Last week I had some very critical things to say about Leonard Sax’s Boys Adrift.
But as critical as I am of Sax’s gender essentialism, there is much within his latest work that I think is insightful and encouraging. When it comes to the now-famous “failure to launch” phenomenon (in which young men live at home throughout their twenties, essentially relying on their parents to support them), Sax makes good sense:
I agree that the real world is very rough. What’s the best way to help young people face that reality? If your child is ten or fifteen years old, then by all means, shelter him or her from that harsh reality. But what if your child is twenty-one, or twenty-six, or twenty-nine? How long is a parent expected to shelter a child who is not mentally or physically handicapped?
My own belief… is that if parents continue to shelter their adult child after the age of twenty-one years, the parents may make it less likely that the adult child will ever be willing and able to meet the challenges of the real world.
Tell it, brother Sax. Preach the good word.
Dr. Sax also deserves credit for being willing to reject traditional models of masculinity. Indeed, given how reactionary his views are on single-sex education, it is surprising and refreshing to read the following attack on Harvey Mansfield’s ludicrous Manliness (which was a big hit with a lot of social cons last year).
Right off the bat, Mansfield asserted without any disclaimer that “John Wayne is still every American’s idea of manliness.” He then proceeded with a detailed analysis of what makes John Wayne the epitome of manliness.
When I read that sentence… I was startled. “Speak for yourself” was the first thought that came to my mind.
Anyone who can rip apart Mansfield is okay with me.
But perhaps my strongest and most enthusiastic point of agreement with Sax comes on what is perhaps the one principle which virtually all the disparate voices in the broader men’s movement affirm: the central importance of strong, loving, adult male role models. Most humans, growing up in our gendered culture, are more likely to “identify” with and seek to imitate adults of their same sex. Given that most teenagers go through at least a brief period of rebellion against their parents, it is good to have adult role models who are not family members.
Sax urges parents (and parents are the primary audience for this book) to seek out good adult men to mentor their sons:
Don’t wait for your son to make this choice. If he’s like most of the boys I work with, he may need a push. That’s OK. Just choose an activity in which he can interact with grown men, where he can have opportunities to see how they live, how they relax, how they serve their families and their communities. In most cases, even a not-quite-perfect choice, perhaps even the wrong choice, will be better — will be more likely to engage your son in the real world — than no choice at all.
Dr. Sax has been rightly lambasted by feminist critics for his suggestion that we ask too much of young boys when we insist that they be able to articulate empathy as well as their sisters. But when he calls for safe, strong, loving adult men to be more involved in the lives of young boys, he deserves an enthusiastic “heck, yes!” All children — boys and girls alike — need good, non-familial role models, and they need them from both sexes. But when the majority of adults modeling compassion, competence, courage and emotional availability are female, then our boys often grow up without ever developing their own ability to be reliable, strong, ambitious, and articulate. That’s not women’s fault — it’s men’s.
In my teaching and in my volunteering, I am committed to working with young men. I mentor quite a few of them. Those in the men’s rights community who reject my feminist commitments would be wise to step up and mentor at least as many lads as I do. After all, my MRA friends, do you want me to be the only adult man working with your sons? :-) Put your volunteer time where your mouths are, and raise up a generation of young men with the same capacity for love and boldness as their sisters.
My own belief… is that if parents continue to shelter their adult child after the age of twenty-one years, the parents may make it less likely that the adult child will ever be willing and able to meet the challenges of the real world.
Tell it, brother Sax. Preach the good word.
This is all great grand and wonderful in the land of no student loans and no difficulty find jobs, and then having jobs that pay enough for rent, food, and insurances. However, most of us don’t live in that world. Most of us live in the world of thousands of dollars of student loans, inflating rental prices, no health insurance, and a need for a car.
My fiance just graduated with a Commercial Aviation degree. That’s 120,000 dollars of debt that he went into hock so that he could be in a “useful” major. Right now, it’s pretty easy to get a job as a flight instructor, but unless you have 500 hours or more, that’s all you’re going to get. He gets paid by the hour (and that’s dependent on the weather), no benefits. He moved into his parents house because he had no way to come up with a month’s rent and a deposit and still be able to eat and make loan payments.
So, you can go ahead an mourn this “extended adolescents” but most that I know in their parent’s basements are those who went to college, are highly independent, but just cannot afford to live on their own.
Antigone hits the nail on the head. I am going through the same thing. I have to choose between whether or not to go to the college of my dreams (MSM’s) and take out thousands of dollars worth of debt OR go to a cheap state school and stay out of debt. My parents did not save for my college education, and they have my brother to think about, too. Also, I am going to be a humble school teacher and won’t make tons of money. Choices, choices. The job market is bad right now. Add that to us needing to take out lots of loans. It’s not easy. Most of us in Gen Y aren’t lazy slugs living off of our parents forever, like many Baby Boomers think we are.
Perhaps I didn’t quote Sax fully enough. As long as a child is either a full-time student, or working — and PAYING RENT (even a token sum) to stay in the home, Sax is okay with it.
So am I.
The choice between debt and dependency isn’t even a choice sometimes — sometimes you end up with both. I honor that. We’re referring here to the lads who live at home and aren’t in school, aren’t working, aren’t paying rent, aren’t handling their share of cooking and cleaning.
I’d have to see some statistics on that…I’d say that number is so low as to be useless, and probably has been steady for the last few decades.
In that case, I’m a bit sceptical about how large the `failure to launch’ problem really is. I know very few fellow twentysomethings that did not move home for 6-12 months after college graduation, but no-one was sitting around playing videogames all day.
Most of the people I’ve talked to went working, traveling & volunteering for a few years & then went to post-secondary only around age 22 - 25 (which is what I’m doing).
If we’re serious about helping young adults “launch” fully when they cross the 20-yr milestone, maybe we need to quit sheltering them quite as much when they’re in their teens. Start teaching them about the stuff they need to know in the adult world & why (like personal ID cards, how to negotiate good deals, budget & time management, etc) & also, have them work asap in babysitting or whatever job is open for under-age kids (here in British Columbia we have summer berry-picking). Have them contribute a portion to the family income -or, better yet, to their own education fund. Also, insist that they volunteer for at least 1 organization throughout each year.
Lastly, the bit about debt & education is a huge one. It amazes me the weird things parents in North America are duped into buying for their babies & toddlers who really could care less whether his/her doll is a ltd edition Barbie or a Tonka truck with all the bells & whistles. (Not to mention the insane “advice” parents are given by the latest “experts”). Save some of that money for the kids’ education.
Noumena: Given that I’m a classic example of the breed, my perspective is skewed. But we do exist.
On the other hand, I’m going back to college (North Seattle Community College) at the age of 29 later this month, so there’s hope for me yet. And it only took 11 years past the usual time one is expected to be up to it for me to be really ready to own going to college. :/
Hugo, this might be a good time to review your post about your cultural blinders re “flying the nest”. ;)
That said, while adult kids will do what they do, aren’t parents sorta responsible for teaching them how to live on their own? How can you complain that your child needs shelter at 19 if you sheltered him at 17?
“In that case, I’m a bit sceptical about how large the `failure to launch’ problem really is. I know very few fellow twentysomethings that did not move home for 6-12 months after college graduation, but no-one was sitting around playing videogames all day.”
You’re absolutely right, Noumena, they’re most likely helping out with the house duties, including maybe[ahem] helping to take care of an elderly family member.
But, hey, having him/her sitting around, reading comic books, and whining for Mommy to bring in some sandwiches just makes for a jollier movie, doesn’t it? [BLECH]
All this whining about boys not being able to compete is incredibly tedious. Of course boys did better in the past — they did not have any competition. If you’re a slow runner and you’re racing only other slow runners, you’ve got a decent chance of winning. But if you admit others to the race, your chances diminish significantly. Face it: until the 1970s, boys and men were living in a nicely cushioned world of pro-male (and pro-white) affirmative action. Your average white boy only had to compete with perhaps 35-40% of other children, since the adults in his world had already rules all the girls and ‘minorities’ out of the picture. A slow race indeed! Now boys have to compete with 100% of children, so of course some of them are going to do worse than they used to do in the males-only affirmative action world of the past.
That’s point one; point two is that, in fact, we’re still working and living in a pro-male, pro-white affirmative action world in a whole lot of ways. Girls may do better in school, they may make up the highest percentage of university graduates — but they’re mostly not *teaching* in those universities, except in the poorly paid part-time ghetto. I don’t know the statistics for the US, but in Canada, women make up only one third of full-time faculty, less than 10% of Full Professors, but two thirds of part-time faculty. Almost 85% of the appointments for the prestigious Canada Research Chairs went to men. But — 95% of administrative assistants (the people who used to be called ’secretaries’) are women. So, for those boys who do manage to graduate from university on an academic track, the news is great: start applying for a job and you’re twice as likely as your sister to be hired in any faculty, including the arts. But, hey, she can always get a job as an admin assistant.
And point three is that the whole ‘failure to launch’ phenomenon is not simply about boys losing the encouragement of the official but un-named affirmative action programs of the past, it’s also about a number of social factors. Smaller families mean that parents are over-protective of children and fail to expose them to conditions which would allow them to handle the skills needed to make it the real world. Add to that the general de-skilling of society by corporate capitalism — you’re more likely to buy cake mix if you don’t know how to make a cake or to pay to have your oil changed if you don’t know how to do it yourself. As an educator, I see again and again students who lack basic life skills. I’ve met young men who don’t know how to operate a can opener, boil a pot of water or even take out the garbage because their parents have ‘protected’ them from these tedious chores that they themselves did not enjoy as children. But I’ve met girls with the same lack of skills, so this is not a gender-specific problem.
And point four is that schools have moved from teaching children knowledge to bolstering their self-esteem. I have students who are barely passing university classes, but who had As in high school - in classes where virtually everyone got As. This does children no favours; in fact, it would be more honest and decent to go to an ungraded system than to treat grading in such a meaningless fashion. Yet, at the same time, this leaves children lacking any *real* basis for self-esteem, such as knowing how to do something. And it doesn’t really matter *what* a child knows how to do, but he or she should be given a chance to be good at something real, whether its academics or sports or manual skills, from mechanics to gardening. It makes me sad when I see grown adults paying for easy skills, such as replacing a rotted board in one’s deck, rather than doing it themselves and teaching their children how to do it.
No real education, no life skills, no competence in anything except perhaps video games — it’s no wonder these children are scared of the future.
I am a teacher, and do see this happening, but see a different reason, which i think is pretty obvious. I would bet that 90 percent of the young men you guys are talking about are canabis users, and went to college and smoked pot all day and got bad grades. I have seen that more times than i can count. Pot is way stronger now that it was in the past, and boys simply do a lot more smoking.
Pot is really destructive if you ask me, but people rarely mention it at staff development meetings where the talk is of boys who are underachieving compared to girls. It’s even worse for younger kids, but when someone mentions it as a problem you hear groans from both Staff and students. I don’t get. It’s obvious.