First Person: Steve Harvey on turning boys into men

This weekend, he hosts “Steve Harvey's  Mentoring Weekend For Young Men” on his 120-acre ranch in Dallas, Texas. More than 100 troubled teenage boys from around the country will meet businessmen, family men, athletes, ex-convicts and others who offer personal tools to help them lead successful, responsible lives.

Harvey, 53, says he is in talks with Mayor Kasim Reed to bring his mentoring weekend to Atlanta this fall.

I was very fortunate. My father was in my life until I was 44, [when he passed]. It has made me reflect on where I might be if I didn’t have his direction and his discipline. Really I can say there is not a chance, not even an outside remote possibility that I would be here today, in the position I’m in, if it wasn’t for him.

It made me think of all the people who don’t have fathers, who don’t have male role models to say, “Look, this is what men do, and any other thing that comes your way is not the description of manhood. I’m going to show you what a man is.” My father was that guiding light in my life. If I saw something otherwise on the outside, that didn’t register as manhood to me.

Single mothers are forced to raise these boys, and I tell people all the time, you can turn a boy into a citizen. You can make him God-fearing. You can make him respectful of women. Even doing all of that, you cannot make him a man. He must get that picture from another man. Because there are some intricate details of manhood that only we as men know.

I’ve been doing things like this since I first got into comedy. During the [1990s] I performed at a comedy club in Augusta, and I used to go to visit this youth detention center. I was talking to this group of boys and one was in the ninth grade. I get a letter one day about 10 years later in [Los Angeles] from this guy named Prince. He wrote me to say how I had changed his life. I just had that one visit. The guy was graduating and had a job. And someone asked him at the commencement what made the difference. He said, “Steve Harvey. He came to the youth detention center that I was locked up in and said ‘man, you can change your life'…”

I’m just a guy who comes along and plants a seed. If you get those things into a boy’s head, you have planted a strong enough seed to get him to start making a change on his own whether you are standing there [alongside] him or not.

If you straighten out these boys and turn them into better men, you’re going to have better fathers, better families…

My mother and father were married for 64 years. That’s all I’ve seen. This is what I thought -- that you’re supposed to get married; you’re supposed to run a family. It took me a minute to get it right, but I figured it out. This is my third marriage. I’ve always been a good guy. I just take responsibility for myself as a man. And I’ve worked on all the things I was short on in manhood.

MENTORING WEEKEND

More than 100 teenage boys from Atlanta and around the country will be participating in “The Steve Harvey Mentoring Weekend” in Dallas, Texas. The four-day event starts Thursday and continues through Father's Day. The radio host plans to hold a similar weekend in the Atlanta area this fall. For more information visit www.steveharvey.com.