One of the things that struck me most during a recent trip to India was the completely unselfconscious affection between boys and men.
You’d see young blokes walking down the street with arms draped over one another, holding hands or leaning into each other physically in ways that would immediately attract suspicion or awkwardness in Australia. Nobody stared, whispered or sexualised it. It was simply accepted as a normal and healthy expression of closeness between males.
And honestly, it made me feel a bit sad about us.
Western cultures seem to have ingrained in boys and men that public affection is dangerous territory. We’ve become deeply suspicious of male warmth, particularly in environments involving children and young people. And I understand exactly why safeguarding matters and why schools must take student safety extraordinarily seriously. However I also wonder whether we’re inadvertently throwing away something profoundly important in the process.
Schools desperately need good men.
They don’t need superheroes, disciplinarians, camp volunteers or token “male role models” wheeled out to bark at the worst behaved boys. We need emotionally healthy, relationally skilled men who can show young people that masculinity is also warmth, affection, gentleness and connection without any of that being interpreted as weakness or threat.
If we really do want more men in schools, then at some point we also need to trust them professionally. And we need to do it despite both the risks and our fears.
I speak to male teachers all the time who feel deeply cautious about physical proximity, emotional closeness or relational warmth with students because they are terrified of how ordinary human interactions might be perceived. Some actively avoid comforting distressed students. Others maintain emotional distance because the professional risk feels too high.
That’s not healthy for schools and it’s certainly not healthy for boys growing up already starved of emotionally available men.
To be crystal clear, safeguarding matters enormously and schools absolutely should have strong professional boundaries and expectations. There are predators in the world and schools must remain vigilant about protecting children. But the existence of harm does not automatically mean suspicion should become the defining lens through which all male care and affection is viewed.
In India, men do not stop placing an arm around a mate because somewhere, sometime, a terrible act has been committed by another man. They don’t abandon a healthy cultural behaviour because of the existence of risk. And I wonder whether western schooling has slowly conditioned itself into fearing male warmth so much that we are now struggling to distinguish danger from decency.
The irony is that many of the boys we are most worried about growing into disconnected, emotionally stunted or aggression-driven men are precisely the boys who most need healthy affection, healthy connection and healthy examples of emotionally secure masculinity around them every day.
So perhaps alongside asking, “How do we keep students safe?” we also need the courage to ask another important question: “When are we going to trust good men to help raise good young people?”
Because I honestly don’t think boys learn healthy masculinity from distance, suspicion and emotional sterility.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. While we’re on the topic of trusting people, I’ve been thinking about what happens when students start trusting AI more than their own judgement. That’s the focus of my next workshop, The AI-Ready Student. It’s not really about technology. It’s about helping young people develop the courage, discernment and relational skills they’ll need in a world where answers are becoming easier to access than ever.
The AI-Ready Student Online Workshop
Tuesday 23June 2026
Want to subscribe to Adam’s Home Truths? Simply subscribe here.