Parenting a teenage son is like standing on the deck of a ship and watching an unfamiliar land slowly come into view. One of the challenges is letting go of the boy you thought you knew and accepting the emerging man.

While teenage girls are a major focus of public anxiety about early sexualisation and alleged ''raunch culture'', teenage boys face an equally difficult transition into adult masculinity. And it's a masculinity too often defined by all-male bonding sessions over alcohol, which results in reckless behaviour and violence.

Australia remains a highly gendered society. For young men, in particular, the public models of acceptable masculinity are still constrained by norms that privilege competitiveness, toughness and an indifference to harm.

There are plenty of young men who buck that stereotype. But it's still one they have to negotiate. Most chillingly, it's a masculinity they may actually come face to face with one night - as an 18-year-old man now fighting for his life in St Vincent's Hospital did on a Kings Cross street recently.

Reports indicate Daniel Christie stopped to help another guy who had been punched to the ground when he was struck and rendered unconscious by the same assailant. He was seriously injured for showing qualities we would like to see in all young men: empathy, concern for others and the courage to stop and help someone he didn't know.