Rise of the manchildren

[TirisfalPumpkin]

Aware I might be treading on shaky ground here, given that this is a parenting forum. I'm not out and out blaming parents for this phenomenon - I know 'his mother babied him' is the usual excuse, but I'm sure there's more to it than that. I'm trying to understand it better.

It seems a non-trivial % of millennial males are entitled, lazy man-children. I have personally married two of them. They have cost me dearly (both in the 'thousands of pounds' and 'I'm now cynical and don't trust anyone' way). I have read numerous threads here and found myself nodding along to a catalogue of infuriatingly familiar behaviour, so I don't think it's just me.

I mean by 'manchildren': men that are emotionally stunted, have underdeveloped morals and values, respond in childlike ways to adult issues (lie, sulk, whine) and are subconsciously seeking a partner they can put into a motherly role who will carry the mental load of the relationship and household. They often have hobbies that they prioritise over everything else in life. My friendship circles are kind of nerd-culture oriented and it seems to be especially bad here, but I think it is a wider societal phenomenon than just among gamers and geeks.

I am wondering whether there has been some change in the way boys are raised, that makes them more like this - or are girls brought up not to be difficult and therefore challenge it less? Why do their actual parents seem to enable and encourage them when they behave badly towards their spouse? Is society in general becoming more sexist and placing fewer demands on boys and young men? Are there just as many 'womanchildren' out there? My perception is it's largely a male phenomenon but I can think of a couple of counterexamples.

Rants about awful manchild behaviour welcomed too.

So many good points on the thread. They all show that there are multiple messages going to boys and young men that encourage manchild behaviour. We have to consider too that boys also hear the messages given to girls. I think that in fighting sexism, it may have inadvertently hurt boys. Take for example the messages

“Girls can do anything”. A boy hears that and thinks what about me? If girls can do anything that might mean I can’t do some things....add to that the worship of mothers, and a boy thinks he cannot be primary child care giver. So what happens? New fathers run for the hills until the tone is set and the child inevitably prefers the mother.

“Girl power”. Boys have no power because there is only girl power. So the boy thinks, he has to take the girls lead and have her tell him what to do, when to move in, when to propose, what chore to do. What do we get, men who are willing to chip in but useless at self direction and need lists and leading by the nose in all aspects of life.

“Girls really need to do and are brilliant at STEM” so boys think, this whole school academic thing is for girls, not me. I’d better look at a trade... And what did we get? Girls outperforming boys all through school and being the majority of university students and graduates.

In fighting sexism and the limits girls had, we put out messages to the girls not thinking that boys will hear them too and notice they are excluded. It’s like a pendulum has swung too far over.

I know not all millennials are like this, but a lot of them seem to be very self indulgent.

Like crumbling into an attention-seeking mess when other generations would've just got on with things.

I don't think they're parented with as much discipline as previous generations; they are indulged.

Add to this male entitlement and it's a bad combination.

@PlanDeRaccordement Oh Plandethingy. You so often have such a Male Rights Activist/'what about the men' view on things.

The whole reason why people are trying to give some positive messages to girls about what they can achieve, is that society gives males in general more of that encouragement and praise than girls every single day.

Imagine if we'd had WW2 with the current generation at the helm. Most of them would be lying in bed whining with the curtains closed while the Germans just wandered in.

@NoMoreDickheads Exactly. That poster just blamed everything on women including the fact that men walk away from their kids. What a joke. See how women aren't allowed to have standard because someone always comes in NAMALTing all over the place and blaming women and girls for doing well at school/university. Boys and men have always been empowered, we live in a bloody patriarchy for goodness sake. They're choosing to fall behind and waste their lives but of course that's all the fault of women🙄

[quote NoMoreDickheads]@PlanDeRaccordement Oh Plandethingy. You so often have such a Male Rights Activist/'what about the men' view on things.

The whole reason why people are trying to give some positive messages to girls about what they can achieve, is that society gives males in general more of that encouragement and praise than girls every single day.[/quote]
That’s my point actually, that society USED to give boys more encouragement than girls and in our efforts to counter that we stopped encouraging boys and started to ONLY encourage girls.

We went too far. The proof is in the statistics about the millennial generation and later. Boys going from out performing girls in academics to girls outperforming boys in academics from reception through graduation, into higher education. It starts at age 5 !!

Wtf???
Girl power, what about the boys???
Seriously????

[quote DandyMandy]@NoMoreDickheads Exactly. That poster just blamed everything on women including the fact that men walk away from their kids. What a joke. See how women aren't allowed to have standard because someone always comes in NAMALTing all over the place and blaming women and girls for doing well at school/university. Boys and men have always been empowered, we live in a bloody patriarchy for goodness sake. They're choosing to fall behind and waste their lives but of course that's all the fault of women🙄[/quote]
I did not speak a single word blaming women of all things. I stated society and then used “we” to refer back to society. As a society, we have made mistakes in how we raise boys and the messages we give them through portrayal of idiot men as role models on TV and in films.

Maybe it's raising boys to respect women.
Then this will overflow into society.
If they respected women more instead of feeling entitled then a man child wouldn't form???

Is it so hard to believe? I’m Asian and grew up with the message
“Asians are naturally talented at maths”
Not only did I believe it but I worked harder at maths. So I ended up really good. I fulfilled the expectations put on me by the message I heard as a child.

But also my white friends heard this same message and the things they’d say
“You’re lucky you’re Asian, it makes maths easy for you”
“Maths is too hard for me, I’m not Asian”
And they honestly believed because they were not Asian, they could not be good at maths and so didn’t try as hard as they could. Which resulted in them not being very good in maths. (I know as I would help them with homework.) They also fulfilled the message by being discouraged.

Every message we send has ripple effects to the others who hear it and then apply it to themselves even if they’re not the target audience.

My daughters are not Asian. I told them that their skin colour and ethnicity, let alone gender, had nothing to do with how good they could be at STEM subjects. I made sure they knew that blaming not doing well at them on ethnicity or gender would not be tolerated, and they would be given all the help they needed to be the best they could, and they had the potential to be pretty damned good.

They believed me. The most important messages you get as a young child come from your parents.

Males perhaps have to work a bit harder and earn their place, rather than just receiving it after phoning it in, academically and career wise. Women provide more competition now. They may have to do the same in relationships, with women less willing to tolerate something less than an equal partner in all aspects of family life.

They've had a few decades to adjust to the new reality.

@PlanDeRaccordement Why is it a problem that girls are outperforming boys at school? Some people are smarter than others, that's always been the case. Girls have more opportunities now whereas in the past they were told it was pointless to be interested in math and science. I don't understand why you've got such a problem with that. Do you want girls to go back to not excelling? Do you want boys to have everything handed to them just because they're male? I can't understand the logic behind it.

I was a child in the 80's. I remember even then, the muttering about how girls were outperforming boys, and being a little bit bitter that no-one had really been worried prior, that boys were outperforming girls. That was just deemed to be the natural order of things.

[quote DandyMandy]@PlanDeRaccordement Why is it a problem that girls are outperforming boys at school? Some people are smarter than others, that's always been the case. Girls have more opportunities now whereas in the past they were told it was pointless to be interested in math and science. I don't understand why you've got such a problem with that. Do you want girls to go back to not excelling? Do you want boys to have everything handed to them just because they're male? I can't understand the logic behind it.[/quote]
More studious, not smarter. Boys spend a lot of time doing sports whilst girls don't bother their arses with exercise.

When they get older men do better at STEM subjects.

[quote DandyMandy]@PlanDeRaccordement Why is it a problem that girls are outperforming boys at school? Some people are smarter than others, that's always been the case. Girls have more opportunities now whereas in the past they were told it was pointless to be interested in math and science. I don't understand why you've got such a problem with that. Do you want girls to go back to not excelling? Do you want boys to have everything handed to them just because they're male? I can't understand the logic behind it.[/quote]
If it’s not a problem that girls far outperform boys, then it wasn’t a problem when boys far outperformed girls by your logic.

Isn’t that how equality works? If one sex is consistently falling behind the other, then do we victim blame like you did:

“Some people are smarter than others” [which is the same as saying, girls outperforming boys academically is because girls are smarter than boys/boys are stupid.]

Or do we stop and think. Why did we go from one sex ahead, to the other sex ahead? It cannot be innate girl smarts or boy stupids because intelligence scientifically is distributed evenly between the sexes by nature. So it must be society and socialisation.

Feminism is for the equality of the sexes, not female superiority. It’s perfectly feminist to look at the “fixes” society has put in place to correct the favouritism that WAS given to boys and assess, was our fix too heavy handed? Did we go too far?

I think the manchild is clear evidence that we did not get making the sexes equal exactly right in the last fifty years. It would be naive to think that any social movement can get to perfection so quickly. We should always be looking at every aspect and thinking, did we go far enough here or did we go too far there.

More studious, not smarter. Boys spend a lot of time doing sports whilst girls don't bother their arses with exercise.

'Scuse me? Where the hell do you get off with such a ridiculous (and outdated) sexist stereotype?!

So my girls aren't also doing ballet, gymnastics, swimming, archery, pilates, and running?

More studious doesn't mean that they don't spend time on extra curriculars.

I'm sorry, but I'm seeing an awful lot of both sex that could bear to spend a whole hell of a lot more time taking a walk rather than playing the x-box. Which apparently is quite the drawcard to many males. As opposed to football.

Mbosnz
“My daughters are not Asian. I told them that their skin colour and ethnicity, let alone gender, had nothing to do with how good they could be at STEM subjects. I made sure they knew that blaming not doing well at them on ethnicity or gender would not be tolerated, and they would be given all the help they needed to be the best they could, and they had the potential to be pretty damned good.

They believed me. The most important messages you get as a young child come from your parents.”

But honestly, the fact that you as a nonAsian family had to create a counter message to the Asians-math myth proves just how pervasive it is because your nonAsian daughters heard it, and it was on their minds.
You countered it but you will never know how effective your countering was because that Asian-maths message cannot be unheard.

Just reading these wee gems out to my daughter. She's terribly concerned that some poor wee heads might explode if they have to now have to factor in non-binary people. (She might mean me as well, to be fair.)

Well, that's possibly because their friends were Asian, and so was their tutor.

@BigBoosh I guess watching porn all day and playing video games into the wee hours of the night makes them so better than the girls "who don't bother their arses with exercise". It's blatantly untrue because plenty of girls are interested in sports but have been told their whole lives that it's "for boys". Men are given priority when it comes to STEM subjects whereas women have to fight harder for it. It's hard to be a woman in a STEM field.

I don't think you can ever go too far to promote equality for women.
We have a very long way to go judging by all the threads on mumsnet, what women are going through.
Boys are doing just fine. They are not delicate that need to be protected from girl power

[quote DandyMandy]@BigBoosh I guess watching porn all day and playing video games into the wee hours of the night makes them so better than the girls "who don't bother their arses with exercise". It's blatantly untrue because plenty of girls are interested in sports but have been told their whole lives that it's "for boys". Men are given priority when it comes to STEM subjects whereas women have to fight harder for it. It's hard to be a woman in a STEM field.[/quote]
Given priority? How?
Girls are not interested. Blame the mothers i guess.

My boy loves dance. The amount of people that ask me if he gets teased or how does he cope in secondary school with that.
He cope just fine because he has never seen a problem with a boy dancing and holds his own. Most of his dance school are girls. They are all children learning to dance at the end of that day.

@BigBoosh All girls aren't interested then? I'd say blame the fathers, but that will be seen as very controversial.

@PlanDeRaccordement I didn't victim blame anyone. No, feminism isn't for everyone. It's for the liberation of women and girls. It never has been for men. If men are so worried, then why don't they create their own movements? Oh I know why. Because any time they do it descends into woman hating and expecting women to do everything for them instead of doing it themselves.