Some mums enable their sons poor behaviour

[theprincessthepea]

I had my first daughter with my “childhood sweetheart” who ended up becoming a terrible adult and so we broke up when my daughter was young. He hasn’t seen his child for over 5 years now but I am still in contact with his mum who lives abroad.

As I’ve gotten to know her, I’ve realised her attitude is very much “boys will be boys”, “us women will always carry the burden of childcare and we should be grateful for the little men contribute” and “at least he cares about his daughter and is trying in his own way.” (E.g. a text once a month!!!!)- she tells me these things. Whenever he had stepped out of line in our relationship she usually laughed it off.

Her son has gone awol apparently and she is trying to convince me to “motivate him again”. He is in his early 30s - he should have grown up by now - but I believe his mum has enabled so much of his lazy behaviours.

I think about my current partner who shares the household load. He is close to his mum, she also taught him how to cook and he has an element of respect for his mums time and opinion. Complete opposite to my ex.

A friend of mine recently complained about her husband - they’ve had their 3rd child and he feels like he can “do what he wants” and when he goes to his mum she takes his side and treats him like a big kid (cooks for him, has the boys will be boys attitude etc).

AIBU to think that mums carrying this attitude plays a big role with enabling some of their sons negative behaviour. I feel like my exes mum enables him and I’m tired of her excuses for her son.

What was your exes relationship like with his mother generally? I think the relationship of a man with his mother is indicative of how they will likely treat their partner/wife.

In the early years of my relationship I was fucking incensed at how my partner talked to me when he was stressed. If I offered him a cup of tea he’d rip my head off and man we’d fall out over it. Then I saw him do the exact thing to his mother and she’d apologise to him!!!!!!!! I told her she should not accept his behaviour towards her and I certainly didn’t accept it towards me. He stopped doing it to both of us soon after.

Moral of the story is if a behaviour is acceptable to the mother the male will extend the same behaviour to the wife. Be warned.

Some parents enable their children's bad behaviour.

There, I fixed it for you.

Exactly! The only person to blame for how the man behaves now is the man himself. He makes his own choices as an adult. So if he CHOOSES not to clean up and leaves it all to his wife, that’s on HIM. Not his mum 🤦🏼‍♀️. And yet people on here are still making excuses for him and his behaviour by laying the blame with his mum. He’s been an adult for a long time now.

This isn’t the mother’s fault at all. It’s is up to both parents how a child is brought up and, as an adult, individual responsibility for how that continues.

Yes but I would counter that its actually their fathers who are mostly enabling them as every man I've ever dated was heavily influenced by his father. My first long term relationship was with a gentleman who cooked and cleaned just as much, if not more, than me and when I went to stay at his house it was clear where this had come from. His father was the cook and the one who organised the house - would get up early before work to make porridge for everyone and squeeze orange juice. Delightful.

In contrast, my STBXH was the opposite but I didn't realise it until after our DC were born as he hid it and talked the progressive/equality talk bit more or less morphed into his father once our DC came along. If I had just looked at his parents relationship and his fathers role in the home I would have had all the warning I needed.

What was his father like?

Hmmm - the very first item on your list "who rights the cards?" - well - who thinks cards need to be written? This is entirely a self imposed task, people (normally women) choose to do it, then complain loud and long about it.

Just don't do it. This tradition is from the last century.

It often isn't so much that men don't do stuff that needs doing, but that women invent stuff to do, and men don't see the point IMO

Exactly.

I can see how the mothers get the spotlight on them though.

A women baring the brunt of a man's learned behaviour turns to see where he learned it - and sees another woman (his mother) was part of the team responsible for his upbringing. You can't help but wonder why it goes on and on.

I know someone who was at her boyfriend's house when she saw him fling all his clothes down and all over the stairs when his mum shouted up (nicely) asking if he had any washing he wanted doing. And then the mum laughingly picking it all up and washing it for him 😮

My friend told me this and i was horrified and said so. She said she would never let him treat her like that obviously ...

They got married and fast forward a few years and the little prince still can't/wont use a washing machine 🙄

No, women aren’t responsible for the behaviour of adult men.

But they are, at least partly, responsible for raising the next generation of men.

Do you make your own decisions about what sort of person you are and how you want to behave, or are you still following all your parents instructions as an independent adult?

Some women do wait on their husbands and sons hand and foot. I don’t see any point in denying that it happens, no matter how much we would wish that it didn’t. So yes, such women are responsible for teaching their sons that wives/partners are general slaves with sex thrown in.

Exactly.

My ex's mum used ton
wait on him hand and foot and he had a right nasty shock when l didn't do the same. I remember saying to her you have created a lazy monster bh running around after him but in hindsight, he shouldn't have let her do that

Do you make your own decisions about what sort of person you are and how you want to behave, or are you still following all your parents instructions as an independent adult?

I make decisions based on the morals and guidance I was given as a kid for the most part. I hold some different views from my parents but that doesn't mean they taught me nothing.

Do you think parenting has absolutely zero impact on how an adult behaves? If that's the case, why do we bother trying to prepare our kids for the adult world? Might as well just let them be feral.

Is it just men that are a perpetual product of their upbringing and can't have an independent thought and autonomy?

Some posters blame women for the behaviour of boys and men.

Women are not responsible for men's behaviour. And repeat....

Well, if you really want to blame a woman... who decided to have a baby with this waster?

No, but this thread is about men, isn’t it?

Now and then MN has a post about some thoroughly spoilt Dsis or SiL whose parents have always indulged her in everything, and continue to e.g. bail her out financially well after she’s an adult, so she never becomes properly independent.
But in such cases it’s usually both parents, not just the mother.

Parents of both sexes can badly parent children of both sexes, it's not exclusive to mothers and sons.

No. Women do it too.

Grown arsed men have brains and know what’s right from wrong and how to behave properly and how to treat people. No matter what their mum did or didn’t teach them.

If it's all they've ever known, they don't see it as 'wrong'. That's the point.

In the same way that some women believe a man should be taller than them, or a certain height full stop or earn a certain amount or whatever else some women expect of men. Have those women challenged their own thinking and beliefs when they post asking if it's OK to date a man who is only 5'10? Even if he is still taller than her. It's just seen as natural law by many that a man should be taller and earn more.

This is why sexist stereotypes hurt everyone. It obviously needs to change but just assuming that people will 'realise' is unrealistic.

There are women who post on here who have automatically adopted the role of homemaker/default parent in the early days who find that it's no longer desirable or manageable and they're drowning. There was a point when they also believed that it was their function to fulfill and ask on here for advice on how to be more organised or how other women manage.

It hasn't occurred to them that not all families/relationships look like theirs. When people reply with details of their own relationship, which looks very different, they respond in slight disbelief.

Their children also grow up seeing these messages and behaviours and learning what is 'normal'.

It's normal in my family to work hard at school, go to university, work and live within your means. My children have adopted that as their normal too. That wasn't normal in my exhusband's family and, when he broke the mould, went to university and worked in a job that wasn't manual labour, they questioned his masculinity and criticised him. His parents were constantly in debt, always drunk and that was their normal. Other family members of his live the same way. My exh is the only one who made a diffeent life for himself. But he still lives way beyond his means and is always in debt. He sees no problem with having £0000s of debt from multiple sources because 'everyone' does.

People learn what they live and live what they learn.

YABU, yes. Because its not a 'big part of the reason' at all. Within the context of the constant messaging boys and men recieve in almost every society in the world about their roles, their relationships towards women, and their overall superiority and entitlement to be supported and facilitated by women, the occasional mother perpetuating this in an overt way, is a drop in the ocean. I think in your desire to blame women for men's actions, you are vastly over playing the importance of the influence of mothers over their sons. Sure, being brought up to think you can do no wrong isn't going to help male entitlement any, and is poor parenting. But to blame women for the ongoing poor behaviour of autonomous adult males, who should be able to judge for themselves when they're wrong, is just going for the low hanging fruit.

There's a thread here about overaged boys bring taken onto women's changing rooms with their mothers. The attitude of the women who do this is part of the problem. Their little princey will not be inconvenienced and girls and women can lump it. This is definitely part of the problem.

Women take their sons into changing rooms with them, not because they think their boy is 'a little princey' but because they fear he is unsafe in adult male spaces. I don't think women should do this, not at all, but I think its unfair and inaccurate to attribute their motivation as being to make their boy 'special', when it almost certainly arises from fear of male violence and perversion. Males behave badly. Women fear them. Women try to protect their children (sons included) from them. Other women suffer as a result and blame women not men.

No. My ex had wonderful parents and turned out to be a vile, abusive psychopath who went on to get convicted for assaulting a woman.

DP had very unbalanced parents and is a literal angel.

I definitely think some mums don't promote the healthiest behaviour/relationship with their adult sons, but ultimately men make a choice whether to step up and act as an equal partner in a relationship.
My MIL is definitely one of those mums who encourages my husband to 'just relax, look after yourself, it's your wife's job to look after children etc etc'. But my husband is the most involved father I know - does half the school runs, half the housework, helps out on school trips (and its great to see he isn't the only one) and takes on more when sees I'm struggling, and vice versa