive with a patriarchal model that says it's
a hierarchical system. Men are at the top, white
affluent men normally at the top of that system.
They draw the benefits out of that and below that.
There are various kind of levels that we can occupy in this
devilish pyramids of life to try and get them going.
And most men don't benefit from it.
Most men in who are not kind of causing lots of problems to the
rest of society and themselves and their families, but also
don't benefit from being in charge of the way the world
works or drawing off a lot of financial reward from that, find
themselves in the middle, a bit confused about where to go.
Stuck within the frameworks that don't meet their needs, their
children's needs, their partner's needs, and are often
struggling to find ways to be satisfied and fulfilled with all
of the pressures and ideas about how you're supposed to be.
So the narrative is you're absolutely right.
More visible than it's ever been, but I don't think it's the
healthiest it's ever been. It's quite adversarial at the
moment and at the time of kind of shrinking resources, rising
prices, Some people who are very, very loudly shouting about
what models of masculinity they think we should adhere to,
including the current leader of the free world.
You know, it's a really challenging time, you know, And
no one tells you more clearly and more upfrontly about what it
is to be a man than a young boy. He quotes Donald Trump and says,
but hold on. He says that's how he should be.
That's how, look, he just got voted in.
Clearly, you know, I can't be wrong in espousing some of these
views. So I think we just want to be
part of a conversation. It's not for us to dictate to
men and boys about how they should be.
It's for us to build a relationship so we can have a
healthy challenge and present them with options to consider
themselves and then be be available afterwards whenever
time to consider, to say, right now you've considered it, now
you're more open to the idea of help, Let's make sure we've got
mechanisms to help. Yeah, let's, let's talk about
that. What you're saying there around
what young boys tell you, because, you know, one of the
reasons we want to get you on the podcast is because your
organization does work with boys on, on on the ground.
You're you're in schools, you're in communities talking to boys
and sometimes this conversation can be had about boys, but not
actually with their voices included.
So what would you say on the most pressing and poignant
issues that you're hearing from boys on a day-to-day basis?
Some while back, I conducted a series of focus groups with
representation from each of our strands of work.
So we work in schools, we work with fathers, and we work in the
community. And I used a tool which was a
series of kind of words and prompts and then a scale of
strongly agreed to strongly disagree so that then they could
talk to the tool and not about themselves.
This was about trying to foster an environment where it was
broader than the individual. And some really key ideas came
out maybe surprising and maybe not.
Maybe not surprising depending upon your perspective, but the
younger boys held more traditional views of
masculinity. There was more of an aspiration
towards an archetype and a norm than there was for the fathers
for example. And the, the, the, the fathers
were generally in the kind of late 20s to mid to the mid 30s
range. And they were saying by this
point a lot of those kind of ideas of what type of trainers
to wear or how to, how to flex in society, they were gone.
They just didn't. It wasn't a big issue for them.
Masculinity was framed very much in terms of religion.
So there, there are a number of young people that we support in
the community, particularly around Westminster and N
Kensington that come from more sort of North African
backgrounds. And this was a, a big influence
on them in terms of their, their, their ideas and normative
behaviors towards masculinity. I've mentioned age culture as
well. We support, as Owen said, young,
young people, young men, men from lots of different cultures,
but often more marginalized backgrounds.
And those sort of cultural factors played a role again, in
their view of masculinity. So there were all these
different ways of understanding masculinity, which was important
to confirm that masculinity is not one thing and it's not
existent in. It has normative functions,
normative behaviors, normative thought processes, but equally
they're interpreted through a prism that sort of parses out
what what we do and what we say in terms of the actual
challenges that are faced educationally, boys are not
doing particularly well. For something like 33 years.
Boys have underperformed at GCSE level and of course there's lots
of cutting of that. So it's not all boys, it's some
boys in some circumstances. And at certain ages.
And at certain ages, yeah. Yeah, because.
You know, we've seen, for example, ethnic minority Afro
Kuban boys do really well at primary school and then there's
something that switches in the transition to secondary school
with the onset of adolescents and different expectations
around what we want from our teenage boys and what their
peers expect from them and what society expect from them
depending on where they grow up and what their socio economical
cultural background. Maybe you see this divergent and
this change in terms of outcomes, opportunities and
behaviours and also in the way they're viewed by society as
well, which has an influence on this.
Expectation shapes how you behave.
You live up to an expectation. If it's very low and very
negative, we can't be surprised sometimes that boys that we
frame in that light start fitting the mould.
You know, it's difficult to break the mould.
That's why we say, well, he's breaking the mould and we make a
big deal out of it, you know, but actually we sit back and go,
why isn't everybody breaking the mould?
He's done it and we think because he's not been given the
inputs to allow him to do so. So sorry to jump in there, but I
just think it's really important to to, to realise that it's not
a continuum. There are opportunities for boys
and men when they're really flexible, when they're getting
lots of new ideas compared to what my childhood in the 70s and
80s might have been like and what my oldest child, who's not
a boy, by the way, who's a girl, but her compatriots and her
peers and her cousins who grew up in the 90s were having.
It was a very different environment, you know, But now
there is a lot of information, there's a lot of people actively
kind of almost pressing you into different camps.
And modern life is all about camps, right?
Whether it's online, whether it's about your, whether you're
a goth or you're a grime or a drill, whatever it is your
social grouping is, there's less scope.
I feel like for boys and men to move around these different
groups, learn new experience and learn new tools to help them get
through life. They can be very rigidly locked
into one pathway, even more so now than before.
And you would have thought that's not possible.
You've got the world at your fingertips, but what it does is,
you know, the devil in the room being social media is it allows
you to just follow the path of least resistance.
And and then the algorithms say, well, I've started looking at
things that are a bit dramatic in this area.
I'll just feed more of the same content to you so there isn't a
challenge. So our services are based around
not only asking to guys what they think, young men, boys,
young adults, which is really important as well because, you
know, the traditional ages at which we went through different
rites of passage is changing. You know, what do they say?
40s, a new 3050's, a new 40. So that that has a knock on
effect all the way back, you know, right down to your
childhood where the frameworks we give boys to develop within,
you know, the expectation. 50 a hundred years ago it was very
clear about what boys and men did in society.
You either achieved academically and went on to these types of
careers or these type of apprenticeships, or you didn't
and you were out of school and you were working by the time you
were 14. You might have been married and
had a family by the time you were 16 or 17, but you also had
status in society and in your community because you were doing
all the things expected of you as a man.
Since we've had all of the marvellous advancements in
society since the 60s onwards with women's lived, the advance
of reproductive protection and technologies that have liberated
women from being under the yoke of marriage and men.
And we've got a much say, much more informed by choice, the
traditional roles that men had for a long time have got.
And we've not, we're kind of sat back and going, all right, so
how's life going to be now? What's society going to be like
now? And we're leaving different
groups of people behind. While some of us are doing
really well at this flexible new egalitarian lifestyle, But for
many men and boys, they're not. Which is why we're seeing for
us, in our view, the kind of growth of negative speak, talk
and ideas and groups that attach themselves to these kind of more
toxic or more harmful models of masculinity that actually are
not really satisfying for those men or fulfilling for them in
the long term. Hey Elliot here.
As you may know, as well as Co hosting this lovely podcast, I
also run Parenting Out Loud, the workplace coach change program
that supports dads to be loud and proud about their care and
responsibilities at work and equal parents at home.
Well, I have some exciting news. In September we are hosting EU
KS first ever Working Dads Summit.
Sponsored by Universal Music Group UK.
The one day online event will bring together fathers for
leaders, employers and change makers to explore what it really
means to be a dad in today's world and how we can create
workplace environments where dads can parent loudly.
Expect real stories, bold conversations and practical
solutions. So whether you are a dad, an
employer, HR leader, or advocate, this summit is for
anyone who believes in equal parenting and gender equality at
work and at home. 23rd of September online 1:00 PM to 5:00
PM completely free. So register on Working Dads
summit.com and join the community over on LinkedIn.
Just search for parenting out loud right back to the show.
There was a polden earlier this week which found that just under
half of boys and young men think that feminism has gone too far
and that they themselves have experienced sexism.
This came out on the radio on Monday and I was in the kitchen
with my 11 year old son and he heard it.
And he said to me, I would agree with that.
And I said, all right, well tell me a bit more.
What do you mean? And he said, well, at school,
all of the girls are constantly crying sexism over everything.
They call everything sexist. And it feels very much to me
like the teachers constantly take their side over the side of
boys. Would you?
This is a very controversial question.
Would do you think that the way we've had the conversation about
women's rights has potentially caused negative side effects in
terms of men feeling completely ignored from the conversation
and therefore pushing back? Or do you think it's just that
we've focused to a lot on women, as you've said, women and girls,
but we haven't really had that conversation enough at all about
boys and men? The first thing I would want to
say is that the advancement of women and feminism is to be
felicited. And it's actually a model that
should be deconstructed, decomposed and and analyzed from
the perspective of masculinity, boys and men to see what what
aspects of that discussion can be brought forward and and
implemented in in a way that resonates for boys and men.
I mean, I would add, it's really interesting and I'll make this,
I suppose, more linked to experience of delivering what
I've heard boys and young men saying.
You know, first and foremost, it's about definitions.
What does feminism mean? Does everyone understand what
the term feminism means? Because I've had conversations
with feminists in different settings over the over the years
I've been doing this work and I've been here about 20 years
and you can get different views on what feminism is.
You know, there isn't 1U voice of feminism within the feminist
movement. You know, there are disputes
about, you know, what feminism means for women of colour versus
a middle class white women talking about feminism and the
dynamics of power and how that plays out are really what we're
talking about here, I think. I mean #1 I'm interested to hear
how you manage that conversation with your son, if that comes up
now, because it can't be easy. But I think that, you know,
young men are not going to make this stuff up.
He's speaking based upon his experiences and what he's
observed, right? So maybe there's something
around his frame of reference where he needs to understand or
maybe be brought up to speed about the long struggle for
equality, which is still ongoing.
And that feminism, in my view, means I just believe in equality
amongst the sexes. That doesn't mean that everyone
is the same all of the time, doing everything.
Equality of outcome is what we're looking for for everyone.
But equality of that doesn't mean necessarily that to get to
that end point, we all do exactly the same things.
So men have to cede some of that space.
They have to cede some of that power, and they have to cede
some of that control. You know, and in issues of
fairness, how things are distributed, you have to start
talking about the advantages that some of us start our life
with or the privilege that some of us start our life with.
And they're a slightly scale than this.
You know, in some settings, Chris is more privileged than I
do. In some Chris and I and Elliot,
I have more than you do Jolie and vice versa.
But but really, the point I made about this feeling of
disenfranchisement, the work we do with marginalized boys, many
of them have no agency over their own lives.
You know, they grow in a household where all of the
significant adults in their lives are women because maybe
their dad's not at home. They've got a mum, they've got a
nan and an aunt or most of the teachers at school are women.
You know, all of the powerful people.
They might have a social worker often as a woman, you know, so
they don't. And, and they feel like none of
you understand me, but you're telling me how I need to be and
what kind of person I should be. You know, none of you care about
my experience. And actually when I look at the
world, everything seems quite adversarial.
So what camp am I in if we don't make the idea of, you know, you
can be a man, you can be heterosexual, you can be
traditional in your views, but you can still be empathetic, you
can still believe that women shouldn't be controlled by men,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It's a complicated, nuanced
conversation and we have to createspace for everyone to be
able to have that. PSHE frameworks don't work at
the moment for that. That's powerful.
Owen. I think so much of what you said
is so true and resonates deeply with me as well.
Couple of things. You mentioned young boys having
a staunch idea about masculinity without maybe the experience.
And I've definitely seen that in my work and what you were saying
there in regards to power and class and race and how that
intersects with this conversation.
And I want to kind of ask you about.
Your work, you work in London quite a lot with lots of
different communities. With a lot of the issues that
you're seeing boys speaking about, how do you think that
differs based on their race, their class and other
characteristics as well? Look, there's a sliding scale,
right? There are many in.
There's a concept of intersectionality.
I'm sure everyone here is familiar with it.
It's developed. I think it's Anne Phoenix.
Come up with this idea to talk about all the different factors
and different contributing issues that create the
environment that makes your world your world.
And so for boys and young men, this, these intersecting factors
of race, culture, poverty, socioeconomic class, access to
opportunities all contribute towards you a being more or less
likely to, as Chris kind of referred to at the beginning,
achieve educationally, academically, which opens up
your opportunities in life moving forward.
And so that measure, that metric for men of achieving providing
still exists, right? And if you don't have clear
pathways because you are less likely, you have less
opportunity. You're a working class white
British guy from, you know, a struggling sink estate on either
in a city or on one of the kind of dormitory on the outskirts of
London, right? There's not a lot of opportunity
for you there. There's not a lot of work,
secure work. You know, you've not achieved
educationally in school academically the way you would
want to. You don't have access to lots of
social networks that can get you into work and that can develop
you. So you're going to kind of make
the most of the opportunities that are laid before you and to
keep yourself safe from people in your own area.
From this idea that if you're different, you're an outlier and
you're a problem, you might adopt ideas and present in ways
that are not actually true to yourself or true to your
beliefs. Because it's actually can be
risky to break out of what the traditional mold should be, you
know, and that is compounded sometimes by race and by
culture. I can't see a pathway for many
of the young men we work with when we're saying stay in
school, get your education, get a job.
Why I can never afford a home in London.
How am I as a single man on the kind of jobs I can get?
Look where I live, houses are like nearly £1,000,000 for
two-bedroom flat. What's, what am I going to do?
So there's a degree of hopelessness where there's this
sense that they sometimes think I'm going to give up, you know,
people not interested in my voice, people like me.
And I've heard this from a boy in school as well, which was
really disheartening. People like me, we hustle, we do
Rd. that's what we do. And it was really disheartening
for me. It was grown, you know, in a,
what would be deemed a black a part of London in the city,
London, one of the centres of black culture.
I'm, I'm the South London Lamb Bridge, the boy originally.
So, you know, we had riots to protest and to gather
collectively to try and bring about change doesn't exist in
the same way. They feel disempowered.
So they give up a little bit and fall to this lowest common
denominator. So money, class, race, they're
all problematic. You, if you've got a positive
kind of support network around any of those things, you can
break that ceiling. You can be the outlier that we
spoke about earlier on that we want everyone to be, but we have
to understand and accept that that is unusual.
That's some, you know, it's less likely statistically that you're
going to go and achieve a, a career in the city or go on to
become a great academic or an engineer.
If you come from a sink estate and go to a state school and in
in a London, if you're black, if you've got a name, a surname
that sounds funny when you write it down on on a job application
to an employer, you're less likely to even get an interview.
That's still statistically true. So all of those factors start to
wear boys down. They become very aware of this
very early on in their lives, and it can be problematic.
You know, the last thing I said for our gift to Chris is is, you
know, we've got a lot of love for boys in our society when
they're small and cute. And they get to this point.
Jolie, I don't know how old your son he was referring to earlier
on. But given the questions he was
asking, they get to this point where, you know, they start to
emit smells. They become a bit surly.
They wear their hood. They get a bit of bum fluff on
their chin. And you walk down them past the
road, and they probably saw the lovely little boys they were the
year previously. But they started to affect this
outward persona to kind of protect themselves from its
insecurity and from the real risk that other boys and young
men or authorities that might be the police, it might be your
head teacher at school are going to notice you and take advantage
of you. So the only way I know to shield
myself from that is to present like I know everything, that I'm
confident and no one can mess with me.
I want to, I mean, again, Owen, Owen is the most eloquent person
you can ever meet, right? And, and he combines, he
combines strong and dealt with strong statistical background.
I just want to pick up though, on he really highlights this
challenge of older men speaking to younger boys, older men who
may have the status that is the result of educational
attainment, job satisfaction, career development, house
potentially, family potentially. And then trying to communicate
to boys that, oh, you don't need to fulfill the dominant norms of
masculinity. Oh, it's fine for you to say
you've already got all this stuff, right.
So how it's it's a real challenge.
How do you say to somebody status is not as important as
you think it is from people who already have it?
This is a it's, it's a paradox. The other thing I wanted to
break pick up on is also that there is a really unseen
privilege in this world, which is coming from a loving, caring
family that doesn't that they can sit inside any type of norm
around socio economic background.
You could have loving parents who are not very well off, who
are not necessarily very educated.
But if they listen to you in a non judgmental way, if they're
curious about your world, if they're offering guidance as
opposed to do this, if they're saying things like it's very
difficult for me to advise or guide you in in this world
because that's your world. I come from a different world.
So let's think about what this looks like together.
This is a massive privilege if you want to use that term that
is unseen because we don't. We don't cut intersectionality
like that. Definitely agree.
I want to go to to talking about the engaging boys and how you do
this. I remember very many years ago,
maybe I was 25, I was invited to speak to a group of year six
boys in Edmonton, quite a rough school in Edmonton and they were
going off to year 7. And so I was brought in to speak
to these boys and they put three classes together.
There's about 60 kids and I remember walking in and they
just sat there and just stared at me, were like impressed me.
And all they asked at the beginning was What Car do you
drive and what football team do you support?
And I had to work so hard to kind of get their respect.
So they listen to me And when I sold some stories and let them
know that I'm not from their area, but I have a similar, had
a similar life to them, they kind of loosened up a little bit
and two hours later we got somewhere.
But it was tricky. And now that work I do with
adults is so much easier because adults generally will give you
that respect to the beginning. So talk to us about tools and
techniques. There's so many parents that
listen, so many practitioners that listen to this podcast.
They'll be really interested to hear about how you open up kind
of productive conversations about masculinity with young
boys. Well, I, I'm going to, I'm going
to use the platform you've given me, Elliot, to blow my own
trumpet for a bit and to unveil my, my super talent.
So I, I, I've been a body popper for 25 years.
I've competed, I've traveled, I've done shows and, and I want
to be very clear, this is not general advice, okay?
This is not. This is not.
I'm just highlighting. Case studies.
Yeah, it's I'm highlighting a tool and I go to schools and I
do with a with a colleague of mine and we do a show, an
assembly and we very clear to the school, do not introduce us.
We're standing there, put the music on, we dance, right.
So that's that captivates them. After that, I tell them about a
tricky moment in my life when my dad, when I was younger, he had
a life changing stroke. And I talk about how life was
very fuzzy for a couple of weeks.
And then the things I did to move away from that and to build
more safety and security. And how it never, it didn't
change the actual circumstances I was facing with my brother and
my mom, but it gave us more resource to, to, to sort of
carry on. And then we talk about the five
ways to well-being. And we do some, some, some,
some, some pre work around support in the school, in their
local community. And we signpost towards safe and
secure online spaces. So this is a very quick, punchy
way of grabbing attention, using that attention for discussions
around vulnerability. Management conflicts.
The king part. Yeah, because, well, you know,
he could. Flick arises all of the time
where it could be a home about getting up and getting to school
in the morning. Once you get to school, the
teacher asked you about lateness.
You've got a peer, you know you've got a group of girls that
are taking the Mickey out of the trainers you're wearing that
day. How do you manage that conflict?
How do you manage that feeling of insecurity and being got AT
and all the rest of it? How do you build resilience?
So resilience doesn't mean I'm just going to put up with it.
This is my station, I'm staying here.
We're saying be aspiration. We want to help build this idea
that I can achieve more but put in a scientific approach to
build critical thinkers so that they work out.
How do I get from here to there whilst maintaining my
well-being? We participated with the Open
University and this piece of research around male role models
because a lot, there's a lot of talk in the moment about how
important male role models are to boys and young men and we
need to have positive people. And I think to Chris's point
earlier on, sometimes young men find it hard to engage with role
models because they're already successful.
So I tell the famous people or sports people, whilst it's great
to see yourself represented in imagery and in pop or in
positions of power, what I say is is that we've got enough
footballers and boxers and singers and rappers, there's
nothing wrong with that, That's great.
But I say to the young people, do you not notice they're over
represented in those areas of work?
Why is that? And I look into the history of
minstrelism and black people performing for people whatever
to empower them. Not to say that you need to be
radical and empty the society, but tell me where you see the
next black Boeing pilot or lawyer or High Court Circuit
Judge or we're starting to see that movement in society now.
So you can draw on different models, but the point is, boys
don't need a man who looks like them to tell them how to be a
man. It's useful.
It's one of the tools that helps them in their lives.
But what we seem to say to mothers who don't have a
positive male role model in the household is that you could
still raise a great boy who's empathetic, who's understanding,
who is going to be happy within himself.
If you present that parenting model that Chris kind of really
loosely outlined there of being a caring, understanding,
engaged, attached and involved parent.
The challenges around kind of engaging boys is just around
listening to them, showing them you care about their situation
and the circumstances they're in, giving them the space and
the time to get. We used to have in one of our
models, it's called venturing, which is a really cheap
bastardization of the word mentoring with time to vent
first. You can't mentor someone who's
not had a chance to express themselves and say what my issue
is. The boy said, look, if I'm in
crisis, I don't care. I don't care if it's someone
who's posh. I don't care if it's someone
who's poor, black, white man, woman.
If they care about me and I know they're on my side, that's
enough. If you're going to go and do it
a generic engagement piece, you might, it might be quicker to
break down barriers if you use a device like Chris does.
You know, there's two dudes they've started dancing these
middle-aged men. Oh, they look, quite frankly,
I'll talk to these guys, you know, But if you don't have
those skill sets up your sleeve, and I left that skill set
probably when you started more than 25 years ago, it's called
blind. But I'm not willing to go and
dance in front of an assembly hall full of teenagers anymore.
Those days are done for me. So I have to use conversation.
I have to show an interest in them.
They're human beings like everybody else.
And you will find with men and boys, even though we are kind of
conditioned to go Oh yeah, I don't really chat as your model
of work, Elliot free music, football, fatherhood kind of
shows. If you find the right subjects
to get men started talking about, we've become quite
effusive. Powerful Well I've just put a
body pop in class starts tomorrow 1212 weeks intensive
course. So Chris, I'm available, I'm
available. We've spoken quite a lot about
the conversation that is happening about men and boys.
We're having the conversation which is really, really good and
there is so much conversation about masculinity and the need
for it to be redefined. Do you have a a model 7
characteristics that contribute to positive masculinity?
Talk to us a little bit about what those 7 characteristics are
and also what you think can be achieved through that model as
well. So a recap of what the seven
characteristics are and we use a mnemonic device of memory aid
called the nice triple Rs. N for non violence, I for
inclusiveness, C for curiosity, E for empathy.
And then the triple Rs are resourcefulness, resilience and
reflectiveness. What makes us unique and why
I've been here so long and why I love this organization is if we
support kind of boys, I mean, at these transitional key moments
in their lives, these these teachable moments where that's
becoming a dad, leaving, moving from primary to secondary
school, exploring your community, breaking, trying to
make that natural breakaway from your parents.
There's this moment where they're more susceptible, more
open to the accepting help or seeking help, right?
We have to utilize that moment. And so we've developed loads of
different types of programs over the years to engage boys and men
at different, wherever you may find them in their lives.
You know, we might have been doing a program that looked kind
of the racial dynamics down in the state in southeast London
near Thamesmead, Eltham, where there's been a long history, if
you know Stephen Lawrence and Rowland Adams, of racial
disharmony and violence, right? And we were going down there to
do a project with young white men who had been subject to
racially aggravated kind of criminal charges.
And our our view was, you know, you don't just exclude these
guys or leave it for the judicial system to work with
them. Someone needs to sit down with
these guys and explore why they found themselves in this
situation. What really are your beliefs?
Why do you feel what these differences actually are?
There opportunities for us to bring young men from different
communities together to show them what they've got in common,
to build bridges between communities rather than just sit
back and go. I don't like the views he
espoused, so he shall forever be blotted from my landscape.
No, you know, we, we have to have this kind of communal
approach to want to solve problems.
We're saying whatever kind of man you want to be, look at the
context of where you live, the people you interact with, the
the agreed kind of norms across society which end up as being
laws and rules and social taboos and try and find a way to fit
within them. Because you're never happier.
As you said at the beginning earlier more fulfilled life.
If you can put yourself in the position of other people rather
than just feel sorry for them, you might change some of your
behaviours because you can imagine what it'd be like for
that to happen to you or someone you love.
If you just feel sympathy, you can just dismiss people, go, Oh
yeah, it's terrible that happened to them, but hey,
that's life. If you empathize with them, you
go, oh God, that should never happen again to someone else.
What can we do to stop that happening?
And I'm definitely not going to contribute to doing that to
anyone else because I would hate for someone to do that to me,
you know? So I think you're, you're
helping develop these soft skills, these human skills that
are not being developed as part of normal society.
Family frameworks have changed. You know, you don't have your
aunt and your cousin and everyone living on the same St.
as you're in the same little neighborhood now.
We're all very remote and it changes the social contract and
the dynamic between us all, so we're having to step in.
We're choosing to step in and create these models and create
these frameworks to help boys. Can I just draw out 11 quick
point about the, the, the, the seven characteristics?
Because I think when you create frameworks, it's, it's really
important to bring that into the self.
And when I deliver the Future Dads course, which is an A1 day
antenatal course delivered in certain hospitals in, in London,
where we're upskilling fathers to be around sort of practical
care and stuff, but we also do a lot of discussion work around
what type of father they want to be.
When I'm talking about the characteristics, the, the most
powerful framing I've found thus far is to say to them, imagine
how you would feel as their father if they exemplified these
things. And then that gets them to
really think, oh wow, those 7 characteristics, they're,
they're really powerful. Because if I could, if, if, if
my child exemplifies these types of traits, then that means, you
know, myself, my partner, my child, all in, in, in a family
environment have done really, really well.
So I just want to share that framing of those characteristics
so that that people can imbibe that.
Amazing insight. I could talk to you all day,
literally. We have to get you back at some
point because there's so much information and insights you've
got to share. I want to kind of close off by
going to some solutions and actions and it's a two-part
question really. The first part is around what do
you think can be done at a high government policy level, process
systems change level to positively impact the
conversation we've had around men, boys, gender equality more
widely. And secondly, around for
parents, parents who are maybe concerned about their their boys
behaviour or just understand the world we're living in and want
to equip them with the knowledge and tools to be healthy boys who
grow into into healthy men. So your advice?
First, let's start with the government level.
Is there anything that you think could be done?
We spoke about the paternity leave.
What else do you think our Labour government now should be
looking at doing? Well, I, I, I think that it the,
in the area of father's fatherhood, that's an area where
there, there might genuinely be a rights issue there because
there are gaps in, in policy that disadvantage fathers who
want to be engaged to support their partners for, for their,
for their partners, for their, for their health, their mental
health advancing in their career, but also for their
fathers and their mental health and their longevity and, and,
and to model of fatherhood going forward.
So I mentioned paternity leave. There is also a potential gap in
the, the Equality Act of 2010 where whether it's framed as
fathers or whether it's framed as, as carers, that's for, for
discussion, but that there isn't a representation of fatherhood
within the Equality Act of 2010 mental health screening.
Now, of course, any individual father can exercise their agency
to go and find out what about mental health support in their
area. But as, as a de facto right,
that doesn't exist for fathers. It's only through the prism of
the mental health status of their, their partners.
And we, we see that as, as an area for discussion.
And, and, and so these, these types of areas then don't allow
for this distillation of, of new norms of masculinity going
forward other areas. School exclusion is a particular
area looking at school attainment so that we can look
at how to support boys to to, to move away from behaviors that
will put them at risk of exclusion.
Because I don't want to sit here and say, you know, that there
aren't situations where the behaviors of boys at least
highlight an area to be addressed because that would be
a lie, right? But how we look at them, how we
address them, that needs to be looked at the system.
And then also, so thinking about this ongoing deficit in terms of
school attainment and educational attainment and be
reflective on our system to understand what is going on.
We hear Richard Reeves talk about this a lot in in American
context. We need to be taught having that
same conversation in Auk context.
Those are two areas I wanted to highlight.
I think to follow that up, I think, you know, we've been
involved in the APPG for fatherhood for a long time and
have covered many issues there. You know, there are issues
attached to the way family law is set up or private law is set
up in this country which both hampers and harms women and men.
You know, this expectation that there is one primary carer and
that's where support goes. In Scandinavia they've got a
different assumption around parenting rights and even rights
again is that the Health 50 language responsibilities I
think is a much healthy way to frame it.
And children's rights as adults, we've got responsibilities to
children to help enforce their rights.
There are parental rights you have, there's a, but there's
parental responsibility. So let's enable people to fulfil
their responsibility, you know, around men and boys and between
our fathers. What there is, is a lack of
data. Elliot, you know, people are not
capturing data about men in their health, their well-being
and in their status as fathers. No, you know, there is no
uniform or statutory capturing. The only services that I'm aware
of, the statutorily capture data are about fathers of the prison
service. So every man who goes to prison,
they ask you if you're a dad to sort out your own visiting
arrangements or whatever social pestoral support they have to
give in. And then if you don't come to,
if you go through a relationship breakdown, you don't come to
agree with yourself, then the Child Maintenance Service will
get involved in your life. And again, I was at the launch
of a report into changing that system, the Gingerbread funded
through Jazz Roundtree. We were on the Advisory Board
supported by a lot of parliamentarians.
But no one's happy with that system.
The women who are not not getting the support they for
their children that they deserve are unhappy.
The non resident parents, often men are not happy either with
the system and are saying, look, it's not clear.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be providing.
I want to provide. And for some men that we
support, who maybe are not the most socio economically
affluent, people were saying, look, I'm working really hard,
I'm giving everything I can afford.
But my children there, there seems to be no correlation.
The government only cares about me if I'm doing stuff wrong or
if I'm not paying, if I don't get to see my children or if
I've got concerns or if I need help, no one cares, right?
So I think we need to change that social dynamic and that
construct. I think whatever we do at our
high level governmentally is about holding people accountable
for what we want to actually deliver in terms of support.
So I hope with the current stripe of government they look
at family hubs over the long term, they look at models of
support for people right from antenatal all the way through
it. So this idea is research shows
that the the earlier men form an attachment to their children,
the more likely they are to stay positively involved throughout
the life course, the more likely they are to be able to negotiate
with the mothers of their children in a relationship or
not about what's best for their children moving forward.
And that's what we all want to see.
But more than law, we need guidance, We need to do
training. We need to empower people to
understand the positive impacts of engaging men for their
children, for women, for the economy, for everyone.
You know, the deficit costs of managing the fallout of
unsupported, uneducated, unhappy men is huge to society.
We need to take a prevention rather than a cure approach to
the issues that are well documented and out there.
You know, even in London, you know, knife crime and violence,
Scotland have taken a public health approach.
Why aren't we doing that in in England?
You know, is there something about the narrative the press
like to promote that we see youth violence as a very ethnic
issue, whereas in Scotland the demographics are different so
that that that isn't part of the narrative.
We know this is endemic working class Scottish white boys,
right? We don't want it to happen.
We want stop it. Let's look it as a public health
issue. I feel as though, and I don't
have proof of this. So this is my views and my views
only, but for a long time that he just elbows today meeting
with the King talking about knife crime and rounding off the
end of kitchen knife look whilst that may help right and I I'm
all for anything that helps. Why aren't we putting in, you
know, approaches that realize we're meet not meeting the needs
of boys and young men in society?
School can't do it by itself. Parents can't do it by itself.
Why haven't we got a youth sector anymore?
Yeah. And what would you say to what
would you say to those parents? So the parents listening now who
have been probably fascinated by this conversation, hopefully
feeling inspired, positive, but also very aware of the the
issues. What would your tipping advice
be for parents to nurture their their boys in a healthy way?
I mean, it's, it's very difficult, obviously, to speak
to any individual parent. I, I mean, so, so the, the, the,
the, the, the stuff I'm going to talk about is quite generic.
And, and I don't want anybody to be offended by the idea that I'm
not hearing their particular story.
I can't hear all their stories. But I come back to those
characteristics and the idea of inspiring I'm, I'm a father, I
have two, two daughters and my sensitivities as they're growing
up are increasing. But at at times I have to hold
back and try to take a more detached or kind of 35,000 feet
type of view in terms of the risks to them.
And they, they, they, they have certain characteristics around
them that make them more protected than others.
But that doesn't stop them having sort of psychosocial
challenges. But again, being curious, being
resourceful, supporting them to develop all these skills for
themselves and listening from a non judgmental point of view,
sharing my own vulnerabilities appropriately, not sort of
turning around and saying, oh, you think you've got problems.
Listen to me monster.com style. It's not about that.
It's about very much sort of saying, well, I like I said
earlier, I, I don't know your world.
I'm curious about your world. Tell me about your world.
And also going from a, a more promotion perspective, tell me,
tell me about the music that you're listening to, because I
can be very informative. Tell, tell me, tell me what,
what, what platforms you're on? What are you hearing?
What did what's interesting you so that this is all very generic
type of investigate yourself and your immediate response.
Take the moment to breathe in and out, because it can be very
easy to come out with a triggered response.
But take that moment to to to to to sit in your chair, feel
yourself in your chair and then exercise curiosity and non
judgmentalism. Summarize what you've heard.
Make sure that you're actually hearing what they have said
because the act of the act of listening is maybe one step
removed from actually sort of or the act of hearing is that step
removed from listening and understanding, you know, reflect
that back to them. The only things I would add from
a parenting point of view would be just be unafraid to be
vulnerable as a parent. With your peers, with your
friends, with your children themselves.
Let them know you know, if their behaviour upsets you or
disappoints you, You know it's not we've got to be a negative
shower. But you have to put all those
supportive things that Chris described in place, that
curiosity, that interest in their lives.
But what children want from as small as they can be right
through to when they leave you eventually, hopefully one day
are some boundaries. You know they need the framework
for society now they'll back against it.
That's what they're supposed to do.
They'll challenge you at every turn.
That's what they're supposed to do, right?
But you will find, as I found with my oldest child is not a
boy, but they eventually start to give back to you what you put
into them. Or just as I'm sure you found,
you sound like your dad sometimes when you're talking to
kids or Jolie, You sound like your mum sometimes when you're
talking to your kids. Go Oh my God, this is I heard
this 20 years ago. Why?
You know, I found myself telling my kids, these are the happiest
years of your life. School's the best years of your
life. You should enjoy it.
You know, when I when they told me that when I was a little boy.
Mum, I'm not going to swear at you, but please do 1 you know,
it's a nightmare. You don't know what it's like
pressure every day. So look, but go obscure
yourself. I I'm making the case to someone
who supports parents. Listen, why isn't every parent
in this country offered some parental education?
You know, you wouldn't go and try and fix your car without a
course in in basic car maintenance or a manual.
Where's the manual on parenthood?
There isn't one. In fact there are several.
There are loads of different models for parenting.
Maybe come and do a course, you know, find out about.
You can do it online. There are different models
depending on your cultural context and how old your
children are and particularly issues your children might be
facing. You know, talk to other parents
at the school gates, be part of a community, understand what's
not only going on for your children, but their peer group.
You know, there, there's this power.
There's nothing more than that your adolescent kids hate than
knowing that you talk to the other kids parents and to your
friends. Damn it.
This has been amazing.
Seriously, Like we could do another podcast.
There's enough to say you've been incredible.
We the world needs more Chris and Owens I think.
I think the world needs more Chris and Owens.
Like 1 is enough one. Is enough.
I'm sure we've. Yeah, I know we can like, you
know, duplicate you both. I'm sure we'll make it happen.
But now this has been incredible.
Seriously, so much insight. And I think for us to speak to
people who are doing the work, you know, you guys are actually
on the ground, You're speaking to many employees all the time.
And so the insight that you will have is so invaluable.
And so I just want to say thank you first and foremost for
taking time out in your busy schedules to sit down to share
your your knowledge and insights and stories of us.
Thank you so much. We have so much love and respect
for the work you do and we're always here.
So thank you, Chris, thank you, Owen, Thank you so much.
Thank. You.
Thank you.