My oldest son is 23. He lives at home, pays car insurance, phone and other personal expenses. He is working full time, but looking for a job in his field very actively. He is always helping my H with projects around the house and pitches in without being asked. He likes to hang out with his family. I’m pleased with the man he is, even if he’s not in his own place. I would not pressure him to leave home. If he were sitting around playing video games and unemployed I would obviously have a different perspective.
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When I grew up, most of my sibs (like their friends) lived in the family home until they married and moved out, including after completing college, professional school etc. They all worked and helped around the house but no one paid rent.
I moved out to my own apartment after finishing law school because it just felt too crowded to me to return to the family home after having a lot more space for the 6 years I was away in college & law school.
Different strokes are fine as well as everyone is OK with it.
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D’s BIL lives at home. He is in his mid-30’s and has never lived away from home. The family immigrated from the Middle East when the brothers were in elementary school. The joke is that my SIL is the American child & his younger brother is the Arabic child. SIL moved five hours from home after college, and his brother will probably never leave his parents’ house unless he gets married - and even in that unlikely scenario, they might just live with his parents. The brother is a cardiologist, so he’s no lazy shlub playing video games in the basement. It’s just a cultural thing, plain & simple.
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Actually, there is evidence that this generation (women and men do read), what is interesting is many of them prefer physical books. And yes, they do, the members of my son’s chamber group read a lot, and it isn’t just music stuff, 3 of the 4 are men.
There is a problem I think, a friend of mine is going through this. Have known the son since he was like 4, the kid is bright and artistic, was in a gifted program, but he is struggling. 2 years ago he started college, and he basically didn’t finish his first semester, is living at home, and struggling. He shows lack of ambition among other things.
I found this book, Boys Adrift, the author is a PHd in psychology and an MD, and he makes a lot of points in the book that I could see (and understand, I am still processing it). He doesn’t blame any one thing, and he is not blaming DEI or anything else, he bases it on studies that have been done.
One of the big ones, that I think affects both boys and girls but especially boys, is the lack of experiencial learning. What he means is that instead of getting out and seeing things, they are doing it on a computer video screen, that it is different straining tadpoles out of a pond versus looking at it on a computer screeen.
He also mentions learning to read and I think he has a point. When I went to school we started reading in 2nd grade, now they are pushing academics in Kindergarten with this mad rush to catch up (I suspect lot of that is patterning education after Asian systems). Boy definitely learn to read slower, and what happens is kids get labelled (and the guy in the book cites real studies) as being slow, needing help, and get labelled. He said in other countries that don’t push academics early, but use the early years to get kids used to school, they do better than the US (He does use Finland, and I have seen where someone said that was because of girls doing better and overall test scores; but another citing I read said that boys in Finland still do much better than boys in the US).
Too, I think , the lack of physical activity in schools is hurting boys according to him, that schools are now so much about sitting quietly doing your work. Schools have cut back PE, recess, things where boys could get the energy out.
After reading this I am glad we made the sacrifice to send our son to a private school (and believe me, we much rather would not, not just scraping up the tuition, it was also social issues). They did a lot of experiential learning, they did a lot of things outside did trips and such, and they had physical activity). The other problem is schools are a designed to the middle package, and they take very little account of individual needs for the most part and I can see where they craft things that can hurt boys without meaning to. I can only imagine the damage to be honest if they decide AI is the way to teach kids, there goes any experiential learning.
One of the things he mentions that struck a chord, he talked about boys feeling alienated and a lack of agency and said something interesting. He said the video games, generally the shoot em up games, give them agency, they actually control things, and that when they play alongside other people it gives them the ability to do things in a group. He thinks that is why boys get so lost in it. He doesn’t blame video games per se, he is saying the kind of games we are talking about, the shoot em up, GTA, etc, feeds something they are missing.
He also has examples where schools in their desire to create a safe environment have gone too far. He mentioned a kid that was referred to him, where the kid was suspended for writing something they claimed was indicative he was a threat. What triggered it? This was a high school student, and he had written a paper about the Battle of Stalingrad. He said it didn’t pull punches describing the horrors of it and the immediate reaction was he must be a violent maniac. The thing is did the teacher think the battle of Stalingrad was fought with pool noodles? For better or worse speaking from personal experience that is the what boys gravitate towards, they don’t shy sway from realistic descriptions of ugly situations.
One thing he mentioned that didn’t shock me is how many kids are being diagnosed as ADHD are being done without the proper protocol (and being an MD and a psychologist, I suspect he knows them). I had already heard this going back (in gifted kids literature, it is that a lot of the kids diagnosed as ADHD back then were really bright and bored in schools, studies checking IQ showed a lot were at the gifted level and above.) but he mentions the protocol for the diagnosis and how many kids where parents came to him to treat their kids hadn’t been properly diagnosed. I already wasn’t happy about the medicines they use on ADHD, like Ritalin and Alderall, but he had some really wild data about them. First of all, someone actually was able to do a study where they gave these drugs to kids with ADHD vs kids not diagnosed with it. The people running the study were shocked, the drugs showed improvement in the kids who didn’t have ADHD, in test scores, grades, etc. His idea was these are stimulants, which explains why people without ADHD showed improvement. The other one is there is serious long term studies according to him that show that those drugs damage a section of the brain that has to do with motivation, and that he personally when treating kids diagnosed with ADHD told the parents to switch to Welbutrin and other non stimulant drugs.
It isn’t just schools, he says also that young men don’t have other things they once had, that there aren’t the rituals formal and informal that were there to say “now you are a man” and I think that has some truth that goes along with the lack of agency I mentioned. Rituals like the Jewish Bar Mitzvah were about this , about taking responsibility for themselves and others. I will add he is very, very careful not to go into the tropes that are out there, that it is all about girls taking away from boys yada yada. One of the things he rips was this Harvard professor talking about the need for role models, and he used John Wayne as an example, and the author ripped that notion, that the movie image was crap and the real man wasn’t a role model for anything associated with being a man.
We are very happy our son has turned out well but also are aware that it may very well have not gone well. I think my friend’s son shook me about what could have happened with our own son or anyone else’s kids.
By the way, the author isn’t saying girls have it made, he has a book on girls that is equally disturbing, the issues they face.
There is a lot of depth to this book and I also am not selling it as a miracle answer to this or even a full explanation to what is a complex situation, rather it just got me to thinking about what is going on and if others are interested worth seeing how it resonates or doesn’t.
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Our library has it—maybe I will get it. I think I have to be in the mood for a deep read and have too many books I still haven’t gotten to 1st.
Thanks for your detailed comments about the book. Here’s the one about girls.
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My SIL is going to a funeral tomorrow for a friend’s 27 y/o son who ended his life. His father said he was struggling for a long time to find happiness and “ his place and purpose “. This is the 3rd such funeral she has gone to in the last 5 years.
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Deleted… duplicate post.
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From another perspective, I recently finished “Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America” by Ileoma Oluo.
In reading this book, I kept a focus on the perspective it was written from, and thus, to some degree of skepticism. Many interesting views on historical events, and American history in general.
I attended the funeral of a 38-year-old man today. I believe he OD’d. He had mental illness, too. Still very sad. He lived in an apartment managed by the same non-profit organization as my son’s. The manager at his apartment spoke. That choked me up.
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If you already read this article shared above, the one from @vpa2019 is the same one:
Sorry for the duplication. I’ll delete my post.
Getting real here. I live in the Boston suburbs and work in tech. Even the most ardent feminist demands that men pay and will almost always choose (if they can) the assertive, strong ego finance bro over the kinder, gentler teacher. Yes, we can all point out exceptions but they are just that, exceptions.
Women encourage these “traditions” as much as men. Their words may not, but their actions and choices do.
I’m not coming at this as some MRA whack job. I’ve been happily married for 25 years with two great kids. I know several great men in teaching and other “female” professions. Life is a rich tapestry. But the overall direction of society is guided by biology.
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It may not be biology. The arguments about nature vs nurture have been going on a long time, and the general consensus is that it is a combination of both with human behavior (I know, Captain Obvious). The thing with issues like this is that you don’t change norms all that quickly, things that brewed over hundreds or thousands of years, it takes a long time. Even where most women work outside the home, and women have now moved up the ladder in terms of professions and whatnot (which if you think about it, is still relatively new, we are talking the last 50-60 years roughly), women still are influenced by the more traditional ways of looking at things, even as they break through the old constraints women had. You can teach girls to be strong and self assured, you can teach them that a man doesn’t need to be the provider or whatever, but kids pick up things from the world around them (‘attitudes are caught, not taugh’), they watch the world around them and pick up clues from it and that can be stronger than any teaching.
Is part of this biological? I don’t doubt that, I have found few things that are entirely one or the other, so in part biology might be part of this, women very well may be attracted to alpha men based in biology (and I say may because I don’t have any training there), but there are also strong cultural norms that haven’t changed all that much, even in the current society, things passed down from generation to generation that may not be bioligical or genetic but are just as strong IME.
And social change causes upheaval and it takes time to adjust. Schooling has changed a lot and aspects of it, especially with replacing experiential learning with screen learning, can adversely affect boys as can the push for early academics in school. Lack of physical play time and policies designed to try and mitigate violence in the schools may have unintended consequences on boys as well. Older traditions that helped boys navigate into adulthood have for a variety of reasons disappeared (and I am deliberately not mentioning specific examples,but I will add not all older traditions were good things, that the benefit they had for boys may also have caused toxicity; the problem is nothing better replaced them).
I also see young men under 35 who are thriving, so we have to be careful to say which men under 35 are struggling and why, too and see why the men who dont struggle are like that and see what the difference is.
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That’s not a feminist. That’s a person who is incapable of logical thinking and is to be avoided at all costs.
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I don’t have statistics, and I recognize this is anecdotal, but my 3 girls did not choose finance bros (their response to that “type” would be “gross”). They chose scientists and creators who are kind to animals and children and love their mothers. Their marriages are partnerships, with each supporting the other’s vocations and building family life together. I hope you know some people like that.
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Good point. The correct phrasing would be “self-identified feminist”
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That’s great. Yes, but only a few at this time.
Note: I am not in finance nor did I ever aspire to be.
I would add that my girls did have choices. And they all work in male-dominated tech fields and are not enamored with the tech bro type either.
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My D married a guy who is pretty much not the kind of guy she ever would have imagined she’d marry (except that he’s tall, which she probably hoped for, being tall herself). She met him unexpectedly, and she really enjoyed his company. They are now married with a child. It’s important to be open to possibilities. That said, I have family and friends who never found a life partner, for whatever reason. They lead happy lives because rather than being bitter about not having a partner, they focused on building lives that made them happy despite not having a partner. Life is what you make it.
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