Raise children who stand where others fall

My father, an athlete and a famous soccer player in Romania, taught me that the biggest danger is to fit in—to become a sheep. That was true for surviving communism then, and it is just as true for living in Germany now.

There are two ways to live. One is to move with the current, allowing the structure of the world to shape you and your children. The other is to recognize the scaffolding for what it is and deliberately create something different.

Most people float. They believe they are making choices, but they are simply following paths laid out for them—by governments, corporations, algorithms, industries built to mold behavior before a single conscious decision is made. Children, especially, are swept into this design. By the time a child is five, their patterns have been largely set. By ten, they are fully immersed. By fifteen, they will either move within the structure or they will have been taught to see beyond it.

This is why the science of letting go is not about passive surrender but about releasing the illusions we have been sold and returning to something deeper, something older. It is not about teaching children to “fit in” to a broken system. It is about letting go of the system itself and replacing it with something stronger.

So when you are thinking about childhood obesity remember that it is not just about controlling the weight or about food or the lack of movement. These are only the symptoms of the deeper issue—the inability to create a structure that withstands external forces.

In Iron John, Robert Bly explored a story nearly forgotten—a folktale passed down for centuries about initiation, discipline, and the making of a whole human being. The story follows a young boy who, under the guidance of a wild, untamed figure known as Iron John, learns to break free from the sheltered world of childhood and step into something stronger. It is not an easy path. There is no soft guidance, no indulgence. The boy is forced into deliberate discomfort, into deep transformation.

Bly’s entire thesis is that modern culture has no initiation process. There is no clear moment where a child is guided out of the default world and into something intentional. Without this passage, children remain half-formed, pulled by external forces, never learning the strength that comes from structure.

He writes, “When a boy comes to the edge of the forest, if there is no one there to meet him, he will go in anyway.”

This is where we are. A world where the old initiation structures—community, mentorship, physical challenge, discipline and the presence of parents as mentors —have been stripped away, leaving children to navigate the wilderness alone. And when the world does not shape them with strength, it shapes them with something else: distraction, indulgence, dependence, chaos.

The science of letting go, in this case, is letting go of the illusion that the modern world has a plan for your children. It does not. It has systems. It has markets. It has influences. But it has no design for their strength. That must be built by hand, your hand.

Few modern films have captured this crisis as well as Captain Fantastic (2016). Played by Viggo Mortensen—known best for his role as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings—Ben Cash is a father who refuses to let his children be raised by a decayed system. He removes them from conventional schooling, takes them deep into the wilderness, and raises them with discipline, philosophy, and physical rigor. His children are fluent in literature, history, and survival skills. They are taught to stand where others fall.

But Captain Fantastic does not present this as a perfect solution. When the family is forced to re-enter society, the gaps are clear. The modern world sees his children as strange, out of place. And yet, there is no doubt: they are stronger than the ones raised inside the machine.

Mortensen’s casting is no accident. His role as Aragorn, the ranger-king who resists the decay of civilization, aligns perfectly with this archetype. Tolkien, too, understood this crisis. In The Lord of the Rings, the Shire is a world of comfort, disconnected from the forces shaping the outside world. The hobbits believe they are safe simply because they exist in their own bubble. But safety is an illusion. The world does not protect those who do not prepare for it.

Ben Cash in Captain Fantastic, like Iron John, like Aragorn, represents a lost figure—the adult who builds structure where none exists. The one who refuses to let childhood be dictated by external forces.

The nations that have intervened in the trajectory of their children did not do so through gentle nudges. They cut through the noise. They redefined what was possible.

When Mexico saw its people being consumed by sugar, it fought back—not with vague encouragement, but with a hard policy shift, a tax that made soda consumption plummet.

When Cuba faced economic collapse, its people moved more, ate less processed food, and their health transformed—not because of a wellness trend, but because the environment forced a shift.

For those who understand, that is the only real work to be done.

The modern world would like you to believe that freedom means having no structure at all. The reality is the opposite. Freedom is structure. It is having your own rules, your own governing system, your own non-negotiables. It is standing unmoved while everything around you sways.

What does this mean in practice? It means there is no waiting for external permission. There is no begging institutions to change. There is no illusion that the default environment will ever correct itself. It won’t.

There are only two paths: structure or surrender. The choice is made every day, in every home, in every decision.

The child who grows up in a house where ritual is intact will be impervious to the drift. The child whose time is deliberately shaped, whose body moves according to ancient rhythms rather than modern exhaustion, who sees the scaffolding behind the illusion—this child will stand where others fall.

Be the architect.

And when they come asking for the blueprint, tell them it was never written down.