SmartLoving – MRC · SL INSIGHTS Made for Greatness Why the World Needs Strong Men

Rediscovering fatherhood, courage and tenderness as two sides of the same masculine coin.

There’s a quiet suspicion floating around our culture that masculinity itself might be the problem. Strength, competitiveness, risk-taking, the instinct to protect and provide – these are treated less like gifts and more like flaws to be managed. We think that’s a mistake, and we think most fathers, husbands and sons feel the sting of it even if they can’t quite name what’s wrong. 

A few weeks ago, while our grandchildren were playing in a three-story climbing gym, we noticed a dad skip the infant play area to join in with his 2-year-old son. Older kids (including ours) raced excitedly around, but the toddler seemed unperturbed.  

We waited for reality to bite – the toddler was too small to manage many of the obstacles, but dad kept encouraging him. Seeing us watching he grinned and said: “He’ll work it out”.  

And to our surprise he did! After many agonising attempts, he hoisted himself up the series of platforms that were almost as high as he was tall.  

Eventually, he mounted the upper level where he took the slide to the bottom into dad’s triumphant arms. Throughout it all, dad was watching and encouraging him from the sidelines.  

What the Research Shows

For years, a lot of parenting research assumed that ‘traditional’ masculine traits were, at best, neutral for fatherhood, and at worst, harmful to it. A study out of Ohio State University put that assumption to the test.  

Researchers followed new fathers and rated how they interacted with their infants and co-parented with their partners. What they found surprised even the study’s own author: traits like being competitive, daring, adventurous and courageous were linked with higher-quality parenting, not lower.  

The key ingredient wasn’t suppressing masculinity; it was a father who believed he was called to be both nurturing and daring.  

Courage and tenderness, held together, produced the best fathers. Strip either one away and something goes missing. 

That finding lines up with what we already sense in our bones as Christians, even before we’d ever heard of the research: strength was never meant to be shed – it was meant to be given in service. 

Strong: His Body Speaks a Masculine Language 

This is where St John Paul II’s Theology of the Body offers us something for which the culture doesn’t quite have language. He taught that our bodies are not incidental to who we are; they reveal something about our vocation.  

A man’s body, and the drive toward strength, initiative and self-gift that so often accompanies it, is not an obstacle to holiness. It’s raw material for it. 

Christ himself didn’t set masculinity aside to love us. He carried a cross. He drove moneychangers from the temple. And on the same afternoon, he laid down his life freely, for love, holding nothing back.  

That is masculine strength perfected: not strength that dominates, but strength that is poured out.  

Every father who works long hours to provide, who teaches his son to change a tyre or his daughter to ride a bike, who stays calm in a crisis so his family doesn’t have to be afraid – is living out an echo of that same self-gift. 

Raising Sons Who Know Who They Are 

Our sons are watching closely – more closely than we realise – for permission to be both strong and soft-hearted at once.  

If we only ever tell them to be gentle, without also honouring the courage in them, we leave a hole. If we only celebrate the toughness and never make room for hugs and emotional expression, we leave a different hole. 

The heartland of where this comes together is in how a husband strives to love his wife. His perseverance in strength and tenderness – imperfect as it may be – is a manifestation of his masculine spirituality and a witness to all those who encounter them as a couple. 

The invitation for us this week is simple: to thank the men in our lives – not despite their strength, but because of it. Thank them for the ways they carry, protect and provide for the people they love.

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Republished with thanks to SmartLoving. Image via Adobe.