Before they become men, boys need a place to belong

By  Eric Mungai

Founder & CEO

Yazua Afrika

What you need to know:

• Boys are constantly being shaped by the people, institutions and environments around them, raising questions about who is responsible for guiding their journey into manhood.
• From family and school to sport, religion and social media, the environments boys encounter teach them what masculinity, power, courage and responsibility mean.

How is a man-made? What constitutes the making of a man? Can it be learned, taught, practised, observed, copied? Is manhood something a boy simply grows into, or is it something that must be intentionally formed?

Human societies have wrestled with this question for thousands of years. Every culture has had its own answers, its own rituals, expectations, elders, institutions and stories about what a boy should become.

And perhaps there is something deeply human in that instinct. We have always understood that boys do not simply wake up one morning as men. They become men. He encounters boundaries. He experiences failure. He learns what earns approval, what attracts ridicule, what receives respect and what gets him excluded.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he begins to construct an answer to one of the most important questions of his life: What does it mean to be a man here? That answer is never created in isolation.

It is formed by fathers and mothers, brothers and friends, teachers and coaches, churches and schools, music and sport, culture and community, screens and algorithms. Every environment a boy enters is teaching him something about power, courage, friendship, sex, responsibility, work, love, status and belonging.

Are we paying attention to what is being taught? Our work with boys has led us to a simple conviction: Boys need formation, structure and purpose. These are three conditions that help a young person develop into a man with an increasingly coherent sense of identity, responsibility and direction. Formation asks: Who am I becoming?Structure asks: How do I learn to live it?Purpose asks: What is my life for?

The first is where we must begin. The dictionary defines formation as the act of giving form or shape to something, or of taking form. This definition should make every adult who cares about boys pause. Because a boy is always taking form, not whether he will be formed … He will.

But by whom, by what, and towards what end? This is where as a people, nation and society we have made a profound mistake. We increasingly left the formation of boys to chance and then acted surprised when the outcomes troubled us.

The military, traditional societies, religious communities, sport teams and gangs understand formation. They create environments where expectations are clear, behaviour is observed, competence is practised, failure has consequences and belonging comes with responsibility. Not that every old system was good, nor that every traditional model should be recovered. Some of those systems produced extraordinary strength alongside profound injustice.

The lesson is simpler. Containers matter and the environment surrounding a boy shapes what becomes normal to him. If the most compelling container available to a boy teaches him that masculinity is dominance, his understanding of manhood will begin to organise itself around dominance.

If that container teaches him that status comes from money at any cost, he will learn to pursue status, that vulnerability is weakness, he learns to hide, that cruelty is power, he becomes cruel simply to belong.

And if the adults around him offer no compelling alternative, the most attractive, influential and at times powerful voices available will gladly do the teaching, which they have. This is why the formation of boys cannot be treated as an accidental by-product of growing up.

If we have a problem with the men we have, we must look at the containers teaching the boys. Look at gambling, a young man repeatedly exposed to a culture that promises wealth without patience can begin to confuse risk with ambition and chance with strategy.

Alcohol and substance abuse, a young man who has never been given meaningful ways to process pain, failure, loneliness or disappointment soon discovers chemical escape, because no one has taught him or helped him discover emotional language. Through understanding of power, and how it plays out publicly, where leadership is presented primarily as status, wealth, influence and personal glory, boys learn through observation, to desire authority without developing the character required to carry it.

These are not individual failures; they are formation failures that have continued to break our sons. A boy remains responsible for the choices he eventually makes. But before he becomes responsible for his choices, adults and institutions are responsible for the environments in which those choices are being shaped.

This is why boys need more than instruction, they need spaces where experience allows for challenges that forge character, boundaries that form ideas and responsibilities that stir leadership. They need containers where they can fail without being abandoned, competence can be earned, courage coexists with tenderness, and strength is understood as something larger than the capacity to dominate.

A boyneeds adults who are willing to participate in his becoming,not simply watch him grow. This is the work of formation. And perhaps the most important thing we need to understand is this: Our sons are going to become something.The question before us is not whether they will be formed, but whether we will be intentional about what is forming them because every boy is becoming a man and every generation has a responsibility to decide what kind of manhood it makes possible.

The writer is the founder & CEO of Yazua Afrika, a boys' development organisation.