Manhood: A Manual

Simplicity is a lost art. These days, many kids can’t get through the day without watching TV, playing video games, or spending time on the computer. Others are not even content with that, wanting to go find entertainment outside the home, at the movies, the mall, or other superficial pastime. They just don’t know how to live simply.

Writing for Lifehack.org, Mike St. Pierre shares six tips for helping your kids learn to love spending quiet time at home:
1. Establish routine.
2. Give them some space.
3. Respect the quiet.
4. Be content with puttering.
5. Establish a Sabbath.
6. Practice hospitality.

Enjoying quiet time at home is a lost art. With so many distractions outside the home, and so many electronic distractions inside the home, it’s hard to teach kids to just be comfortable with themselves.

I think this list is a great start for parents to get their kids out of those bad habits, and establish skills that will help them throughout life, both spiritually and monetarily. Mike also blogs at The Daily Saint, a productivity blog with a spiritual twist that’s worth adding to your feed reader.

It’s that time of year again. The time when the Christmas season — at least the version that’s been created by retailers — begins the day after Halloween. It’s hard to look at what has become of Jesus’ birthday. It’s not like it was any better when I was a kid, but at least then they waited until the day after Thanksgiving to begin ramming commercialism down our throats.

As a father, I struggle every year with trying to teach my sons the true values of Christmas. I want them to be excited about getting toys, but I want them to learn about the best gift they could every receive as well. Over at my new favorite blog, The Simple Dollar, Trent has a similar lament brought on by a toy catalog that his nieces and nephews are marking off their Christmas wish list in.

Christmas catalogs encourage materialism in young children. It creates a desire within them for objects, particularly ones that they did not even conceive of wanting before the Christmas catalog came along. In fact, ideas from catalogs can often overshadow other ideas - nowhere in a catalog, for example, can one find books or highly open-ended creative toys.

Trent suggests a solution that allows kids to pick out their toys, without getting the most expensive and least creative ones forced into their consciousness. He shares a plan that a friend of his uses: put out a blank page in late October, and let kids put things on the list as they think of them. They don’t need to look at a catalog to be told what they need. Instead, they make a list of things that come from their imagination.

My oldest son is obsessed with the toy catalogs. He’ll go through and find at least 10 things in each that he wants, all of which he would not have thought of on his own.

I’ve tried to educate him on the way advertisements work on your brain to convince you of things you might not really believe, and he’s pretty good at noticing it in TV ads.

But for some reason, the toy catalog has full control over him. I think I’ll try to curb his access to them for the rest of this year, and try to keep him away from them altogether next year.

Have you ever been on a job interview and been asked a questions you had trouble answering? What’s the right answer to the question, “Where do you see yourself five years from now?”

According to Crack Interview, the best way to answer is to:

Reassure your interviewer that you’re looking to make a long-term commitment…that this position entails exactly what you’re looking to do and what you do extremely well. As for your future, you believe that if you perform each job at hand with excellence, future opportunities will take care of themselves.

They offer answers to 64 difficult questions, to help you navigate the hiring process and avoid tripping yourself up next time you’re looking for a job.

Everyone makes mistakes. Some more than others. But it takes a mature person to know how to apologize. Today on Dumb Little Man, there are some helpful rules to help you Learn How to Say You’re Sorry.

There are five steps:

1. Give yourself some space and time from the situation.
2. Listen to the quiet, calm voice in your head that’s telling you the right thing to do.
3. When you’re ready, just say you’re sorry. Don’t wait.
4. Make It a Habit.
5. Identify patterns in your life that you need to apologize for over and over, and fix them.

There are certain things a man should know how to do. Tie a knot. Clean a fish. Use a map and compass. Some boys learn these things from their fathers. Others learn them as Boy Scouts.

If you never learned these sorts of things, or know a boy today that needs to learn how to get outside and do something fun, you’re in luck. There are several classic or classic-style books to help you out.

Some of my favorites include:

• The Dangerous Book for Boys
• The American Boy’s Handy Book: Turn-of-the-Century Classic of Crafts and Activities
• The Field and Forest Handy Book: New Ideas for Out of Doors
• The Boy Mechanic: 200 Classic Things to Build
• How To Be The Best At Everything (The Boys’ Book)
• 211 Things a Bright Boy Can Do

I’ve created the Manhood Manual Book Store at Amazon.com to help you find the best books to help boys become men, or to help men relive their boyhood.