Men in the Making

A Blueprint for Raising Good Men

Every boy contains, in potential, the man he is meant to become. The question is whether the adults in his life will know what to do with that potential—or whether they will settle for a boy who simply behaves.

Free Men in the Making is a practical and philosophically grounded guide to the education and formation of boys, written by Alvaro de Vicente, the headmaster of The Heights School, one of America's most distinctive schools for boys. Drawing on decades of experience working with students, parents, and educators, de Vicente argues that the goal of raising boys is not compliance but freedom—not the shallow freedom of doing whatever one pleases, but the deep freedom of a man who has developed the self-mastery, virtue, and faith to consistently choose what is genuinely good.

The book examines the forces working against that formation—the softening effects of affluence, the hollow shortcuts of screens and pornography, the cultural confusion about what manhood is actually for—and offers concrete, experience-tested tools for parents and educators: how to build a relationship of trust with a teenage son, what paternal presence actually looks like in practice, how to cultivate the moral imagination, and how to form boys in loyalty, generosity, and hope.

Free Men in the Making is not a book of theories. It is the distillation of a life spent watching boys become men—and understanding, sometimes slowly, what makes the difference.