A lot of what schools are dealing with in boys is less bad behaviour than masked disconnection.
NYU professor Scott Galloway, author of Notes on Being a Man, argues that men are not built for isolation. Statistically they suffer more when relationships thin out: shorter lives, poorer health, higher risk-taking and greater despair.
Louis Theroux’s recent and hugely popular documentary Inside the Manosphere exposes the same pattern from another angle. Many of the young men drawn into those online spaces aren’t there because they’re villains; they’re there because they’re lonely. When belonging is weak, behaviour – and too often ideology – become the substitutes.
That’s why restorative practice matters far beyond behaviour management.
Used well, it keeps boys in relationship when every instinct tells them to push away or be pushed out. It refuses the easy exit of exclusion as the primary response and instead demands something harder: stay, face the impact, repair the harm and return with dignity intact.
From experience, schools that use restorative practices well are authentically interrupting lonely futures. They teach boys that strength includes repair, that accountability doesn’t require humiliation and that being called back into relationship is not a threat to masculinity. Moreso, it’s an essential part of it.
Boys learn that when they mess up, they’re not discarded. They’re expected to grow.
This matters because many boys are already walking a narrow social bridge. They have fewer and fewer close friendships, subsequently using less emotional language as part of their daily existence. There’s more pressure on them to perform and less permission to be uncertain.
The online “manosphere” thrives in exactly that gap. When schools respond to mistakes with removal alone, it unintentionally reinforces the same message those spaces trade on: relationships are conditional and the world is against you.
Schools that hold the line restoratively resist this isolative tide. They combine clear boundaries with relational follow-through. They challenge behaviour without withdrawing care. They make belonging contingent on responsibility, not perfection.
Over time, that shapes young men who know how to stay connected under strain – at work, in friendships and in families. That happens not because they were protected from consequences, but because adults were strong enough to stay in relationship when it would have been easier not to.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. If you’re ending too many days with a sore throat, a fried brain and a stack of behaviour issues whirring around in your head, join my next all-day workshop, The Restorative Classroom Playbook on Friday 8 May 2026, live and online.
It’s a full day where we get properly practical about what to say, what to do and how to reset things when they go off track. You’ll leave with your own playbook, built for your class and ready to use straight away.
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