Shaping Your Son’s Moral Imagination

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on his writing.

Boys begin to develop an understanding of the world far before they begin to think deeply about it. As early as infancy, they begin to develop a pre-conceptual understanding of reality before they can articulate propositionally what they think about the world. For instance, how a father relates to his newborn child already begins to shape that child’s understanding of the world. Does he hold him and play with him? That communicates one message. Is he absent for long stretches of time? That communicates another.

What is the Moral Imagination?

This implicit, pre-conceptual vision of the world we can call the moral imagination. It is moral insofar as the vision implies value judgements and moral principles. It relates to the imagination insofar as it is not propositional, but graphic and evolving. What a boy sees as good (and, therefore, attractive) and what he sees as evil (and, therefore, repulsive) are informed by his moral imagination before he can articulate rationally why he sees the world as such. What rules govern reality, moreover, is part of his moral imagination.

A boy’s moral imagination touches every aspect of his life because it is the frame through which he views the world. Whatever parents or teachers explicitly communicate to a boy is received in the broader context of how he implicitly understands the world and his place in it. How he responds to events in his life, the way he approaches decisions to be made, and the manner in which he relates to others are all informed by a boy’s moral imagination. In short, the moral imagination is the all-encompassing story through which one sees the particular episodes of his life. Is this life a comedy? A tragedy? A romance? A mix? Is there even any meaning to life? Or is life merely a series of happenings, full of sound and fury, ultimately signifying nothing? One’s moral imagination informs his answer to such questions.

Developing a Persona

Besides developing a pre-conceptual vision of the world, boys also quickly begin to place themselves in that world; they form personae. As they attempt to figure out who their character is in the story of their lives, adolescent boys are often like chameleons: they put on different personae, as they attempt to fit into different crowds. An important part of the path to maturity involves discovering one’s deepest, truest persona—the man they are really meant to be—and detaching oneself from those other personae, those false characters whose part they have at times played.

Whether his moral imagination harmonizes with the truth of reality matters. If his idea of how the world works is off, then he will be like a man playing soccer who thinks that he is playing baseball.

Shaping a Boy’s Moral Imagination

Even before engaging boys on a conceptual level, parents and schools ought to think deeply about what sources are shaping their boys’ moral imagination, for regardless of whether parents or teachers think much about it, a boy’s moral imagination will be shaped. There is considerable irony in the fact that as we have become increasingly protective of boys in an effort to guard them against physical harm, we have simultaneously been strangely permissive when it comes to protecting them from psychological and moral harm. Parents who would never consider letting their boy bike without a helmet, climb a tree, or walk home from school unaccompanied think nothing of providing them with a smartphone.

How can parents and teachers shape the moral imagination of their boys? By having a vision themselves and communicating that vision both directly and, more importantly, indirectly. As the proverb goes: vision without action is a daydream, action without vision is a nightmare.

Protecting, Promoting, Shaping, Deepening

To be more concrete, parents and teachers can influence the moral imagination of their boys in at least four ways: by protecting, promoting, shaping, and deepening.

When a boy is young, we can protect his view of reality by avoiding harmful influences from entering his world. As they get older, strict protection becomes less possible and, in some ways less, desirable. We don’t want to isolate our boys, but to filter what they take in.

We promote the right vision by encouraging the reading of good and great books, and providing opportunities for interaction with other families and peers whose worldview accords with our own. To this end, schools whose vision aligns with that of the parents can be an invaluable resource.

We can shape the imagination through conversations, both planned and unplanned, that transmit in a more direct way our vision of reality and the reasons for it. Car rides and dinner time provide great opportunities for conversation, as do unplanned conversations in the hallways at school. At times, perhaps even many times, the most important conversations will arise at moments that are inconvenient for us, when we feel least prepared because we are tired after a long day, or stressed because of an impending due date, or upset for some other reason. In those moments, don’t push off the question until tomorrow because it may not come out the next day and, if it does, the boy may not be as open as he was when he had first mustered the courage to ask in the first place. An important corollary to this: prepare for possible important topics in advance, so that when he asks a tough question you have already been thinking about it for some time.

I should add that, in my experience, simply lecturing a boy is often the least effective way to shape his moral imagination. Long-winded discourses, no matter how eloquently crafted, tend to fall on deaf ears. Conversations, in which parents or teachers listen as much as they speak, point to examples that inspire, and comment on events our boys have witnessed, are a much more effective way to shape the moral imagination.

The Importance of Prayer

Lastly, parents can deepen the moral imagination of their sons by praying. What a boy hears his parents pray for implicitly shows a boy what things really matter. Moreover, what a parent asks his son to pray for indirectly communicates what things really matter. If a parent consistently prays and asks his son to pray for his friends, for example, over time the boy will come to see that friendship matters.

Perhaps the most effective way to shape our sons’ moral imagination is through our own example. This is especially true of our reactions to events that happen, whether in our own life or in the news. If we consistently react to events with a sense of despair, they will likely begin to acquire a negative view of reality; they will begin to think that life is really a tragedy, even if we or they would never explicitly say that it is. If we give an optimistic twist to events that happen—not unrealistic, but optimistic—they will begin to view challenges not as things to dread, but as parts of a grand adventure story.

And let’s not forget that boys love adventure stories, that every boy longs to be a hero in the story of his life, and that, in one way or another, that is precisely what he is called to become.