There’s a story Australia keeps telling itself: that boys are just “going through a phase,” that they’ll sort themselves out eventually, that school behaviour is a discipline issue rather than a cultural one.
The data says otherwise.
Australian boys dominate nearly every marker of social failure. They account for over 70% of school suspensions. More than 90% of youth detainees and prisoners are male. Three quarters of suicide deaths are male. Psychological distress among young men is rising, while optimism about the future is collapsing.
Boys are disengaging earlier, disconnecting faster, and falling further behind – not just academically, but relationally. When boys lose connection to school, the damage reappears later in life as unemployment, addiction, violence, loneliness and incarceration.
The common thread isn’t aggression. It’s disconnection.
Yet our predominant response inside schools has been tighter control: more compliance, more exclusion, more removal from community. Order instead of belonging and relational accountability.
The truth is that our boys don’t grow into better men because they were well-contained children.
They become better men because they learned how to stay in relationships when things go wrong – how to face up to the harms they cause when they fuck things up, and how to personally repair broken trust. Exclusion teaches none of that. It teaches boys how to leave.
When boys are relationally disconnected from school, it’s too often women who pay the price down the track. Our country’s women are far more likely to be harmed by isolated, bitter men that they already know than any other demographic.
It’s dangerous and neglectful for us not to open our eyes about this.
Schools can’t fix a society. But they can fix their own growth culture.
Schools control how mistakes are handled and who stays within the community. Whether harm leads to exile or to repair. Whether accountability means rejection or authentic responsibility.
Across Australia, schools that have shifted towards relationship-centred discipline are seeing suspension rates fall dramatically, while engagement levels simultaneously rise. It’s not happening because they lowered their expectations, but because their boys are taught how to face consequence without losing belonging.
In these schools, suspension becomes a protective pause instead of a punishment. Boys are routinely expected to acknowledge harm, make amends and then return with their dignity intact.
That work is harder than punishment and it practices something we should want as a defining hallmark of our men… courage.
It’s also the work that actually shapes boys into men who can belong, contribute and regulate themselves in a complex world.
The question isn’t whether our boys are in trouble. They clearly are.
The real question is whether schools (and their systems) are prepared to do the cultural work required to build better ones before we lose more of them to the manosphere.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. Our boys can’t wait. That’s why I’m running a 60-minute workshop, The Better Boys Blueprint, to help schools replace outdated discipline with a clear, relational approach that actually works.
If you’re a school leader who is ready to stop reacting to behaviour and start growing better boys, I’d love to see you there.
The Better Boys Blueprint Workshop
Thursday 12 March 2026
2.00pm AEDT
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