Such deep and practical wisdom throughout! Very well written

There is much truth in this book about how we father’s need to do better and how we are one of the only cultures without a ritual into manhood, but much of it rings hollow to me. First, I believe that deliberately causing your child to feel pain is cruel. If I had subjected my boy when he was thirteen to swimming in ice cold water, he would probably have felt hurt and betrayed. Also, the things the author claims his son said to him at such a young age seem developmentally impossible. Maybe this method of raising a son worked for him because his child is thirty years more mature than all other thirteens year old boys. Finally, while I truly believe he’s on to something that we need to change in the US when it comes to raising our boys, I just feel this is an over the top and sometime cruel way of doing it. If you do gain something from this book, the statistics and graphs and so forth are excellent. Barna, the publisher, does excellent work in this regard when it comes to collecting and analyzing data.