How about parents just do their d@mn job and raise their children to be good people?
Take some pride in your family.
Stop blaming others for your child’s failure.
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Interesting comment. Does that attitude apply to all underperforming groups, or only to young men?
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I 
agree.
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Are we trying to discuss how to bring up our own kids or how best to support those kids that might not have intact families and all the resources available to upper middle class CC posters? I thought the thread was focused on the latter, so I’m not sure how this comment is relevant to the discussion.
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Wow…
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As you’ve noted several times your children have turned out well and you’ve credited your parenting for their success. Good for you.
Mine have turned out well too. However, as I mentioned upthread I had some nephews who struggled for most of their 20’s. Even through their struggles they were ‘ good people’.
Their parents always had ‘ pride in their family’. Sometimes things happen. Have some empathy.
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I honestly don’t see the point in schadenfreude over contemporary young mens’ problems. I don’t see how it does women any good either. This is not a zero-sum game. Knee-jerk misandry and misogyny are both dumb.
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Jumping back into this thread.
First of all I like hearing and considering different perspectives…even the ones with which I disagree. My how @FunnyPup changed the discourse with his observations concerning whether the label “struggling” applies to young males under 35 if they’re happy/satisfied but don’t necessarily conform to the expectations of others/“us”.
So after reading through some of the posts on this thread, I’ve spent a little time thinking about various imagined scenarios. How would I feel if my DS was not meeting expectations? What would I do? Would I think/consider that I did something “wrong” in the way I raised him?
I guess if I were feeling defensive I would probably look at external influences that led him astray from the “right” path. I might consciously or subconsciously “blame” a whole host of reasons…from media (social and otherwise) to general societal changes (friends who had absent parents and were a bad influence, the prevalence of guns and drugs…legal and illegal, growing wealth disparities, etc.)
There are just so many issues that I think we get bogged down a little. People can get offended and respond by becoming defensive. On some level that’s to be expected since we come from different backgrounds and have had different experiences. “You don’t understand” and “that’s political” frustration can set in.
That said I’d like to share something. I have a good friend who travels with her husband to Africa to do missionary work. They work with Christian groups there to translate the Bible into the many African languages spoken in that country. On their most recent trip they shared how they do their work. Local host pastors explain the protocol for a particular tribe/village. To make a long story short they submit to the will of village chiefs. It doesn’t matter that my friends have traveled thousands of miles at great expense. They show respect to the village chiefs by respecting their authority and if they are asked to leave they commit to do so…respectfully.
As my wise friend’s DH observed, oftentimes in America submission is associated with defeat — being unable to “stand your ground”. Being “in submission” just irks us. We have our rights! However in many cultures submission goes hand-in-hand with honor and respect.
His words concerning submission struck me. And in many ways I think it applies to this discussion. I hear some who are voicing the need for setting clear/high expectations (the teacher in me loves that) and the benefit of structure and hierarchy. On the surface I think it sounds great. However it’s the latter part (structure/hierarchy) where I have serious reservations…and submission comes to mind. Why? Because in my experience the default of structure/hierarchy often lives within a patriarchal system that frankly expects submission rather than earning it. Respect is a two way street. IMO one must give it to receive it.
Demanding one adult to submit to another adult’s will without regard for that person’s individual autonomy is obedience… a losing, disrespectful proposition imo. Even if you argue it’s for the good of the community and even if I want the community to succeed, forfeiting my autonomy would be a dealbreaker.
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I would concur. I think we need to be somewhat circumspect about the degree to which our actions as parents or as people lead to the results we see. I wrote a piece years ago thinking about career choices, but I have similar thoughts about the effects of parenting. There are large and small waves that raise and lower the metaphorical ocean that we swim in. These waves are economic, technological, demographic, and political. These big waves are often unseen (like the fish living in water may not see the water) or perhaps their impact is underestimated. The baby bust that followed the baby boom affected the jobs of teachers, who were laid off or bounced around as schools shrunk, but many of the affected teachers often felt bad about themselves when the real problem was demographic (I remember talking to several young teachers at the time). Similarly, the advent of the internet made it much more difficult to make a living as an author or illustrator of books, for example. People overestimated the effects that their decisions/actions affected outcomes. I suspect the same is true of parenting choices. Our kids live in an era of the internet and then the explosion of social media.
In a much earlier post, I suggested that there were three areas in which males were struggling relative to the past. These are clearly affected by big economic, political and technological waves.
- Academic performance. Part of males’ apparently weaker academic performance comes from the political wave reducing discrimination against women. Women have flourished. Part of males’ weaker academic performance is because the way they organize schools tends to be less conducive to males’ mental development. And, part of this is not seen on CC but outside elite groups, my sense is that American society has been increasingly be devaluing expertise and education.
- Employment. The big waves of globalization (a political driven wave) and especially technological changes have eliminated a significant proportion of the high-paying jobs that were available to (primarily) males. The better jobs were management and tech jobs that require more education, which interacts with women’s increasing success in school.
- Dating and Relationships. The penetration of online dating has been bad for both genders, as far as I can see. From the studies I have read, women tend to swipe right for the same 5% to 10% of men. A very significant percentage of men have not had dates or had sex over a say three year period and may never have been in a relationship. So I think a significant percentage of men have just withdrawn from seeking relationships. [For women who want a long-term relationship, the effects are also not good. “The over-selected men see no need to commit as women appear to be falling all over them. So, women looking for commitment are disappointed.”] This follows in part from the rapid penetration of online dating vis-a-vis other ways of meeting people. Relationship formation and fertility are probably being impacted.
I think all of the effects that I have pointed out made are pretty well-documented. But, the effects of these waves are not always easy to predict. For example,I would have thought that the percentage of young males participating in the labor market would have declined (the stereotyped gamer on the couch in his parents’ basement), but I don’t believe that turns out to be the case.
We as parents can’t counteract the big waves, though we can provide some guidance on how to prepare if we see the waves. We can try to instill values early on that enable our kids to make good choices and to provide them with the education and resources to manage. But, I think we need to be pretty humble about our input in comparing out kids’ outcomes with other kids’ outcomes. Let me take an extreme case: We have friends who strike me as magnificent parents. They listen, they are psychologically astute (one psychiatrist and one psychologist but they are astute beyong their professions), caring, good values, by example and words emphasized academics and performance but not too much, etc. Both sons went to medical school. One has a thriving career and two children. The other committed suicide. The father actually predicted the suicide but realized that he was powerless to prevent it.
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I have four brothers; two are identical twins. Each of my brothers is completely different from the others. 4 years between the oldest and the twins, and the fourth is four years younger than the twins. When I say that they are not alike, I mean that. I challenge any pop psychologist to explain their differences based on some theory-of-the-day. The most likely explanation is the one my mom gave … they are who they are supposed to be.
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This thread has stimulated a few thoughts. Here is one and one will come later. @ucla_cs_god provided a very useful view from the trenches of the 18-35 yo men (the poster and his friends). “Most of my college friends have never been in a relationship and are not currently seeking one, never been intimate, and sit in front of a computer 8-10 hours a day with 4 of those hours being video games and anime.” Some of his friends from home “are unemployed/don’t have concrete plans for the future.” What’s was most interesting to me was that he wrote that both sets of friends “living their lives to the fullest.” This was provocative in a good way.
From what what @ucla_cs_god says, they are not struggling. What I wonder about is his assertion that they are “living their lives to the fullest.” Color me a bit skeptical about the latter. If a HS boy who came home from school, played video games in the afternoon and evening, had relatively little in-person social interaction, and did not have much of a plan for the future told me that his life was great and that he was living life to the fullest, I’d be deeply concerned that his definition of “fullest” was rather shallow and uninformed, precisely because he did not have a broader set of experiences. @ucla_cs_god’s friends are adults and so I feel some trepidation projecting my (much longer and fuller) life experience upon theirs, but I think the life he describes, especially for the unemployed kids back home with no plans but even with the kids who are on computers 6 hours a day for work and 4 hours a day for gaming/anime, is missing out on a number of the dimensions that have been the most rewarding and given the greatest amount of depth to my life and that of many of my friends.
Many of my friends/colleagues have been able to craft careers that really positively impact the lives of others. I know that when I am able to do so, it is deeply gratifying – it is in accord with the sense of meaning that guides my life. (This is not a rant against techies. I’m sympathetic to folks working on computers – in HS, I had a job writing code in a language called b that preceded c on the first Unix machine and my undergraduate and PhD theses both drew heavily on Monte Carlo studies. And I can see in my father’s career his great satisfaction and sense of meaning that came from advancing theoretical physics. There was no direct impact upon people in his lifetime, other than the folks whose careers he helped, but over the long run, I believe that some of the things he worked on are resulting in technologies that probably affect all of our lives. Some of the folks working on the screens 8-10 hours a day may be working to be in a position to have that kind of satisfaction – I don’t know. )
In addition, many of my friends have had deep and supportive marriages (not all – some marriages seem pretty bad and some have terminated with rancor). Moreover, I have found that, despite the sleeplessness, stress and financial demands, having and raising children has been among the most gratifying of my life choices.
My bias: While the employed among @ucla_cs_god’s friends do not appear not struggling, I am concerned that what they are doing is satisficing – making the best of a bad situation without really being aware of what is possible (the economist in me wants to say that they have found a local optimum, which is substantially inferior to a feasible global optimum). This is not unique to this generation. My younger brother, who came after the baby boom, always made the best of whatever[ situation he was in, but with a fair bit of effort and hustle, he could have been in a much better situation.
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This has not been well documented. There are studies all over the place on this but no significant difference has emerged. Perhaps it would be better for boys if there were more male teachers. But in classes with male teachers girls continue to excel. That there is a significant difference between male and female mental development in K-12 schooling has also not been well documented. Again, studies are all over the place.
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Thanks. I’ll take you word for it with respect to the organizing of schools. What I was thinking about were not male v. female teachers, but more time for exercise and shorter blocks of sitting still. My son attended a middle school for boys organized that way – they were of the opinion that this was better for boys than the typical sit at a desk each period with 10 min breaks. Is that also not supported by data?
I thought the faster cognitive and emotional development of girls was pretty well established. No? Not my field.
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Why is this about “one adult [submitting] to another adult’s will”? That may be the expectation for tribal rulers in Africa, but in the US the primary “submission” is to society’s rules. If a police officer tells you that you are breaking the law, then obedience isn’t a bad thing
Is society not allowed to have moral codes (eg “don’t commit adultery”) and disapprove of those people who break them, even if those actions aren’t illegal?
@Twoin18, I think from @88jm19’s point of view, the question is where society’s rules/structure/hierarchy come from. If society’s rules/structure/hierarchy come from men (the patriarchy), then, if I understand her correctly, they are inherently illegitimate or at least highly suspect. I would think that logic would not apply just to rules about schools, but to the entire legal and social structure of Western society.
Well yes, that’s why I’m perplexed. Do we also throw away all moral codes since religions etc have also traditionally been “patriarchal”? Communities need standards and laws.
To respond to this in today’s political environment would result in my comments being flagged. So I will just say that standards are in the eye of the beholder, which becomes problematic in a democratic society if there is no room at the table for those who disagree.
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These are some screenshots from a post by Steve Magness. If you are not familiar with him, he is a performance coach and motivator. He is not a fan of toxic masculinity but recognizes that some changes need to be made.
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I agree with everything he wrote.
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I thought about posting that here.
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