Celia Lashlie is passionate about the stories of adolescent boys. She has visited New Zealand secondary school classrooms and listened to boys tell their stories. The essence of those stories she has distilled in her book He’ll be OK: Growing Gorgeous Boys Into Good Men. Now she has gone back to school, but this time speaking to parents.

Celia asserts that the only acceptable emotion many New Zealand males feel able to express is anger, however if we hope to grow good men, as Celia is fond of saying, then we need to help those young men become more emotionally confident. Celia defines an emotionally confident boy as one who can “ask and answer reflective questions”.

Questions like: “When have you felt scared?” and “When have you felt alone?”. How do we answer these complex questions? We answer them by telling stories. And how will today’s generation of young men, who use an economy of words, tell these stories? In the medium with which they are most familiar—yes, I’m talking about digital storytelling!

And fathers, Celia also challenges us to step up and make time for our sons and time to share our story, because:

If men can begin to share these stories with their sons, with other men and perhaps even with their wives and partners, and if we can honour those stories within our society as they deserve to be honoured, we’ll be taking a significant step forward in guiding our young men successfully across the bridge of adolescence into manhood.

Father and son digital storytelling workshop anyone?