A comment on your post "The Danger of Fantasy" talked of separating the masculine from the feminine. My wife & I have 5 children & we home school. We have just one boy. What I've noticed for awhile is that I believe my son actually takes on some female traits. He's somewhat petty. He's very jealous. He's very overdramatic at times. He very much cares what his sisters think about him and cannot stand when they laugh at him. To me these are feminine traits. He's around girls all the time and the 5 girls in our family (my wife & 4 daughters) are exceedingly girly. Is there any advice that you have or things I can to try & steer him away from this feminization? I'm the family provider so there is no way I can spend as much time with him as my wife does and by proxy his sisters. He's a big strong athletic kid but sometimes he's the biggest baby in our family & he has shown LOTS of tendency to avoid confrontation, especially now that he's playing contact sports.It's hard for Alpha fathers to accept that they have sons of lower socio-sexual rank, even though their own behavior often helps cement those Delta or Gamma traits in their sons as they crush any sign of a normally rebellious spirit out of them.
My suspicion is that the boy's behavior is partly the result of being in a heavily female environment and partly the result of having a big, strong, Alpha father. This indicates that the father has to take a two-prong approach to addressing the problem of creeping Gammatude. The first is to ensure that he is occupied in a number of competitive male activities. Not just the sports teams, but also non-sports activities where he can compete and learn that failure isn't a complete catastrophe.
Second, BD needs to start setting him challenges in which he has a reasonable chance of beating BD. I don't mean throwing games, but intentionally choosing games where he can legitimately beat his father. I suspect one reason that he shrinks from confrontation is that he doesn't feel as if he has any ability to compete, so giving him that ability should help address the problem. Also, BD should refrain from either overpraising when his son wins or gloating when he beats his son.
Third, the one thing that should be crushed is any Gamma attempt to reframe defeat as victory or control the narrative through deceit. It doesn't sound like he's that deeply into Gamma for that to be an issue, but if it appears, it should be forthrightly addressed.
