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.

Surely the experience of bearing children, and probably nursing them, will mean women will naturally have a greater attachment to children when they are small?

That thinking nearly ended my (male) friend's marriage and caused huge problems in mine.

My ex husbands expectation was that I would, essentially, become a different person when our child was born - that I'd no longer have any interest in myself; my friends; my interests.

He felt that I should want to sacrifice myself at the altar of my children and that it was unnatural selfishness on my part that I could bring myself to he away from them at all.

@BigBoosh

How come so many of these man children manage to hold down well paying jobs, buy houses, have partners etc.

Could it be that they actually have their shit together more than you?

It’s the whole person we are talking about. There is more to being a responsible parent than having a good job, a home and a partner. Your balance in your bank account doesn’t get the toilets scrubbed or the laundry washed. The fact you pay a mortgage instead of rent doesn’t feed your children dinner. Parenting is not something that falls solely to a partner. It’s an entirely seperate responsibility.

@Whaddyathinkofthis That's really not what I said. I said women would, on average, experience a greater desire to spend time with their children, when small, than men. Saying that this means women should automatically be expected to devote 100% of their time and energy to their children, abandoning their old personality, and if they don't there's something fundamentally wrong with them, is taking this to a ridiculous extreme.

@BigBoosh

They weren't given this unpaid labour by the state. They went out and found someone who volunteered to play that role. Any woman can do the same.

Yes, women can find men who would be a stay at home dad and house keeping god. But that is very rare because of social conditioning and stigma. A man has to really want to take on this role because he is fighting against all the messages he’s heard growing up that this is women’s work and no man in his right mind would ever do it. He will suffer sneering and disapproval at every turn while doing this role. So when we see a SAHD, most of them are truly volunteers because they are defying convention.

But when it comes to SAHM, to women, most are not truly volunteers. Yes it’s a choice, but it’s not a free choice. It’s one they’ve been nudged and boxed in to making because of socialisation saying that mother is best and disapproving of mothers who leave their babies “too soon” or “too young” to go back to work. They are submitting to convention.

@PlanDeRaccordement its partly convention but also partly biology. If you could somehow create a completely free society, you would find, and this is my opinion, that women, on average, would naturally tend towards wanting to cut back work hours to spend more time with their small children than men would. I agree wholeheartedly men should be encouraged to take on their fair share of child rearing and housework of course though.

Women care more about their children’s well being. Well that’s a whole lot of unpacking, there are the birth induced hormonal changes, the oxytocin rush from breastfeeding but much more significant for a much longer period is societal conditioning and expectations. Women are brought up to be held accountable for their children’s well being, men are brought up to know that women are held accountable for their children’s well being. Men can literally murder their children and be referred to in media as a good bloke/father. It’s not remotely comparable.

[quote Scott72]@PlanDeRaccordement its partly convention but also partly biology. If you could somehow create a completely free society, you would find, and this is my opinion, that women, on average, would naturally tend towards wanting to cut back work hours to spend more time with their small children than men would. I agree wholeheartedly men should be encouraged to take on their fair share of child rearing and housework of course though.[/quote]
Well, we know biology plays a role but we will never know how large a role it plays because there will never be a completely free, sex-blind society.

I would agree with you that it would not be a 50/50 split of men/women desiring cutting back work to increase time to child rear. My gut says, more women would choose than men.

But I can’t trust my gut in this because my feelings are the direct result of all that social conditioning about mothers being nurturing and fathers being protectors. All those decades of constant brainwashing. How much of my feeling that, yes, if it was completely free and equal society we’d have a 60/40 split of women/men is really my own prejudice?

There is no concrete evidence that more women than men would make this choice. None. The only reason my gut says what yours is saying is because we’ve been conditioned from birth to believe this is true. It is an article of faith not fact.

What we do know is that changes in the brain happen to primary care givers - nothing to do with the sex of the care giver or biological relationship to the child.

www.independent.co.uk/news/science/gay-fathers-brains-change-when-they-are-the-primary-caregiver-9442757.html
Showing up and doing it is what creates the neural network.

You might argue that women naturally have stronger feelings about their babies due to having carried/birthed and fed them. But I don't think that necessarily translates into wanting to the the primary caregiver.

For me, I felt and still feel colossal responsibility and protectiveness for my dc. But I don't love being with them 24/7. I'd very happily work full time as long as I was certain they were being looked after by someone safe and who really cares about them.

Just look at the threads of women discussing whether it's beneficial to become a mother vs not. You'll see loads of women who might not do it if they had their time again. But none (I don't think) who have actually abandoned responsibility.

So I disagree that under optimal freedom, all else being equal and with loving and nurturing childcare, that mothers would necessarily want to spend more time at home than fathers.

But there are men who want to do more childcare and don’t won’t to be sole earner but their wives won’t go back to their careers. I realised this when I split from my sponger exH and was explaining to female friend about seething resentment I felt that he had played at being self employed while actually doing hobbies and not financially contributed in years and she confessed her DH felt the same about her never going back to her career after children. She also developed ‘learned helplessness’ described here such as stopping driving for no apparent reason and not going anywhere unless her DH went too. She hated her job and found work stressful so has spent 20 years finding excuses not to work including getting a puppy when the kids were older and didn’t need her to justify being at home. Her DH feels taken as advantage of as I did. my ex is seen as a manchild but because she’s a mum no one notices she has hidden behind that role to opt out of adult financial responsibilities even though her DH has suffered stress and ill health in his job but couldn’t leave because he was financially trapped. There are some women who are territorial about house and children and whose OH would actually rather share that than be stuck in the sole breadwinner role. I often get comments from female friends now in 40’s who were confident and independent in their 20’s that I am ‘brave’ as a single parent taking my kids camping or abroad on my own without a man. So they have slipped into a child role. Because if their marriage ended and they didn’t have someone to drive them or pay for them they would suddenly get their shit together. So there are women who take advantage too.

I'm in my mid-50s, as are most of my friends and I don't see any of our male friends behaving like this. They all pull their weight around the house; in fact, I would say that, almost without exception, the men do more cooking (mundane weekday stuff as well as entertaining others posher stuff) than the women.
My dad was in his late 80s and, until he became too unwell to manage any longer, always did basic housework stuff like hoovering, dishwasher loading and clearing up after meals and, when my mum knew she was dying, she taught him to cook.
He grew up in the 30s with a SAHM who worshipped him and did absolutely everything for him, and then he went to a boarding school where he wouldn't have done much household stuff either.
He was nothing like some of the babied men on here -he mucked in to family life to support my mum all along.

Sorry, am on my phone and missed some of the points about generation. I will add that my kids and those of my friends, all in early-mid 20s now, are all self-sufficient and helpful around the house. My two are living at home today and pitch in to most of the chores without being asked.
Why on earth would I not expect that as standard?

I now realise It is down to women to raise their standards. They must mark their line in the sand from the start and be prepared to cut their losses and walk away when a man proves he’s an entitled man-child, regardless of circumstances. Take care of your career and don’t allow a man to affect your financial well being. That’s the only way you can make best decision for your future. You need to be able to base your decision on how you are being treated, not on whether you can afford to leave. Whilst men hold the financial power, they hold power over you.

Spot on.

I’m persuaded on this point too.

Used to think it was a bit of a blame reversal for male bad behaviour, ‘she should have had higher standards’. It is the solution though. However we ended up with bargain basement standards, now is the time to unlearn them.

" Your balance in your bank account doesn’t get the toilets scrubbed or the laundry washed. The fact you pay a mortgage instead of rent doesn’t feed your children dinner."

It does actually as I pay for a cleaner. The girls in my life have been drawn to cleaning so that's also been an option. I certainly didn't force anyone and there was a tacit agreement that I bring in the money and pay for the house whilst she cleans. If I wasn't taking in the money then that would be ripped up.

@HH160bpm

What we do know is that changes in the brain happen to primary care givers - nothing to do with the sex of the care giver or biological relationship to the child. www.independent.co.uk/news/science/gay-fathers-brains-change-when-they-are-the-primary-caregiver-9442757.html Showing up and doing it is what creates the neural network.

That is so interesting! Thank you for posting it.

Does your cleaner plan, shop and cook all the meals? Book all the doctor/dentist/optician/clubs/childcare/do all the childcare at home/plan and organise family events?

There’s a massive difference between the domestic load of two adults sharing a house and a family. It blows any tacit agreement out of the picture. And if the agreement was tacit how do you know you know you were not exploiting someone else’s labour?

BigBoosh,

I’m not saying individual men force women into these roles of cook, cleaner and child care provider. It’s more that decades of conditioning result in men assuming their role is financial provider and the women assuming their role is nurturing/house keeping. So men and women migrate towards these roles thinking it’s by choice but not seeing all the social forces nudging them into those choices and judging them if they counter convention.

I’m not saying men have it easy compared to women either. Being primary or sole breadwinner is very stressful and one of the reasons (I think) that men die on average 8yrs sooner than women do and are at double the risk of suicide compared to women.

So the answer is not to outsource everything to another (most probably) woman so that your partner is free. I’m talking about looking at the core structures of society and shifting the paradigm.

In my culture, it’s actually expected that the man do the cooking, not the woman. So not every culture has divided up the tasks of day to day living the same way as western society has done. I find it really fascinating to see the differences and look at how can we stop having different roles delineated by sex. Not just to free women, but also the fringe benefit of freeing men too.

@DisobedientHamster

I now realise It is down to women to raise their standards. They must mark their line in the sand from the start and be prepared to cut their losses and walk away when a man proves he’s an entitled man-child, regardless of circumstances. Take care of your career and don’t allow a man to affect your financial well being. That’s the only way you can make best decision for your future. You need to be able to base your decision on how you are being treated, not on whether you can afford to leave. Whilst men hold the financial power, they hold power over you.

Spot on.

So DisobedientHamater (love your name) only wrote the spot on. Not sure who wrote the rest, but my thoughts are that this is a short term solution, or a necessary adaptation to a bad situation. Long term, we (all society, men and women) have to raise future generations such that the manchild is phased out completely. I liked the post too about learned helplessness and think that’s a good point. Much of the manchild behaviour is learned behaviour.

The girls in my life have been drawn to cleaning

What does "drawn to cleaning" mean? And why are you going out with girls, not adult women?

@MaxNormal

The girls in my life have been drawn to cleaning

What does "drawn to cleaning" mean? And why are you going out with girls, not adult women?

Maybe a regional thing. Girls generally used for women under 40.

I never asked them to clean. They could have easily done nothing or told me to clean for them. They had all these choices available.
I was told by one that they loved me and they had this urge to clean for me. Must be some kind of primal thing.

I was told by one that they loved me and they had this urge to clean for me. Must be some kind of primal thing.

Maybe it's a regional thing. I've never had an urge to clean anything in my life.

I’ve had the urge to clean once when nearly at my due date with child 1.

@HH160bpm

I’ve had the urge to clean once when nearly at my due date with child 1.

For me it was cooking. I made a six course meal while in early labour. (At the time I did not know it was real labour). My DH said he knew something was wrong because he’s the usual cook.

This thread was really interesting and then some men showed up and gave us the benefit of their ‘insight’ and now it has sadly become boring and predictable.