God Made Your Son to Build. You Are Training Him Not To.
Ten practices from social science and Scripture for parents who want something different
In my post, Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men,” I described why evangelical culture tends to produce risk-averse men rather than builders. I promised a practical follow-up with solutions. What follows is drawn from peer-reviewed social science research and from the theological work of Gerard Van Groningen in From Creation to Consummation, his study of Genesis 1-3. Each point carries both the research and concrete language fathers can use with their sons, because formation that lasts requires both the practice and the story underneath it. Ten practices, each supported by a study and rooted in Scripture, is written for parents, teachers, and mentors to (1) understand the research, (2) understand what it means practically, and (3) ideas about how to talk to young men theologically about these issues.
What follows is how to take the bubble wrap off the lad.
1. Model building behavior yourself.
Sons do not absorb risk tolerance from instruction. They watch their fathers operate under uncertainty and internalize the pattern as the normal picture of adult male life. A 2015 study in the Journal of Labor Economics, using Swedish adoption data to separate genetics from environment, found that having an entrepreneurial parent increases a child’s probability of entrepreneurship by approximately 60 percent. Nurture accounted for twice as much of this effect as genetics, and the same-sex transmission was especially strong. Entrepreneurial fathers shape sons more powerfully than any other single variable the study identified.
What This Means In Practice: Run a business, build something, fix things, or take on visible professional risk of some kind, and let your son see you doing it. Bring him to the job site, the workshop, or the client meeting. If your current work does not involve building or risk, find something outside of work that does and pursue it where your son can watch.
How To Talk To Your Son Theologically: When your son watches you work, name what he is seeing in terms larger than the task. Tell him: “What I’m doing right now is part of what God put us here for. He made this world and handed it to us to develop. Every time someone builds something or solves a real problem, they’re doing what Adam was supposed to do in the garden.” When he asks why you keep working on something difficult, tell him: “Because God made us to be the kind of people who finish what we start. He gave us this world and expects us to do something with it.” Give him language for work that goes beyond salary and stability.
Lindquist, Sol & van Praag, “Why Do Entrepreneurial Parents Have Entrepreneurial Children?,” Journal of Labor Economics, 2015. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/678493
2. Normalize risk before age ten.
The years between seven and ten have a disproportionate effect on whether a boy develops a durable tolerance for uncertainty. Research shows that parental communication framing risk as dangerous during this window suppresses entrepreneurial intent in adolescence, even in families where the parents are themselves entrepreneurs and builders. Let young boys climb things, fail at things, break things, fix things, and attempt tasks they may not yet be ready for. The parental discomfort that arises in those moments is not a reliable signal to intervene.
What This Means In Practice: When your son tries something difficult and fails, your first response sets the tone for how he will relate to failure for years. Respond with curiosity rather than concern, ask what he learned, and encourage him to try again rather than moving him to something safer. Watch the impulse to intervene before he has had a genuine chance to struggle, because that impulse, however loving, is the primary mechanism by which risk aversion gets transmitted from parent to child.
