Norman Rockwell Babysitter 1927

This is a text on a theme I have long been pondering. It is a difficult but important theme. It tells us something essential about societal development and the modern man. It is a good text. I found it by chance on YouTube, though little is by chance there. The algorithms find what they think you will like. And sometimes they actually find gold.

It is a text I wish I had written myself. I have only translated and adapted it. If you want it read aloud in English in the original version, you can find it here. There is an element of nostalgia in it, but far more important is the realism and the observation that something essential has been lost in the generation of men we are producing now. 

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1958: A stream behind a house in rural Kentucky. It is two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in June. An 11-year-old boy sits cross-legged on a flat stone with a pocket knife open in his lap. He is peeling the bark off a green willow branch. His shirt is stained. His shoes are wet. No one knows exactly where he is. His mother is in the kitchen far away making dinner. His father is in the garage changing the oil on the Plymouth. Neither of them has seen the boy for three hours. Neither of them is worried. Neither of them will worry about where he is until the dinner bell rings at five o’clock.

The boy is fine. He is more than fine. He is doing the most important thing he can do in his childhood: being unsupervised in the world with a knife, a stick and a problem, and the challenge of solving the problem on his own. That afternoon, without a single adult nearby, does more to build the man he will become than all the organised activities in his entire school life.

These are 15 skills that every American (and Norwegian) boy learned before he turned 12 in the better part of the last century. None of them were learned at school. None of them required a coach. Most 12-year-old American (and Norwegian) boys today cannot perform a single one of them. This is important, not for nostalgic reasons, but because it raises questions about the kind of men we are producing today.

15. Knots: A boy in his early teens in 1958 could tie six knots from memory. He had learned them from his father, scout leader or grandfather one summer evening on the veranda with two pieces of rope. He could tie them in the dark. He could tie them with one hand. He could tie them behind his back. A knot is the oldest tool man has – older than the wheel, older than fire. And the boy who could tie six knots could secure a load on a lorry, lash together a raft, secure a tarpaulin in a storm, hang a swing and pull a man up from the water.

The modern boy can do none of these things. He can charge a mobile phone. He can navigate an app. But he cannot tie a knot that will hold his own weight. And the day comes for every man – the day when a knot is the difference between a small problem and a catastrophe. The modern boy has turned 40 and has to call roadside assistance because he does not know how to secure the Christmas tree to the roof of his Subaru.

14. The Edge: A boy of the 1958 generation had a pocket knife or a sheath knife from when he was 8 or 9 years old. And one Saturday morning at the kitchen table his father had taught him how to sharpen a knife blade. With a whetstone, a little oil or water, the correct angle, 20 strokes on one side, 20 on the other. He learned to test the edge by drawing the knife against the hairs on the top of his forearm. If it shaved the hairs, the edge was sharp. He understood that a blunt knife is more dangerous than a sharp one, because a blunt knife slips, and a sharp knife cuts where it should.

Most men in their 40s today have never sharpened a knife in their entire lives. They have a drawer full of kitchen knives that are too blunt to cut a tomato properly. Their pocket knives, if they have one, are factory-sharpened and quickly go blunt. The most ancient maintenance skill a man has ever practised – putting an edge on a whetstone – has been lost in the space of two generations. There is something profoundly disturbing about that. A man who cannot sharpen an edge has outsourced his own preparedness for hard times.

13. Fire: Tinder, kindling, small sticks, medium sticks, large sticks – laid in sequence as a pyramid or a log cabin, with the tinder loose enough to breathe and tight enough to catch. Only one match. If the first match did not light the fire, you did not get a new one. You went back, rebuilt the fire and tried again with one match. He had learned it camping in the backyard at his grandfather’s farm. He had practised it until it was an automatic skill.

A boy who can build a fire understands the physical structure of energy. He understands why some things burn and others do not, what oxygen does to a flame, why you start small and build big, and why you do not add too much too soon.

This is not just camping skills. These are metaphors for everything productive a man will ever do in his life. Build a business, build a marriage, build a career. The same structure as with fire; tinder, kindling, small sticks, large sticks, patience. The 1958 boy learned it as a 9-year-old with a handful of birch bark and a match. The modern boy has no equivalent lesson.

12. Direction: A 1958 boy could unfold a map, find his home town, work out where he was going, trace the route with his finger and tell you which roads were best. He could tell north from south by observing the position of the sun. He knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west. He could be dropped off anywhere within a 15-mile radius of his home and still find his way back. He had a sense of place. In his mind’s eye he had a map of his own surroundings, his own county and his own country. He knew where he was in the larger world.

To an increasing extent, this is something the modern boy and the modern man no longer masters. He has Google Maps. And when Google Maps fails, he is lost in his own town. We have outsourced the ancient cognitive task of man – knowing where you are – to a large international company that tracks every step we take. The difference is greater than it sounds.

11. Fish: Hook, weight, line and a worm. A willow pole. If he was really lucky, he had a bought rod with an ABU reel. He sat on the bank for two hours, caught a small fish and took it home. He cleaned it himself, scraped the scales off on a newspaper, removed the innards, cut off the head, dipped it in egg and flour and fried it in a cast-iron pan on the stove.

As a 10-year-old he had knowledge of the entire food chain. From the worm to the hook, to the fish to the knife to the frying pan to the plate and to his own mouth. He understood, in his hands and in his stomach, where food actually came from.

The modern boy believes that food comes from delivery apps. In his entire life he has never eaten an animal whose face he had seen before he ate it. That sounds extreme. It is extreme. It is the most disconnected man has ever been from the food chain. And it contributes to producing a strange, hollow, abstract type of person who has never quite been in contact with the real world.

Notice that of the five skills we have talked about so far, every single one concerns skills that connected the boy to the physical world. Knots to rope, edge to steel, fire to wood, map to ground, hook to fish. He was trained to live in reality, without anyone calling it training. The modern boy is trained all day to live in a screen. The price of this exchange is paid in the man he becomes as an adult.

10. The Bicycle: A 1958 boy got his first bicycle around the age of seven. A DBS or a Swithun from Øgland. None of these brands exist any more. They were exported along with the jobs from Sandnes and Stavanger to China. As a 10-year-old he could cycle anywhere within an 8 km radius of the house, alone or with friends, without a helmet, without a mobile phone, and without an adult knowing exactly where he was at any given time.

He had unsupervised mobility. He could cycle to the swimming spot, to the sweet shop, to his friends’ houses, to the library, to the stream, to the pier and find out what was going on. If he got a puncture 3 km from home, he fixed it or pushed it home and fixed it there. If he got lost he asked an adult. If he got into a fight he sorted it out himself. If he got hurt he came home with grazed knees and one more experience richer.

The modern American (and Norwegian) child can, according to law and new custom, no longer do this in many places. They can barely walk to school alone before they are 14. They cannot be unsupervised in a public park. The child welfare regime, well-intentioned but absolute, has banned the childhood that the 1958 boy lived as a matter of course. And the price of that loss is a generation of boys who reach the age of 18 without having solved a problem more than three feet away with a mobile phone and Google.

9. The Wheel: Remove the tyre from the rim. Find the puncture by listening for hissing or put the tube in a bucket of water and see where the bubbles come from. Patch the tube with a patch kit and glue. Put the tyre back on and pump it up. The same with the car: jack it up, loosen the nuts, change to the spare wheel, lower the jack, tighten the nuts in a star pattern and put the bad tyre in the boot. A 1958 boy could fix a bicycle puncture as a 10-year-old and a car tyre as a 14-year-old, both alone in under 20 minutes.

The modern man, adult, highly educated, in a permanent job, sits on the roadside in the rain and waits two hours for roadside assistance because he has never changed a tyre in his entire life. The skill takes 20 minutes to learn. He has never been taught it because no one assumed he needed to know it, and the assumption produced a man who is totally dependent on others.

There is a deep dignity in the simple mechanical competence of changing your own tyre when you are alone in the rain. The modern man has been deprived of that dignity by his own father, who was deprived of it by his father somewhere around 1990.

8. The Fight: A boy in 1958 got into three or four real fist fights between the ages of 8 and 14. Schoolyard fights, neighbourhood fights, sibling fights. They were not catastrophes. They were the way boys have always learned, since the beginning of recorded time, what it feels like to hit someone and what it feels like to be hit.

After the fight they usually made up, or they did after a while. Either way, something had been processed in their nervous system that no other experience could process. They learned that they could survive a fight. They learned that they could hurt someone if they chose to. They learned the difference between anger and violence on the body.

The modern boy in many places will go through his entire childhood without ever getting into a physical fight. School policy and social workers forbid it. The parents forbid it. The result is a young adult man who does not have a calibrated relationship to physical aggression and therefore either avoids all conflict like death itself, or escalates to verbal conflict that can end catastrophically with stabbing and murder, because he has never tested it physically.

We removed schoolyard fights to protect boys. Instead we produced boys who have no idea what they are capable of in both directions, both unable to defend themselves and unable to understand what fatal consequences physical violence can lead to.

7. The First Job: In 1958 a boy mowed the lawn for Mr Andersen for two kroner. He shovelled snow in the driveway for the Torjussen family for one krone. He delivered newspapers as a 12-year-old. He packed goods at the grocer’s as a 14-year-old. He had earned his own money as a 10-year-old, real cash, his own that he could keep and spend as he wished, and at the same time he had learned the deepest lesson about work: that an hour of his time was worth something to others, and that he could trade it for other things.

The modern American boy cannot work in most states before he is 14. Most do not work before they are 17 or 18. Many do not work at all before they finish high school. (And some remain in their parents’ basement playing video games until they eventually end up on NAV.)

They reach adulthood without ever having traded an hour of their own time for money, and therefore have no calibration for what work is worth, what money is for, or how the two are connected. By delivering newspapers in 1958 he learned in three months what a long university education cannot teach the modern young man. Time and money are interchangeable, and much of your dignity comes from managing this exchange.

6. Boredom: A boy in 1958 could sit on the veranda on a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do for four hours and need nothing at all. He would watch ants. He would carve a stick. He would lie on his back and stare at the clouds. He would think about a girl he liked, or a problem at school, or what he wanted to be when he grew up. He could be alone with his own mind for long periods. We have destroyed this skill.

The modern boy cannot be alone with himself for 10 minutes without a screen. The phone is in his hand as a nine-year-old. He has never in his entire life been bored long enough to meet himself. And boredom is where character is built – in the slow inner hours where a boy finds out who he is, what he wants, what he believes in.

We have filled every single one of these hours with ready-made content. The result is a 21-year-old young man who has never had a single original thought because he has never had a single quiet hour in which to have one.

The greatest thing you can do for a boy is to take away his phone and give him an afternoon with nothing to do. The 1958 boy got that afternoon as standard. The modern boy must be forcibly rescued back to it.

5. The Voice: A 1958 boy had memorised at least one poem and preferably several hymn verses by the time he was 12. He had stood in front of the class and recited it from memory, loudly and sometimes with feeling. The teacher had drilled him for weeks. He learned what no silent reading can teach a boy: that language has a sound, a rhythm, a weight. And that the human voice in itself is an instrument.

The modern boy memorises and recites nothing. Schools stopped requiring recitation in the early 1970s. And so an entire generation of American (and Norwegian) boys cannot recite a single poem, a single Bible verse, a single Shakespeare line or Churchill quote. Their inner lives have no known soundtracks.

The 1958 boy could be alone in a trench, in a hospital room, in a prison cell and have Tennyson and the hymns going through his head to keep him company. That is real wealth. It cannot be bought. It can only be memorised as a 12-year-old.

4. Manners: A boy in 1958 addressed every adult as “sir” or “ma’am”. Mr Henderson, not Bob. Mrs Murphy, not Linda. He answered with “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am”. He stood up when adults entered the room. He took off his cap indoors. He shook hands when introduced. He looked the adult in the eye.

This was not submission. It was the opposite. It was a boy who publicly showed that he understood the basic hierarchy of human respect: that age, experience and responsibility were worth more than youth and lack of experience. And that he was willing to perform the small daily rituals that acknowledged that hierarchy.

The modern boy calls everyone by their first name, slumps down on the sofa when introduced, mumbles, looks at his phone instead of the adult’s face. He has not been taught that respect for elders is something he gives, not something one receives. And the price of that loss is enormous.

A boy who cannot show respect for an older man cannot learn from an older man. And a boy who cannot learn from older men ends up being raised by his own age group – that is, by other children. That says something about what is wrong with the young American (and Norwegian) man of today.

3. Disappointment: A boy in 1958 scored an own goal in the match, was dropped from the team, was rejected by the girl, lost the fight and got an F on the test. He cried sometimes, he was sad, he was disappointed. And then, the next day, he moved on. He had been taught by everyone in his life that disappointment is not a catastrophe, that losing something is normal and manageable, that the world owes him nothing, that he should be grateful for what he has and strive for what he does not have.

The modern boy is increasingly unable to take a no for a no. Every disappointment is a trauma, every loss is an injustice, every rejection is a wound that requires processing. And we have taught him this. We have rebuilt the entire emotional architecture of childhood to protect him from disappointment, with the result that he is crushed by it every time it comes. The 1958 boy was robust as a 12-year-old. The modern boy is fragile as a 26-year-old. Both were raised deliberately. We have simply swapped the means. The result is very different.

2. Truth: When a 1958 boy had done something wrong – broken a window, lied about where he had been, stolen sweets from the shop – he was eventually brought before his father. And the father usually neither shouted nor screamed at him. He just asked questions. And the boy, looking down at the floor, would usually look up and tell the truth. Apologise, take the punishment and move on. The hardest skill in his entire childhood was this: to look the man who was his role model in the eye and tell him that he had disappointed him.

Most adult men’s moral failings are simply the adult version of a boy who never learned to do this. A man who cannot admit a mistake to his wife, his boss or his children is a man who never had to admit a mistake to his father.

The modern boy is often raised in a home where there is no clear authority figure to confess to, where the father is absent. And therefore the boy never builds the ability for moral confession. It atrophies. And as a 35-year-old he is the type of man who lies, deflects, gaslights and projects because the alternative – looking another adult in the eye and saying “I was wrong” – has been underdeveloped since he was nine. The 1958 boy built that skill every time he broke a window.

1. The skill that all the other 14 build towards. As a 12-year-old a boy in 1958 could be left alone, properly alone, with younger siblings in the house for a whole evening, on a neighbour’s farm for a week in the summer, on a fishing trip with his grandfather, at a relative’s funeral in another part of the country. And the adults in his life would not worry because they had built him to be trustworthy. That was the whole point of the previous 14 skills.

Every single one was a deposit in the trust bank. The knot, the fire, the fight, the work, the truth. Every single one was new evidence presented to the adult world that this boy could handle his own life and would not destroy it.

The modern American (and Norwegian) boy in many cases cannot be trusted alone as a 22-year-old. He cannot be sent to college without the daily phone call to mum. He cannot manage his own finances. He cannot navigate his own conflicts. He is not built for solitude because every previous skill that built it was taken from him in the name of safety.

Safety is a child’s right. Being trustworthy is a boy’s inheritance. Childhood in 1958 produced real risk because it allowed real knives, real flames, real fights, real water and real consequences.

And out of this childhood came a young man you could send to war, to college, to start a business or to marry your daughter, and he would not disappoint you. That is the boy we used to produce. That is the boy we have stopped producing, and the price of that is the crisis young men are now going through.

If you have a boy in your life – son, grandson, nephew, neighbour – give him a knife and a stick and three hours alone in the backyard. That is where it starts again. Or don’t. The choice is yours, and it is a real choice.
15 skills, none of them requiring a class, a coach, a certificate or a credit card. Every single one was learned during an ordinary American (and Norwegian) boyhood for free, with occasional supervision by an adult. A father who showed it once, a grandfather who watched from a distance, a neighbour who helped.

The 1958 boys are now in their 70s and 80s. They are the last generation of American (and Norwegian) men who were raised this way. Look at them. They are calmer, more competent, more at peace, more ready for adversity and more useful to the people around them. They knew what we forgot, and we forgot it deliberately in the name of safety, and we are now living with the bill.

Somewhere right now, by a stream behind a quiet house, a boy sits cross-legged on a flat stone with a pocket knife and a green willow branch. His shirt is stained, his shoes are wet. No one knows exactly where he is, and without a single word he is becoming the kind of man his country will need.

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In 1958 I was four years old. But in 1960 I was six. I could swim, row and moor a boat properly. I lay for hours under the pier fishing for small fish and crabs and marvelling at the strange and overwhelming life there in the real world. No iPad or mobile phone.

No artificial reality. No artificial intelligence. No life jacket. No bicycle helmet. No one knew exactly where we were or what we were up to, except that we had to be home for dinner at four o’clock.

In the summer we swam in our underpants whenever we wanted without supervision. We built dens and competed over who dared climb highest in the big oak tree. No one had heard of climbing frames or climbing walls. But we got told off when we came home with frozen clothes after running on the ice floes in winter.

Proper telling off. “Wait till your father gets home.” That was the reality we were confronted with and the fear from a worried mother and the disappointment from an angry father who barely raised his voice, but who was present, gave clear messages and distributed punishment as deserved.

We were not driven. We had to walk, cycle or use a kick-sledge. We quickly learned to mend things. We could change a chain and patch a puncture ourselves as seven-year-olds. And I could chop wood. Masses of wood. I got eight stitches in my leg and quickly learned to know the sharp edge of the axe, but also how it sang exactly as it should when it hit the weak point of the log.

Knives were as common then as mobile phones are now. We whittled all the time. Sticks, willow whistles, bows and arrows, spears, slings and sticks with marks and intricate patterns and occasionally got a cut. Especially the left index finger was vulnerable. The scars and the experience are still there. Risk management, motivation, mastery, robustness – resilience.

As the state and social workers and good intentions have institutionalised, feminised and taken over more and more of childhood, we are now seeing the results of the welfare state’s therapisation, gender neutralisation and over-diagnosis: a generation of young men who struggle with motivation, work ethic, overweight and traditional masculinity.

This is not progress. These are not men you go to war with. These are not nation builders. These are not men women want to marry and have children with.

The institutionalisation of child-rearing with kindergartens from the age of one and the thorough feminisation of the school system explains much of the reason why boys are falling through at school, the downgrading of physical activity in favour of increased screen time, the declining number choosing physical trades, the reduced status of the sciences and finally the dissolution of the family and the extremely low birth rates.

The male role is in crisis. Where the father in the 1960s knew his place as provider, today’s young men must navigate a landscape where traditional masculinity is portrayed as toxic. Gender equality policy may have been a success for women in education and working life, but has at the same time created a vacuum for men. More young men are involuntarily single or childless, fall outside the labour market, are confused about their sexual identity, or seek refuge in gaming, pornography, woke madness and identity politics.

The 1950s and 1960s were dominated by traditional patriarchal values. But not all the values were bad. Some were necessary. And many have been lost. Life was harder, with fewer safety nets. But precisely this created resilience.

Today’s overprotection and focus on feelings and identity have produced more vulnerable men. We see it with regard to conscription, where many young people struggle with basic fitness and mental strength. We see it in working life, where male-dominated industries struggle with recruitment while office jobs with flexible hours flourish.

The welfare state has provided material security, but at the expense of character building. Boys need challenges, risk and clear role models, not just soft values and equality rhetoric. The extreme focus on gender as a social construct has deprived many boys of a natural identity linked to strength, protection and competence.

Society has developed since 1958. But we must acknowledge the costs: a generation of men who are less robust, less ambitious in the traditional sense and more dependent on the system, the welfare state and safety nets.

Norway needs men who can build, defend and lead and not just consume, reflect on their feelings and their identity, and feel sorry for themselves.

Today’s politicians and educators should ask themselves: How can we give today’s boys the same dose of realism, physical challenge and responsibility that shaped their fathers and grandfathers?

We have got a softer, more comfortable, but weaker nation that is vulnerable when reality knocks. The critical but politically incorrect voices who raise questions about the feminisation of young men must be heard.

We have not only liberated ourselves from the gender roles and restrictions of the past. We have lost much of what made Norwegian men the pillars of a growing welfare state.

We can put on the Viking helmets and cheer for Norway. There is something uplifting in that. But we must once again fill them with content. We must let boys be boys. That is how boys can become men.