I grew up in a house with two working parents and six kids. My father went to work and came home to dinner, television, and the couch. My mother worked too, but she also carried most of the responsibility for managing the household. She cooked, organized, planned, shopped, dealt with the kids, managed birthdays and holidays, and tried to maintain some kind of structure in a loud and chaotic home.
I remember one particular night when we got into a particularly boisterous food fight during dinner. The kitchen was a mess. My mother kept trying to get us to stop, but we ignored her completely. Eventually, she broke down crying.
Later that evening, when my father came home, my mother complained angrily, expecting support, expecting him to step in. Instead, he turned his anger toward her and shouted, “What do you expect me to do about it?”
That moment stayed with me because it captured something I would spend years trying to understand.
As a child, I could already see the contradiction. The person carrying the greatest responsibility for managing the household and holding the family together did not possess the authority necessary to effectively manage the family system.
My father’s authority functioned differently. It rested in the fact that he could always escalate further. In our house, conflicts were often resolved by whoever could escalate the farthest, yell the loudest, or create enough emotional intensity that everyone else backed down.
Children learn very quickly where the real authority in a system is. They learn who is scarier, who can make defiance emotionally painful, and who everybody else adapts themselves around.
Very young children test this constantly. A parent says no, and the child looks directly at them while doing the thing anyway. The child is trying to understand something fundamental: How does authority work here?
Will they stay calm and consistent long enough to help me understand the limit, why it matters, and how to develop internal responsibility?
Or will they yell? Threaten? Humiliate? Hit? Escalate until I submit?
Fear always works faster because it bypasses reflection and acts directly on the nervous system. If I can scare you effectively enough, I can produce immediate behavioural compliance without needing cooperation, emotional intelligence, agreement, trust, or internalized values.
That is why coercive authority is so seductive. It is efficient. But it is also developmentally shallow because it produces compliance without helping people develop internal responsibility.
Relational authority develops something very different. It develops reflection, cooperation, emotional regulation, negotiation, perspective-taking, self-regulation, and shared responsibility. It creates understanding instead of submission.
A child who learns cooperation, empathy, and self-restraint through understanding and relationship is developing something very different from a child who complies primarily through fear and threat-based adaptation.
And once children learn that fear creates compliance, they begin reproducing that model everywhere else.
The bully learns that intimidation creates hierarchy. The authoritarian boss learns that fear creates order. The abusive partner learns that emotional domination creates control.
The less people internalize self-regulation, empathy, and cooperation, the more societies rely on external systems of control.
Even prisons operate largely through externally imposed compliance. But high recidivism rates remind us that external control alone does not necessarily help people develop the internal capacities needed to regulate themselves once the surveillance and coercion are removed.
Lasting change requires something deeper than external control. It requires people to internalize self-regulation, empathy, responsibility, and the capacity to reflect on the consequences of their behaviour.
As a teenager, I blamed my mother for the nagging. I blamed her for the fact that none of us listened to her. I would tell her that nothing was ever going to change because there were no consequences and no follow-through. Why should anybody listen when everybody knew she would eventually give up or do it herself?
Blaming her was the only way I knew to try to get her to change.
My brothers responded differently. They dismissed her, and when she pushed, they pushed back harder, often in more openly hostile ways. I did not have that in me. I felt too much guilt watching her struggle.
When I started babysitting, working as a camp counsellor, and volunteering with at-risk kids, I discovered a very different kind of authority. I discovered that I could help create structure, cooperation, emotional safety, and genuine connection without relying primarily on fear, escalation, or domination.
I learned that if I stayed grounded, patient, and compassionate, I could help the kids calm down, reconnect, and cooperate without relying on fear, humiliation, or domination.
I could help de-escalate conflict, make kids laugh, create cooperation, and build environments where people generally got along and felt safer with each other. For the first time, authority stopped feeling chaotic and defeating to me and started feeling meaningful, effective, and emotionally coherent.
Early in my career, I worked in a residential treatment home for young offenders where I saw the same dynamic playing out again. Many staff relied heavily on coercive authority. They threatened consequences, escalated conflict, and controlled behaviour through intimidation, punishment, and physical restraint.
I became increasingly uninterested in simply containing people. I wanted to understand what had shaped them, what they believed about themselves, and what kept driving the behaviours that were destroying their lives and hurting other people. I wanted them to develop empathy, emotional awareness, self-respect, cooperation, and a greater sense of responsibility toward themselves and others.
And that kind of influence requires something very different from coercive authority. It requires relationship. It requires trust. It requires the ability to help people internalize values rather than simply submit to external control.
That experience reinforced something I had already started to understand as a child: coercive authority can regulate behaviour externally, but relational authority helps people develop internal responsibility.
Over time, I also began to understand what phrases like “mama’s boy” were really policing.
Calling a boy a “mama’s boy” is a way of policing boys away from empathy, emotional intelligence, caregiving, cooperation, vulnerability, and relational leadership. Don’t identify with the overburdened person. Don’t question coercive masculinity. Don’t value cooperation over dominance. Don’t become emotionally intelligent. Don’t align yourself with care, negotiation, or relational responsibility.
Become harder. Become more intimidating. Become less affected.
I was never rejecting authority.
I was questioning why coercive authority was treated as more legitimate, mature, or masculine than relational leadership.
Mature authority regulates itself first. It creates structure without intimidation and helps people internalize empathy, emotional regulation, cooperation, and responsibility instead of relying primarily on fear and domination.
Civilizations built primarily on coercion, intimidation, and fear can only advance so far before they become dangerous to themselves.
As human beings gain more technological power, our survival may increasingly depend on whether we can learn to raise children, build institutions, and resolve conflict through emotional maturity, cooperation, and self-regulation rather than domination, coercion, and fear.
