Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,” the Greek philosopher Aristotle famously once said. He meant that those formative years are the most important – that the way we raise children when they’re young lays the foundations for the adults they will become.
For a 2,300-year-old theory, it’s aged remarkably well. Pretty much all modern psychotherapy is predicated on the premise that what happens in infancy and the relationship we have with our primary caregiver/s is fundamental to what we’re like (and the issues we’ll struggle with) later in life. And, arguably, his words could be just as relevant when it comes to what has been dubbed the “male loneliness epidemic”. The way we bring up boys seems to create lonely men; the negative consequences of this are being felt throughout society.
