How Mothers Can Stop the Left From Destroying Our Boys

On Mother’s Day, we celebrate all that mothers do for their children and, by extension, for American culture. That’s a beautiful and meaningful expression of gratitude. But, as important as the flowers and chocolates are, there is an underlying point here the political Left is afraid we’ll understand and address.

Mothers bring emotional reasoning that allows not just empathy, but actual human understanding. To see what I mean consider that facts—historical dates, definitions of words, and other rote learning—are important, but are also two-dimensional words or numbers on a page or screen without the emotional understanding that makes an understandable part of our ongoing national story.

It, of course, is not fair to say that men can’t and don’t foster an emotional understanding to their children; it is just that, on average, women are wired to do a much better job at this.

An important way to see this is in school textbooks. The Left has bled many of our children’s textbooks dry by cancelling imperfect but still important heroes. The ones they can’t completely cancel—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other key Founders, as well as select corporate and political heavyweights—they often dehumanize by oversimplifying them into stereotypes.

This results in a shocking lack of understanding of historical and contemporary events in our youth. The Left likes this because it readies the ground for the finishing schools of indoctrination so many American universities have become.

Mothers can and must disrupt this massive dumbing down of our children by showing their sons and daughters how to see historical and other figures as human beings. It is true that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others owned slaves, as The 1619 Project likes to remind us, but these individuals were much more complicated men of their times than that one sad fact can convey.

This is why I wrote my soon-to-be-released book Cool Heroes for Boys for my now 13-year-old son. I wanted to humanize, with real tales of adventure, 20 such men for him and for other boys.

Books like mine are not what the political Left wants our youth to read, as a deeper understanding of these men and issues tends to disrupt their simplistic, anti-American narratives.

Women are more often are better at explaining the emotional and societal landscape that, for example, George Washington once lived in and was partially shaped by in eighteenth century Virginia, or that Elon Musk is a part of today, than men are. But they have to know to do it!

We can’t understand who our nation’s heroes were or are—from Jesse Owens to Neil Armstrong to Abraham Lincoln—if we don’t psychologically try to step into the complex cultures they were a part of.

It is true that most primary and middle school teachers today are women, that they are mostly Democrats, and that they, as actors in the educational systems they are a part of, often don’t give our sons and daughters real, empathetic, heart-pounding understandings of historical and contemporary figures, but this is precisely why mothers need to take this call to action.

Indeed, many have been stepping up by attending schoolboard meetings and going to the podium to push back against the great dumbing down of our children and the use of our kids as political pawns for an activist woke ideology.

But this needs to go to the next level. Mothers, it is hard to ask for more, but consider challenging the Left’s narratives not just with competing or opposing views, but with well-rounded and very human context that will help children and young adults more fully understand the people who gave all this freedom.

Only then will the next generation understand the fragile nature of our liberty, appreciate its champions despite their faults, and thereby build the armor necessary, via educated awareness, to withstand the Left’s false depictions of what America was and is.