[00:00]

Justin: Your child goes to this party, they’re at the party, there’s a lot of alcohol, and he sees four boys taking an almost blackout drunk girl into a bedroom.

Just ask him, “Have you ever heard of that happening? What would you do if it did happen? Who would you call? Are you the kind of boy who’s going to go and join them and say, ‘Oh, easy score,’ or are you going to be the kind of boy who wants to intervene? And if you’re going to intervene, what can you do?”

Marie: If you’re a parent with a teenage boy, stay with me for this one.

You will want to listen to this episode. He used to tell you everything, now the bedroom door is shut. There’s a voice or some music coming through the speaker that is unfamiliar to you, and you’re standing in the hallway trying to work out, “Do I knock or just leave him alone?” Meanwhile, every headline is telling you that boys are in trouble.

The manosphere, toxic masculinity, Andrew Tate’s name being mentioned all the time. Teachers are reporting it too. Teachers saying that young boys are being more brazen, and the behaviour towards girls and female staff members is more targeted and hostile. And some teachers describing girls going silent because speaking up wasn’t worth what came back at them.

And then a whole country watched the smash hit TV show Adolescence and started looking at their own kid thinking, “What if?” And here’s the thing, your son’s not the headline. He’s a kid with a phone and an algorithm that has worked out exactly what keeps him watching. I’m sure parenting has never felt harder than it does right now.

More information than any human could read in a lifetime, and most of it contradicting something else that you’ve read or heard. And underneath it all, the pressure to raise a good human and a good man. I’m Marie Vakakis, Accredited Mental Health Social Worker and couple and family therapist. And while I don’t have teenage boys at home, I sit with parents every single week who do.

[02:00]

Joining me today is Dr. Justin Coulson. He has a PhD in psychology, and he has spent more than 20 years researching families. He hosts Parental Guidance on Channel Nine and The Happy Families podcast, and he’s a father of six who has just released his 11th book called Boys. Welcome, Justin.

Justin: Thanks, Marie. It’s really good to be able to do this podcast chat with you.

Marie: It’s always so topical, but what can you share with parents about your insights in writing this book?

Justin: I think that we get worried about some of the wrong stuff, and there’s some really big stuff happening that is, deeply concerning, but it’s below the surface. Most parents don’t know that it’s going on, and even if they did know, they don’t know what to do about it. And if they do something about it will often be the wrong thing.

I know that makes me sound like I’m down on parents. I’m not. It’s just, it’s the nature of raising boys today. What do I mean by the wrong stuff? So I think that we’re worrying about a non-communicative son, like monosyllables, grunts, ugh, when we try to talk to them. is that annoying? Yes. Is it disrespectful?

Probably a little bit. Is it totally developmentally normal? Yeah, it is. Is it worth stressing about? Probably not. Like, This is pretty standard, and it has been for decades. Becoming increasingly private. Like I talk to so many moms especially who will say, “Oh, my son used to talk to me about everything, and now he doesn’t say anything to me at all. He’s embarrassed by me.” Again doesn’t feel good, but totally normal and not something that I’d be stressing out about.

Although, it is worth highlighting that disclosure is one of the best predictors of kids making safe, healthy decisions. So we can come back to that later. But teenage boys, their friends are oxygen to them. They’re absolutely obsessed with their mates and making sure they get good quality time with their mates, especially online, because that’s the nature of boyhood in 2026.

And they’re interested in sex, but they always have been, even before the rise of internet pornography, like going back to the I don’t know, Dark Ages. I’m sure that boys were still pretty interested in sex even back then. I don’t think that these are indicators that a boy’s going off the rails, and they’re not the things that I’m worried about.

[04:00]

The things that in the book, I call it a code red situation. Code red sounds pretty serious. I think it is. I’m worried about pornography. I’m worried when a boy starts to become contemptuous, especially towards females. I’m worried about boys who don’t understand no, who can’t accept rejection with grace.

Who, who don’t understand that when a boundary is crossed and somebody points out that boundary is crossed, regardless of whether they’re male or female, that they persist anyway. Those are the kinds of things that I’m concerned about. Additionally I’m pretty worried about boys when it comes to their academic outcomes.

We’re seeing a, an ongoing decline in that, such that for every 10 girls who are suspended from primary schools in Australia, 57 boys are. When we look at high school graduation rates, we’ve got 10 girls graduating for just eight to eight and a half boys. At universities around the country, at 42 of them the females outnumber the males.

And when it comes to university graduation rates, we’ve got 10 girls graduating for every six to six and a half males. And so we end up with this thing that’s called hypergamy. Actually, we don’t end up with it. Hypergamy is the reality that exists across all cultures, including the most egalitarian nations on Earth.

So this isn’t like some anti-feminist thing. But basically women, when they’re looking to partner with somebody, they look across and up the socioeconomic ladder and, the educational ladder. And so if you’ve got a well-educated, a university-educated woman who’s gonna go out and earn, let’s say 100, 120 grand a year, maybe $150,000 a year, because she’s well-educated and she’s done things really smartly, and she’s been disciplined and conscientious and worked hard, and she looks across and she notices that for every 10 girls who are in that situation, there’s only about four or five guys who are in that situation, all of a sudden she’s going hang on.

“Who am I left with?” And at the risk of making this just sound awful, like some kind of economic transaction, when she looks down the ladder and she sees people who are earning 80 or 90,000 or 60,000, or people who are not well-educated, she’s going, “No, I’ve worked hard and I want somebody who can do more than that.”

[06:00]

Is that fair? I think that there are other variables that matter, but this hypergamy thing has been found in studies in every nation, and for centuries. This is how it works. So I get really worried about that because the society-wide issues surrounding this are that we find a whole lot of men who are now, I’m gonna use the word priced out. That’s probably not exactly the right word, but if we keep with that economic concept, they’re priced out of the dating market. They can’t earn the money and they don’t have the credentials, and so they’re not getting the swipes, they’re not getting the clicks, they’re not getting the dates, they’re not getting the opportunities.

So therefore, they start to become a little bit frustrated, a bit angry. They start to blame women for their problems. It’s not the women’s fault. It it never was. But they start to think that society’s structures are against them, and then we get the incel movement, we get all the horrible stuff that you read about online and men start to fall into really bad patterns.

Now, I might have pointed out a worst-case scenario, but we’re seeing it. We’re seeing this trickle down. Like in high schools, boys are seeing this content online. Their algorithms are feeding them increasingly horrible stuff so that you’ve got six-year-olds, in some reports, who educators have said that they will say no to females who ask them to do something, whereas when they’re asked by a male teacher to do something, they do it instantly.

I’ve spoken to teachers, female teachers who have been told by 10 and 11-year-olds to, “Go make me a sandwich. Go back into the kitchen.” This stuff does my head in. I can’t comprehend it because I was born in the ’70s, and that kind of thing just doesn’t even enter my brain.

So pornography sexual challenges, consent, education, mental health. We know that young men die at multiple, multiples of females when it comes to suicide. You name it, our boys are actually struggling. That’s a long answer to a really simple question, but that’s, they’re some of my concerns, just a few of them.

Marie: Yeah, look, I see it come across in every way, shape, or form that you’ve mentioned as well. One of the things that I really struggle with is when I see. Sometimes I read the comments of a Facebook post, and I know I shouldn’t because I just get really angry. But when people are complaining, it’s some men complaining about women.

[08:00]

But I’ve yet to see a group of men get together and be like, “You know what? We’re going to start a grade prep reading program. We’re going to work part-time and volunteer at the school breakfast club.” There are a lot of people complaining about what women aren’t providing their young men, but they’re not stepping in to contribute to that in a positive way.

Justin: The critical word that you’ve used there, Marie, is contribute. So when I wrote the book Boys, which has been out for a couple of months now. The subtitle of the book is Building Strong Young Men From the Inside Out, and I kept the word strong there intentionally because young men want to be strong.

They want to be able to use the testosterone-fueled size and bulk and capacity to be dominant. They want to feel strong. The issue is that there’s a difference between being strong and being dominant and young men who are not well-evolved and who have not done a lot of inner work and whose screens take them away from doing the inner work they get pretty confused.

One of the biggest issues that I’m concerned about, I didn’t mention it before, but I’ll mention it now, is their seeking of status. Like, when you talk to a young man, what they want is to look good in front of their mates. They want to look strong. They want to look cool. They want to be the man. They’re so interested in being the man, but they don’t know what it is to be a man, right?

And so you’ve highlighted that critical word, contribution. Underpinning the entire book is this single concept- Healthy men help the people around them to feel safer and stronger. In fact, not just to feel safer and stronger, to be safer and stronger. And that means that they show up and they add value.

They show up and wherever they are, things are better because they’re there. I teach my daughters, ’cause I’ve got six daughters, right? I teach my daughters to look for the chair stackers, and whenever I say that in front of an audience, everyone just nods their head. They’re like, “Ah, yeah.” So that’s definitely underpinning Boys. It came from two places. First off, a guy called Richard Reeves a few years ago wrote a book called Of Boys and Men, and in that book he talks about this concept of surplus value, that is to give more than you take.

Now I’m not convinced that we want to run a ledger, and so long as I’m a guy that does a whole lot of good stuff, that means that I can do some bad stuff now and then. I’m giving more than I’m taking, so I’m still allowed to take. To me, that feels a little bit transactional, and it misses the point.

[10:00]

In fact, I know for a fact that’s not what he’s saying, but that’s the way he’s describing it. For me, though I’ve stepped into this idea of helping the people around you feel safer and stronger because that, to me, that just feels like a more powerful way to say this is what men do.

‘Cause they are strong. They can use their strength in a way that is supportive and of benefit to the people around them, rather than looking at life through this economic transactional lens. The other thing Marie, that strikes me, I had a conversation with a woman in her early 40s a couple of years ago while I was writing the book.

She was a colleague, but we knew each other personally, so it was okay to ask some personal questions. She’d just been through a divorce, and I asked her if she was dating, and she said no. I said, “What, you’ve given up on the apps?” And I said that tongue in cheek, because I don’t think that the apps are oriented towards helping us to have healthy relationships or find good partners.

I think that they’re oriented towards milking as much money as they can from their subscribers. Call me a cynic, but big tech hasn’t done the world very many favors. And so Marie, I said to her “Why is it that you’re not in the dating world?” And she said, and this is a direct quote, she said, “I don’t think that I’m gonna be ever able to find a guy who will be a bonus in my life.”

Which made me very sad being a man, right? I’m thinking, no, I know heaps of good men. There are men who can be a bonus. But her idea was and I asked her to go deeper and she explained every guy she’s been on a date with is wanting to know how much money she earns wanting to know what her house is like.

He’s looking for a mum, he’s looking for a caretaker. He’s looking for somebody who’s gonna pack his sandwiches before he goes to work each day, if he goes to work at all. He’s looking for somebody who he can have an intimate physical relationship with, but still go and live the life that he wants to live.

He’s not looking for a partner so much as he’s looking for someone to make his life that little bit nicer. And she just said, “I want a guy who’s gonna be a bonus, who’s actually gonna come into my life and add something to my life that I currently don’t have, and basically every guy that I’ve dated is going in the opposite direction.”

[12:00]

Now, to me, that’s a tragic story. Although my punchline was I smiled and I said to her, “Just put that on your dating app profile. Show me your bonus.” Can you imagine the DMs that she’d get if she said, “Show me your bonus” to everyone?

Marie: Oh, but they would be awful. People would be so disrespectful.

Justin: Awful, completely.

But the concept here is women are actually saying, because she’s not the only person who’s said something like this to me, “Hey guys, show me where you can contribute. Prove to me that you’re a chair stacker. Show me that you’re not just in this relationship for you, that this is gonna be a partnership.”

So that’s what I take out of your comment, this idea that contribution matters. I think it’s at the very core of healthy masculinity. And you know the funny thing, for me as a guy, when I’m making a contribution, I feel like a way better person. I feel like a better man when I’m showing up and making a positive difference.

When I’m in it for me, I actually feel less, not more of me.

Marie: The contribution in a community sense really gets under my skin. My background is in social work, and that frontline social work services, I think we had 90 women in the course and four men.

We were the ones, I was tutoring foster kids in English. I was the one doing breakfast club when I worked in school. We were the ones there, and all the men that I hear complain, I don’t hear them say, “I’m coaching my kid’s soccer team. I’m the one taking them out on hikes.

I’m doing the adventure camps. I’m getting a therapy dog and reading in class.” People are complaining, and I know that hurt people can perpetuate the hurt, but it’s a really frustrating space when all the initiatives to get equality for women and to boost enrollment rates and STEM, it’s all led by other women who want to help them.

And men are complaining about that not being done for them.

Justin: This is a really interesting one. There’s two things here that are really interesting. The first, I just want to talk about the importance of role models. We hear it all the time, but I think we miss this.

[14:00]

Masculinity is learned by watching other men. So depending on who your son is watching, that is where he’s gonna learn to be a man. If he’s watching what’s happening online, that’s what he’ll learn. There’s a guy called Robert Merton, Robert K. Merton, 1957, he developed this idea of role models.

Role models, in his first study on this concept, he was looking at young medical interns and how they watched the senior doctors, and they watched the way they the way they acted and the things that they said, and they basically parroted them. They repeated them. They became mirrors of those people who they modeled the role from.

So Merton was the first one to create this phrase in the 1950s. But what he and then subsequent researchers developed was that there are three elements to being a role model. Number one, they actually show you what to do behaviorally.

Number two, they give you a representation of what’s possible, and number three, they serve as a source of inspiration. So let’s go to the dark side first. Andrew Tate, who is everybody’s favourite. Let’s pick on this guy because he’s done and said enough things for us to make himself a very easy target.

He’s just vile. I wanna say that categorically at the outset, just in case anyone thinks that I’m holding him up as a positive role model. We’re straight on the dark side here, but he is a behavioral model. And when you see him with his shirt off and his big tats and his. The, the guy is ripped, right?

He’s absolutely ripped, and he’s got the girls and they’re all gorgeous, and these, he’s got the cars, and he’s got the mansion. Oh, sorry, and he’s got the allegations, and for some people, that is status, right? That is, “Look at what I do. I’m such a tough guy, but I can still flout the law. I can move to Romania, and I can do all this sort of stuff allegedly.”

He’s a behavioral model, and there’s a whole lot of boys who just wanna look good in front of their mates, and they’re like, “If I can do and say the things that he’s doing and saying, he’s cool, and everyone thinks he’s cool, so I’ll be cool too.” So there’s that association. There’s a representation of what’s possible.

That’s the second part of this model. He’s demonstrating that, “If I play this right, that I can have what he has.”

And when I’m a 14-year-old boy, and I’m looking at the hot girls and the hot cars and the big mansion and the seaside living, I’m going, “What else is there?” Bring it on. And last of all, therefore, he serves as a source of inspiration So that’s the dark side.

[16:00]

Now let’s flip it across to the light side here. The light side of this is that when you talk to young men in Australia and ask them who their role models are, recent research from Jesuit Social Services, they’re doing a whole lot of stuff that they call the Man Box. I can’t remember the exact number I’ve got in the book, but the overwhelming majority of young men when they’re asked who their role models are, the number one response, the number one response is, “My dad.”

And it’s really interesting ’cause if you look at the average Australian dad, he doesn’t look or sound or have what Andrew Tate has, looks like, and sounds like. Do you know what I mean? He’s not walking around with his shirt off and a six-pack. I know a lot of the mums are going, “I wish my husband did have that,” but he’s not walking around with the six-pack and the cigar and the hot sports car and the average Australian dad is also monogamous and treating his wife quite well and doing the right thing, speaking nicely.

And so that gives me hope, right? These boys, they’re seeking status in the peer group because they’re adolescents and that’s what they do, but they’ve got these good role models. I look at Australian men, and I know that there’s gonna be a lot of negative stories, but my experience with the Australian men that I’ve associated with and who come to my workshops and who ask me questions, is that they are sincere and they’re good-hearted men.

They’re really trying to be a bonus in the lives of the people around them. That gives me great hope. But our young men need to have more of that, hence your point, Marie, and this is a long way of getting to the second part of what I wanted to say in response, and that is that there are so many women who are involved in service industries and so few men And there are all these initiatives to get women into male-based, and I’m saying this in the stereotypical, not as in the biologically predestined, the male-based industries and getting men into the female-based industries.

It just doesn’t work. It actually doesn’t work. The boys police it really strongly. No matter what we do at an ideological level or a rewards and sociocultural level, the boys are policing it really bad. A quick tangent and then I’ll come back to this, ’cause I wanna talk about the Northern European countries and what they’ve found in their most egalitarian nations.

[18:00]

I’m really big on telling parents to get their boys into gymnastics. But if you’re a nine-year-old boy going to gymnastics, and then you show up at primary school and tell all your buddies that you went to gymnastics yesterday, I’m gonna say some inappropriate words, right? But those eight and nine and 10-year-old boys, they’re gonna say, “You’re such a fag.

You’re so gay. You’re a poof.” They’re gonna, they’re gonna use those words. That’s the lexicon of young men, young boys, when they see somebody do something that they see as effeminate or something that doesn’t fit the masculine stereotype, and they police it hard.

But here’s the thing. If you’ve got a young boy who’s in gymnastics at eight or nine or 10, and he’s learning how to do planches and handstands and cartwheels and all that sort of stuff, by the time he gets to about grade seven or grade eight and that testosterone boost has come in, this kid is gonna have shoulders and arms and a chest and back no one else in his grade.

And then at the right time, when he’s down on the athletics oval or he’s standing on a stair somewhere and he does a backflip in front of everyone, he goes from being the quote-unquote “the gay kid” that everyone picked on to the hero of grade eight. And everyone’s like, “Whoa, how’d you do that?”

And all of a sudden he’s a strong, physically strong young man, but hopefully he’s also got the character that would go along with that we’re looking for. Just a tangent to highlight how hard it is to break this down. I’ve forgotten the name of that actor in Meet the Fockers, and he’s a nurse.

He’s that comedian guy, you know, what’s his name?

Marie: Ben Stiller.

Justin: Ben Stiller, thank you. I know everyone listening to the podcast is hitting their foreheads and going, “Come on, it’s not that hard.” Ben Stiller, he chose to be a nurse in that. Why? Because it’s an instant talking point. What, a male nurse?

Really? Do they have them?

Marie: He didn’t get credibility until they found out he got the grades to be a doctor and then chose nursing.

Justin: Okay, so now let’s go to the Northern Europeans, and I’ll wrap this up, ’cause this is a long answer, and I shouldn’t have talked for this long.

But I just, I find all this so fascinating. We’re talking about hypergamy, we’re talking about male roles, and we’re talking about role models. In the Northern European countries specifically, but there are other countries like it around the world, the same finding keeps coming up, and that is, in the most egalitarian countries that we’ve got, where women can do whatever they want and men can do whatever they want, they still sort themselves into the same employment categories that we have in the less egalitarian countries.

[20:00]

It depends on who you talk to here. There are some people who will say, “The socio-structural realities of our environments are so strong that we just can’t break from them.” But then you talk to other people. There’s a guy by the name of Steve Stewart-Williams, who is just this incredible evolutionary psychologist, and what he argues is that we have just so much evidence that boys are much more interested in things and quantities and numbers, and women are just much more interested in connection and at the risk of being far too reductionist, nurture, and guys just aren’t that into it.

And so when you’ve got the choice and there are no barriers and there are no cultural pushes, we still see that assortment into those groups. That means that it’s really hard to get guys to put up their hand and say, “Yeah, I’m in. Let me do that thing where I’m gonna care for people, I’m gonna provide service, I’m gonna make a difference.”

And yet again, if we could make it masculine, I reckon we’d get more. ‘Cause like I said, as an individual male, when I do stuff for other people, when I have that service contribution orientation, I walk away and I feel like I’m a damn good man, right? I’m like, “Yeah, look at me go.” Masculinity surplus.

And my wife looks at me like that as well. I don’t know if that’s too personal for me to share, but she’s like, “Oh my goodness, I like it when you’re like this,” right? You’re. Women find it appealing when men are kind.

Marie: Yeah. But there’s no equivalent for women of it seems like the biggest insult for a man to be called emasculine.

To feel emasculated is huge.

There is no such thing for girls. If someone says, “You’re not very feminine.” I’m like, “Yeah, no shit and what’s your point?” There’s nothing to insult there. Yes. But there seems to be something so deeply wounding and deeply insulting about your masculinity being threatened.

Justin: I’m looking up right now into my bookshelf. I can’t reach it. Go gadget arms. I can’t quite reach. My bookshelf is above my podcast station. Just up here to my right there’s a book by a guy called David Gilmore. He’s a sociocultural researcher and anthropologist, and the book’s called Manhood in the Making, and he makes that exact point.

[22:00]

One of the worst things you can say to a man is that he’s effeminate, to emasculate him, to say. In fact, there was this really fascinating series of studies done by a University of South Florida researcher. Her name is Jen Bosson, and she looked at this thing that she called precarious masculinity.

What she found is that you can put together a whole lot of statements, just made-up statements about masculinity, and people believe them because masculinity is this thing, right? And then you can have a whole bunch of made-up statements about femininity, and people believe them. That’s fine. They don’t mind.

But if you get somebody to fill in a survey and then you give them results, and let’s say you’ve got a guy, and his results point towards him scoring more like a female than a male, then you give him a subsequent task that he thinks is unrelated, where he’s got to fill in missing letters from words, complete the words.

So you’ve got P-U-N blank. He’s much more likely to use words that are violent in content. He’ll turn P-U-N into punch rather than punt or punk. He’ll turn L-O blank E-R into loser rather than lover, right? Because his masculinity has been threatened and he feels like he’s got to puff himself up and make himself big.

Now, what’s fascinating is that when women’s femininity is brought into question and they’re told that they’ve scored more like a man, and then they get the same questionnaire to complete and fill in the blanks, there’s no difference between those women and the women who were told that their femininity was completely intact and they scored just like other women.

And it seems again to be cross-cultural. It doesn’t matter what country you go to, manhood is something that has to be earned. It is first learned, and then it is earned. And for men who do not earn their masculinity, they are considered a concern to the culture. They’re shuffled out of the society.

[24:00]

They’re really looked down upon. And again, in that book by Gilmore, there are countless examples of men in different places in major metropolitan cities and also in hunter-gatherer tribes and everything in between, where this happens over and over again. Now, why is that? There’s a whole lot of reasons that people suggest from an evolutionary perspective.

Back in the day, that’s what was necessary. But it seems that we’ve carried that forward, and I don’t know if it’s genetic or cultural, and I’m not the guy to speculate on it. What I do know is, though, that it exists, and in spite of all of the ideological concepts that have been put forward and all of the educational programs that have been run, we’re not stamping it out.

It seems like it’s so deeply embedded in our psyche that the best we can do is try to orient our boys to becoming strong, but seeing opportunities to serve, to be considerate of others, to be mindful of context. We’re recording this just a few weeks after the Sydney Swans saga, and there’s been all of these stories recently about young men from private schools in Sydney who have sexually assaulted, allegedly sexually assaulted, young women.

The stories are just awful. They’re atrocious. They’re horrific. And it seems that we’re just not doing a good enough job of, A, allowing young men to really feel the consequences of their actions. But B, I don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of getting this message out, and that’s the whole message of my book.

If you’re a healthy man, you help the people around you feel safer and stronger. Because those football players would not have done what they allegedly did if they had that approach to life. I’m gonna make sure that I’m helping the people around me feel safer and stronger. And those young men who have allegedly sexually assaulted those girls, they absolutely would not have been in that context.

They would not have made those decisions if they had that drip-fed into their brain from a young age. As a growing boy into man, my job, masculinity, is helping the people around me feel safer and stronger, to show up and be a contributor, to be a bonus. This is about giving, not taking.

Marie: How can parents start to navigate that?

[26:00]

One thing you mentioned in the start around, in the monosyllabic phrases, and I get that all the time, where parents try to push through that by asking more questions, and they create tension or even conflict where there wasn’t any. So their approach in trying to get communication actually pushes that further away.

But what can they do to handle some of these big conversations? How can they show that they’re not judging, but maybe have caution, or that they’re interested and curious and not punish before they get the full story? Like, how do they balance this developmental phase within the context of some of the really scary stuff they’re listening to?

Justin: Let me give you five things. It’s a big list. And I haven’t got it prepped, so I might lose count, but I’m going to do my best and use my thumbs and fingers and hopefully get there. So the first thing is this starts at a young age, right? And it doesn’t start with conversations about consent and sex and pornography and all that kind of stuff, and strangulation, for crying out loud.

Like, where in the world has that come from and how did it become mainstream? Seriously.

Marie: Yeah. That was my alternate intro, actually, was the strangulation case, and I was like, oh, maybe that’s a bit too dark too quickly, so let’s just leave that.

Justin: But when you’ve got 50%-plus of young women saying that in their last sexual encounter with a young man, that was part of it.

I’m a Gen X guy, right? That, that’s never been part of my sexual script, and I can’t conceive of being with my wife, the person that I love more than anyone on the planet. There’s eight billion people on the planet. She’s the one I’ve chosen to be with, and I’m going to put my hands around her neck? Come on, really? Like, where does that come from? Now, if you’re an adult and you’re consenting to it and everyone’s on board with it apparently I’m not supposed to yuck your yum. Call me judgmental. Just what is that? That’s not what a loving relationship looks like. It’s just wrong.

I’m calling it out. It’s wrong. I said five things, and I’m jumping to number two before I finish number one. So let me finish number one. No, I’m going to say number two, and then I’ll go back to one. We’ve got to be willing to call stuff out. The Victorian Attorney General, what’s her name?

[28:00]

Kilkenny. I think it’s Kilkenny. She made it into the papers just recently. Said something really interesting. She was launching a new program about coercive control in Victoria, which obviously is just such a big issue. Yeah, Sonya Kilkenny, that’s her name, and she put her notes down while she was doing this launch, began to share a story about what had happened in her home just recently with her 16-year-old son.

He’d come home, and instead of being monosyllabic, he was just chatting with her because coercive control was on her mind and was in the news, and she asked some questions, and he said, “Oh, yeah, like my mates, they track their girlfriends’ locations. They screen their calls. They vet who they’re talking to.

They’re constantly checking in.” And she was willing to do what I’m suggesting as step number two. She was willing to call it out. She said, “Do you know that’s wrong?”

Let’s just call black and white for a minute. That is wrong. There was a second question. The second question was, “Do you know that’s a red flag?” And her third question was something along the lines of, “What do the girls think about this?” They’re great questions, but they’re also really clearly drawing a line in the sand.

Parenting is a moral endeavor, and that’s why people get so hot under the collar about parenting, because we’re actually talking about morals, we’re talking about values, we’re talking about societal norms. Okay, let me go back to it. So number one, we’ve got to start the conversations when the kids are young.

The conversations are, how can you accept a no gracefully? When you don’t get invited to hang out with the boys on Saturday, when you don’t get the party invite, when you get out in handball and everyone’s saying you’re out even though you don’t think you’re out, can you take it and just accept it gracefully and move on?

Do you know how to be considerate of others’ feelings? You’re tickling your little sister, and she’s saying, “No, stop it.” Are you able to stop? You’re bouncing on the trampoline and she says it’s too high. Are you able to go, “Okay I’m bigger and I could hurt you, so I’m gonna stop because that’s what you’re asking me to do”?

That’s where that stuff starts. So we’ve got to teach consideration safer and stronger at a young age. That’s number one. Number two, be willing to.

Marie: Can I jump in on that one?

Justin: Yeah.

[30:00]

Marie: When I run the Tuning in to Teens program, which was created by the University of Melbourne, where I see that go wrong is people will tell off rather than educate. So instead of saying, “You look frustrated,” or, “It’s okay to be sad or disappointed,” they’re like, “You shouldn’t have done that.” And so to teach them those things, it needs to be named and role modeled, not just snuffed out, or they won’t know what that feeling is. They’re like, “I’ve just, I got told off for this thing, but I don’t know what it is. I just know that this thing is now bad.” But if they were told, “It’s okay to be sad that you got out. It’s okay to feel disappointed and things are unfair.” Maybe they get a cuddle from mom or dad, and then they sit on the sidelines.

There’s actually a formula to teach that rather than just saying, “That’s bad. Don’t do it.”

Justin: Marie, that was my third thing. It’s empathy and perspective-taking. So they’re different things. They’re different things, but they’re related. So empathy is I’m feeling what you’re feeling.

Here’s the bad news. The data shows that boys, when they hit their adolescent years and testosterone booms into their body, and they’ve got twenty to thirty times the testosterone that their same age female peers have, empathy drops because of the testosterone boost, and that means that they’re less likely to feel what the other person’s feeling.

But that’s the feeling part. Perspective-taking is the ability to go, “I can see how you would see things. I don’t even necessarily have to agree with it, I don’t have to feel or anything like that, but I get I get where you’re coming from.”

Marie: I can’t get some adult men to do that in couples therapy. I know.

It’s so difficult. “That wasn’t my point.” It’s like, can you see from their perspective that this hurt them even if it wasn’t your intention? And it’s impossible.

Justin: Yeah. So the questions for us as parents need to be things like, when you were bouncing on the trampoline with your sister and she was saying stop, why was she saying stop? What was she feeling when she was saying stop? I do this when I’m talking to parents about smacking, ’cause a lot of parents in Australia still, in twenty twenty-six, think that smacking is okay. In fact, they think we should absolutely be giving our kids a good wallop every now and again.

[32:00]

And so I do this perspective-taking exercise. I’m like, okay, so the average Australian adult weighs, let’s say, seventy-five kg, give or take. Forgive me if I’m wrong. And the average Australian adult is probably, let’s say, a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, right? So we’ve got those two numbers.

Now let’s go back to the average two or three-year-old, ’cause most people will argue that it’s definitely more permissible to hit little kids than big kids, so if we’re gonna talk about smacking. A two to three-year-old child is half their adult height. Statistically, what we find is that by the time they’re at two they’re half the height that they’ll be as a grown-up and they’re about a quarter, let’s say a quarter, sometimes a fifth, but about a quarter of their adult weight, the average adult weight.

So let’s multiply height by two and weight by four, right? So now we’ve got a three hundred and sixty centimeter, three point six meter tall adult who weighs, what’s four seventy-five? It’s three hundred kgs. We’re talking about a very large human here, right? And they’re your boss, and you get things wrong, and we live in a society where bosses are allowed to physically punish employees who don’t do a good job.

So you’ve got this boss who’s twice your height and four times your weight, and he says, “Bend over. I’m gonna give you a tap on the backside.” Are you gonna wet your pants in fear, right? So that’s the perspective-taking, and somehow we’ve got to be able to bring that into the same conversation with our kids.

What would you do if you were in that situation? How would you feel if it was your sister going through that? What would you do if it’s a friend? What would you do if it was a stranger? I’m really big, so this is my fourth one that extends on that, on having conversations that are about hypotheticals with kids, right?

So I’m gonna say to a teenage boy, based on the stories that have been in the news, “Hey, quick question. Let’s say you were with two of your mates, and they cornered a girl in an alleyway. I know that you don’t have mates like that, and I know you’re not the kind of person who’s gonna be involved in that, but let’s just say something random happens, and that’s suddenly where you find yourself.

Maybe there’s been alcohol or drugs involved. Maybe there’s been some kind of context that made this happen.” What would you do? How would you react? Or let’s make it a little bit more realistic. You’re a 16-year-old who’s going to a party on Friday night, and there’s probably not going to be any adults, and there will be a lot of alcohol, and probably a whole bunch of parents who are giving their kids alcohol to take to the party because parents don’t know how to parent.

[34:00]

Forgive me for sounding judgy. If I sound judgy trust your instincts. Parents should not be giving their children alcohol to go to parties. It’s just, it’s not parenting. It’s just not on. But your child goes to this party, they’re at the party, there’s a lot of alcohol, and he sees four boys taking an almost blackout drunk girl into a bedroom.

Just ask him, “Have you ever heard of that happening? What would you do if it did happen? Who would you call? Are you the kind of boy who’s going to go and join them and say, ‘Oh, easy score,’ or are you going to be the kind of boy who wants to intervene? And if you’re going to intervene, what can you do? Who can you call? Where can you go to? Who can you bring on side? How do you help protect this girl?” And I just think these conversations about who do you want to be are powerful. My favourite thing to talk about in this context is back to the definition that has underscored the whole conversation, healthy men help the people around them feel safer and stronger.

What would it look like if a couple times a week or a couple times a month when you’re out on a walk or a bike ride or in the car, or you’re sitting on the edge of their bed to say good night, or you’re around the dinner table, or you’re cooking some sausages on the barbecue, what about if you looked at your son and said, “Hey, you know that definition of healthy masculinity we’ve been talking about?”

“Yeah.” “Cool. Where have you seen it recently? Where have you seen someone show up as a man and help the people around them feel safer and stronger?” And he goes, “I don’t know.” I’m like, “Come on. I don’t know is not an answer. Give me something.” So he gives you an answer, and you say, “All right.

What about its opposite? Where have you seen its opposite? Where have you seen somebody trying to be masculine, but they’ve left the people around them feeling smaller and weaker?” And he’ll have an answer, and then you say, “So which one do you want to be?” To me that’s how you teach it.

You teach it explicitly. My last answer is just role modeling. I know you’ve just said that it’s really hard. You’re sitting down with some men, and they simply cannot do this stuff. But oh, my goodness, if we can help young men see what good men are, then they’re far more likely to follow.

Marie: Yeah. They can’t be what they can’t see.

Justin: Yeah. So they’re my big five.

Marie: They’re fantastic. I’d love to get your input on this because I get this a lot, is “I never had this stuff, and I turned out fine.”

Justin: Did you? Did you really?

Marie: How do you navigate that? How do you navigate a parent saying, or a dad in particular, “I never had these conversations.

[36:00]

No one had my back.” As a therapist, I see that as that’s someone who’s hurt, right? There’s their really activated petulant teenager or child part saying, “What about me?” Someone else getting a slice of cake means there’s somehow left some less for me. How do you have a conversation around just because you didn’t get it or you had to tough it out on your own, that things are different now?

Justin: I’ve got two answers for you, Marie.

The first one might not fly, because people are complex and there are all sorts of defenses and things, okay? But my first one is really simple. It’s, “I know you didn’t get that and I know that you’ve actually turned out really well given that you didn’t have it.

If you could’ve had it, what would it have looked like? If you could rewrite your history, what did you need in those times? Did you need what you got, or did you need a bit more?” Then a second question to follow up might be something along the lines of, how do you think you could have turned out differently again if you did have these things?

Let’s do that counterfactual where we say, “Okay, so yeah, you did turn out fine. I know you didn’t have it. But imagine if you did have it, what would’ve happened then? How would you have turned out differently?” To me that’s really powerful, but it’s very hard for some people to put themselves in that situation.

Marie: Yeah. Especially if they see their strengths having come from adversity.

Justin: Yeah. We’ve got to acknowledge that. We can actually say, “Yeah maybe you going through that hardship did work out for you. But statistically it hasn’t worked out well for a lot of people. So on average it doesn’t work out, but there’s people either side of the average.

Fortunately, for you it worked out pretty well. But imagine what it could’ve looked like if you’d had that additional support. How would that have changed you?” The second one that I think should be universally useful is just to say “When were you born?” ‘Cause if they say, “Oh, I was born in 1973,” or, “I was born in 1986,” it’s just, it’s a different world.

[38:00]

Yeah, you didn’t have that, and you grew up at a time that is so different. You did not have extreme and violent pornography on tap. And just for a comparison and contrast for a sec, the stats in Australia that I use for the book, these are peer-reviewed, verified stats, indicate that young men aged 15 to 29, 34% of them are consuming pornography on a daily basis.

34% of 15 to 29-year-olds are consuming pornography on a daily basis, and a further 53% are consuming it weekly. Which means that 87% of young men 15 to 29 in Australia are consuming pornography on at least a weekly basis If you’re born prior to the internet pornography age, the numbers just don’they’re not even close.

And Andrew Tates and people like the extreme influencers of the manosphere, they did not exist, and if they did, you had to look very hard to find them. The world is a different place. There were no online mobs that smelt blood in the water and circled and went in for the kill. There were no memes that went global. There was a meme a couple of years ago that went absolutely bonkers from a guy called Nick Fuentes. He’s a white nationalist guy over in the United States, and he posted “Your body, my choice forever.” Posted that on, I think it was on X, Twitter. Got more than 90 million views, right?

Your body, my choice forever. That one tiny little line, 90 million views, and it entered the lexicon of schoolboys in the classroom saying it, chanting it to the girls around them, both in the US, Canada, the UK, and even in Australia. I would just say to the man sitting in front of me who says, “I didn’t have any of this sort of stuff, and I turned out fine.”

I’d say, “Yeah, you did. What year were you born? And how is it different for our boys today?” Again, it’s just that perspective-taking activity that we’ve talked about ad nauseam.

Marie: Yeah. So if someone’s listening to this and they’re thinking, “Oh, crap, where do I even start?” What’s one thing they can do different tonight, today?

Justin: So if you think that having had this conversation that you really just need to sit down with your son and say, “We need to talk,” I would suggest that’s a bad idea. He’s gonna be like, “What have you listened to? What workshop did you go to? What book have you been reading?” Oh, my goodness.

[40:00]

Here we go. So there’s a couple of things. Actually, just on that, this is gonna sound like a shameless plug for my book. I. Do you know what? I’m really proud of it, I’m gonna shamelessly plug it. A guy walked up to me about a week and a half ago. This random guy walks up to me and goes, “Hi, my name’s John.

You don’t know me. I’m just some random guy.” And I’m like, “It’s okay. It happens all the time. No worries.” He said, “I saw you, I followed you on social media for a while, but I just had to tell you about your new book.” And I’m like, “Great.” I’m the kind of person who really likes the affirmation of strangers, so I’m like, “Tell me everything.”

It sounds so pathetic. I’m 50 years old, and I’m still going, “Oh, tell me how good I am.” But this guy said, “I haven’t read the book, but my boss and I were talking about you ’cause he’s reading your book, and he’s reading it with his son. He’s got a 15 or 16-year-old son, and they’re reading it together.”

Marie: I love that.

Justin: I didn’t write it for the boys themselves, but he said this guy was literally saying it’s completely changed his relationship with his son as they’re going through it together. They’re having the hard conversations, and they’re talking about the boy’s experience versus what I’ve written, and where it is consistent and where it’s inconsistent, and they’re understanding each other, and Dad’s saying, “Oh yeah, when I was a kid nothing like this happened.”

Or, “I remember I did this dumb thing.” So that’s a shameless plug. Buy the book and read it with your son. Like amazing. But beyond that, what I’d suggest is, you’ve got a water bottle that you’ve picked up and drunk from a couple times, so let’s use your water bottle ’cause I don’t have one near me as we’re having this chat.

If you wanna have a really great relationship with your partner or your child, your son, your daughter, it doesn’t matter who, your mother-in-law, it comes down to two things. It comes down to trust. Trust is believing the other person’s gonna act in your best interest, right? And too many of our boys are looking at us as parents and saying, “No, you’re not here to act in my best interest.

No you’re just here to get me in trouble, and I don’t know what. I don’t know what you’re on about, but you’ve got an agenda and I don’t like it.” So they don’t trust us. But trust comes from connection, and that’s where the water bottle comes in. So that water bottle represents your relationship with your son.

[42:00]

The water in the bottle represents the quality of the connection you have. So if you’ve got a full water bottle, then the water bottle is really useful. It’s really good, it’s really positive, and you need that water bottle in your life, right? Because connection, oh my goodness, water. Hello. This is the whole purpose.

Connection, by the way, my definition of connection is feeling seen, heard, valued, and accepted. Four things. Seen, heard, valued, and accepted. Too many of our kids don’t feel seen, heard, valued, and accepted, therefore, they think that they can’t trust us. Why? ‘Cause we’re always getting them in trouble. Instead of connection in the bottle, it’s correction and direction.

That’s the air. A lot of us, especially with our teenagers, boys or girls, we’re walking around with empty water bottles. That is, our relationships are lacking connection, they’re full of correction and direction. And Marie, I’m thinking about your couples therapy as well.

If you’re in a relationship with somebody, and it’s nothing but correction and direction, if all that ever happens in this relationship is that you tell me what to do and when to do it and how to do it and why I didn’t do it right, and do it like this, not like that, and for goodness sakes, do I have to do everything for you?

If our relationship’s nothing but correction and direction, what am I gonna do with the relationship? What am I gonna do with the water bottle? There’s no water in it.

Marie: Yeah, I see it in couples and in families where they think the “I love you” is implied, but over a week, things have to get done, right?

Pick up your stuff, don’t leave that there. Have you packed your bag? Load the dishwasher. But then there’s no turning positively towards bids for connection, and there’s no, “That was really well-handled. I think you’re really cool.” The things that really shit you are the same qualities you might really love, you just wish you weren’t on the receiving end from, right?

It’s like, “Man, they’re really stubborn, and it’s driving me nuts, but the flip side of that is you really stick to what you believe in, and while it’s shitting me in this moment, good on you.” They don’t hear that, and I had a family therapy session actually several months ago where the whole family came in and were all against the one kid.

There was, like, seven of them, and everyone was correcting him. Everyone was correcting how he played this particular sport, let’s say it was hockey, and all he wanted was to have fun. And he’s like, “I don’t want to be a hockey player. I just like hockey for fun.” They’re like, “We had no idea. We just thought you wanted to improve.”

[44:00]

And everyone’s like, “I’ll do this with you, and you should improve how you hold this, and we’ll do this, and you’re not waking up early enough to get another training in.” And they were all correcting him to the point where he stopped wanting to play hockey, and then they were like, “Now you’re not even trying,” and were even more suffocating.

He just wanted to have fun.

Justin: Do you know the insidious thing about what you’ve just said, though, is that it’s well-intentioned.

Marie: Yes.

Justin: It’s not like they’re trying to. The person who’s doing the correction and direction, they’re not trying to ruin the kid’s life or their partner’s life or whoever.

They’re actually trying. In their mind, they’re helpful.

Marie: Yeah.

Justin: Let me use this for a bit of therapy for me for just a second. I was with my mum recently. My mum is an optimiser. She is a maximizer. She is a no-matter-how-well-it’s-done-it-could-definitely-be-done-better kind of person. She corrects me on how I write my books.

She hasn’t written any books ever. She doesn’t have a PhD in psychology, but she’s definitely gonna sit there and edit my book and tell me how it could’ve been better. She likes to correct everyone all the time about everything. And we were together recently. There was an incident that occurred, and she started to tell me how I could’ve done it better.

I said, “Mum, you’re tipping the water out of the cup right now.” I’m a 50-year-old man. I’m actually really happy with how I did it. I’m not trying to maximize it, I’m not trying to optimise it, and I need our relationship to be such that you can just let me make my decisions without the judgment, without the correction and direction, without what’s going on.

Would that be okay? And it was so hard for her. She was just like, “No, because in my mind, if there is the possibility of something being better, I’ve got to let you know.” Because in her mind, she’s helping. And I’m like, “No. It’s not helping. If I need your help, I’ll let you know.” Yeah. Sorry, thank you for letting me have that therapy session.

But that’s what we’re doing in our relationships with our sons and our daughters. We’re looking at them and going, “Oh, you’ve got so much potential.” And they’re like, “But I’m not trying to achieve my potential right now. I just wanna get through being an adolescent ’cause it kinda sucks.”

Or, “‘Cause I’m trying to have fun doing this thing.” And so long as we’ve got the morality stuff and we’re having the moral conversations, I think that we should give them a bit of space to hopefully do the inner work so they can figure out what they value themselves.

[46:00]

Marie: Yeah. I’ll add to that. We often talk about little kids and just having free play, and needing an adult to just play with them, and I think teenagers miss out on that. Everything is optimised and intensified, and has to lead into a goal.

And so having child-led, teenager-led activities just for the connection building, just to fill up that water, not from a hidden agenda, not for a lesson learned. If they just wanna go and shoot hoops, great. If you wanna play a video game together, fine. Have some things that you do that is just you in their world with no hidden agenda.

Justin: We do some of that in our own lives as adults. We’ve all got our things. I’m a cyclist, I’m a surfer, and I’ve got a couple of hobbies and habits that are just, they’re for me and I love them. But we see our kids wasting 20 seconds. We’re like, “What are you doing? Need to optimise.

Need to help you fulfill your potential ’cause it’s a tough world out there. You’re never gonna be able to buy a house if you don’t study hard or whatever it is.” One of my favourite questions to ask parents, Marie, is, parents will be like, “Oh, I just want them to fulfill their potential.” And I’ll say, “At what age did you fulfil yours?”

And they always go quiet. It’s like, “Still working on that.” I’m like, “Yeah. Let’s not expect that our 17-year-olds or our our nine-year-olds are going to have fulfilled their potential. This is a. Let’s just focus on good relationships and some learning and growth, which will happen naturally if the environment is supportive.”

Marie: Yeah, I love that. And people can find you on your podcast, which you do daily, almost daily?

Justin: Yeah, I know, it’s a lot, but we’ve got a daily pod. It comes out every weekday. The Happy Families podcast.

Marie: And check out your back catalog of books, and your most recent one, Boys.

Justin: Boys: Building Strong Young Men from the Inside Out.

Marie: Great. Thank you so much for your time. I could talk to you for hours about this. It is such an interesting topic.

Justin: Oh, you’re a great chatter. You’re someone who’s wonderful to talk to.

I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

Marie: And hopefully your mum can teach you some ways to optimise your 12th book.

Justin: There won’t be a 12th book, Marie. I’m done. I’m done. And you know, I’m so tired of writing books.

Marie: Maybe it’s grandparenting. That’s ’cause you’re not doing it right. You should listen to her.

Justin: You got that right. I’m sure she’d be able to help me.

[48:00]

Marie: Look, it’s so tricky ’cause it is the thing that everyone says, “I just want to help.” And sometimes I think it’s them not wanting to feel irrelevant anymore, or, yeah, that they think that’s helping.

But often we want connection, ’cause otherwise we just stop sharing with them, and they miss out. It’s so complicated.

Justin: I’m thinking that when I write her eulogy, I should write it before she passes so that she can go through it and make sure that it’s right.

Marie: I think that’s probably really smart. Thanks for your time today.

Justin: Great to chat. Thanks, Marie.