When the Political is Personal: #Boymomming in an Age of Flailing Masculinity
With four sons, my days as a mom are filled with joy and doubt, hope and heaviness. But most of all, my days as a mom are numbered.
I have a new piece up at America Magazine on the questions, anxieties, and hopes associated with raising boys in this age of troubled masculinity and flailing manhood. This piece is a departure for me: not an analytical piece driven by arguments, but a personal essay motivated by questions.
Nevertheless, this essay—along with the approach my husband and I take to raising the beloved sons I’m writing about here—is premised on certain ideas about boys, men, and human nature. Here are two interrelated such ideas, and (especially for those who are new here and thus haven’t seen these posted before!) other pieces where I’ve written in a more analytical/argumentative way about each.
Boys are (on average, not to a person!) more aggressive than girls primarily because of biology, not because of social programming. Male aggression is mostly inborn; it has to be first coercively constrained, and then virtuously directed. Not (faux) eliminated, per too much of today’s left. And not given free, uncivilized, amoral reign, per too much of today’s right. Making an opposite argument is a beautiful book about #boymomming by — one that frustrated me deeply (see my review included below). Whippman is clearly both very smart and very earnest—yet ultimately will not discard the Rousseauian myopia inculcated by mainstream feminism and its foundational lies about human nature, male nature, and also female nature. She thinks boys need less “traditional masculinity.” Much of what she calls “traditional masculinity,” I would call “maturity” or “reality principle” regardless of sex. And I think not only that boys need more of it, but that girls do, too. The truth is that most girls as well as boys would be better served by stronger discipline, firmer boundaries, and more of what calls “knock it off, shake it off” parenting. Nevertheless, for most boys, that frame is much more immediately imperative—and the failure to implement it early and consistently is far, far more deleterious and dangerous. As I explain in my essay, I want the same thing that we all want: other-regarding adult men, capable of emotional intimacy (both with other men and with women) and of familial and communal responsibility. My concern is that the more we do as a society what the social-emotional learning establishment prescribes (basically, assume per Whippman that male aggression is a socially constructed problem to be fixed rather than a biological reality to be directed), the further our boys get from that ideal. The rise of the utterly loathsome “manosphere” is the unintended yet predictable consequence of an approach to boys that makes clear up front, unintentionally yet essentially, that maleness itself is a thing to be cured. How do we strike the correct balance here? I am not sure! My husband and I struggle with it, which is part of what I’m writing about in this essay.
The crisis we have among our flailing boys and men is not really one of masculinity per se, but one of immaturity that, for reasons of both biology and culture, disproportionately affects males. This is not, as many on the right like to argue, about “feminization,” for the quite simple reason that women are not supposed to be immature either! Both today’s feminism and today’s antifeminism make women essentially infantile and inculcate in them a utopian worldview that feeds on fact-free feeling (and resultant anxiety), diminishing their adult authority. This is a profound and self-perpetuating problem for us all—and most immediately for the boys being educated and/or mothered by these soft-minded women. I’ve written about this in several places (see below) and I recommend the work of to anyone interested in learning more about how boys mature more slowly and why. Reeves has three adult sons, and shares a lot via both research and anecdote that I’ve found helpful.
Alright, finally, onto the aforementioned America Magazine essay. I’ve included two excerpts here. You can click on the link to read it all.
When my youngest son was about four weeks old, I sat on a bench on the pool deck at the Y.M.C.A., the baby in the crook of my left arm while he sucked hungrily at the bottle I held in my left hand. With my right hand and my teeth, I adjusted goggles for my 3-year-old, who was embarking upon his fourth or fifth swim lesson.
I heard a voice nearby with a familiar greeting: “You’ve got your hands full!” Immediately, my son was explaining to a woman who appeared to be in her 60s that this was his new baby brother, that he also had two older brothers, and that they had all been to visit the baby in the hospital before they saw him at home.
“Four boys?” she asked me. I nodded. “Wow, you really have your hands full.”
My new companion went on to tell me that she, too, had four boys. They were in their 30s, all married, with children of their own. She told me what each did for a living, where each lived and how many children each had. She talked about her boys, now men, with zest and enthusiasm, clearly delighted with the lives they had built.
Pool Lady has what I so fervently hope, work and pray to have in 30 years: four independent, married, productive, good fathers who, it makes me tear up to remember, used to be my four babies—unfathomably adorable and earnestly winsome and proudly blowing bubbles in the pool as they held the wall and kicked. Once, barring a tragedy or a war, a mom like me would have simply expected this outcome. Three or four kids were the norm, most boys grew up into men, and mothers of several became grandmothers of many as a matter of course.
But today, as almost everyone across the political and cultural spectrum is now aware, boys in the United States are flailing and failing at much higher rates than both American girls and past generations of American boys. Those of us concerned about the nation’s sons, and our own, have a plethora of problems to preoccupy us: academic underperformance, underemployment, porn-brained cyborg-sexuality, and profound loneliness and isolation. Moreover, in my experience, when we talk about the problem of “failure to launch”—that is, the inability or unwillingness to achieve adult independence from one’s parents, habitationally, financially, emotionally or otherwise—it is tacitly understood that we are talking predominantly, if not exclusively, about sons.
So it’s probably rational for me to be flooded with anxious questions about the endless tomorrows I cannot see, none of which have accessible answers but all of which have practical, urgent implications for how I parent my boys today.
This essay is not a prescription for how to raise boys or a panacea for the societal problems that ail them. Those are well above my pay grade. It is merely an attempt to be honest about the questions that preoccupy this #boymom, as well as about how my incomplete answers to those questions are shaped not just by having four sons—now ages 10, 8, 4 and 1—but also by having no daughters.
…
When Pool Lady told me about her grown sons, she mentioned that two lived nearby and two lived far away, where their wives are from. “It’s wonderful,” she glowed, “grandchildren. The ones who are here, I see, usually, twice a week. The truth is, though…when you have boys…you’re always the other grandmother.” She paused. “But that’s a good thing; it means my boys are blessed. They all have wonderful marriages.”
I pretended to find this reflection revelatory. But really, this gendered reality had hit me the moment I learned our fourth child was another boy.
I am not the kind of woman who backed into marriage or motherhood, because I am not the kind of woman who backs into anything. Always a Martha, never a Mary, I am, as I have always been, burdened by the multiplying cares of carrying out my own expanding vision. From the time I was in high school, I knew that I was called to have a family—a household—along with, if I could figure out a way to make it happen, a meaningful career.
Today, at 37, that 20-plus-year-old vision—a big old house with a full slow cooker on the counter and several boisterous, healthy kids chasing each other with neighboring children in the twilight until I call them in for dinner—is my daily life. No, it is not always so picture-perfect, not by a long shot. I’m not one for crafts, my cooking is basic, and I’m terrible at getting the laundry folded and put away. I’ve had to zig and zag professionally in ways I never intended, and I work into the wee hours much more than I’d like. Still, I am blessed to be living what I once prayed for.
Since we brought that fourth boy home from the hospital, I have felt the brutal ephemerality of every moment.
Of course, I know that many parents of girls as well as of boys, especially those who have several children, harbor pre-emptive nostalgia with what is likely to be the last baby. And I’m sure that if I had a girl or two among my children, I would have, too. But it would not be quite the same.
**Read the rest at America Magazine.**
As a high school teacher and a guy I concur with much of this essay: we're failing boys and having to deal with this failure once they're men. Some of this is difficult to fix macro-economics, such as the relative lack of physically demanding, and hence more likely to be held by men, jobs. Even if we bring back manufacturing, the mills, mines, and factories don't need the old numbers of guys on an assembly lines. Modern firms now rely on a few employees supervising robots and machinery, not humans.
Some of it though can and could be fixed, particularly in our schools, where we're using inbuilt inefficiencies, from a school year with long summer breaks even though only 1% of our nation's citizens now need summer for agricultural work, to the style of learning. We're asking boys to sit quietly and focus on texts for hours, and no, they're not designed physically, emotionally or psychologically for these tasks. My personal favorite educational experience was the police academy (POST), because our lectures alternated regularly with sustained physical training. We need more of this.
We need longer school days to acknowledge many parents now work longer hours, with some staff arriving earlier and then leaving earlier and others coming in later and staying later. Alternate academics with physical activities, from working out and playing sports to dram and art that involves movement. There's nothing wrong with dance classes for example, or yoga. Schools should begin with breakfast, an academic class for digestion time, then exercise, repeating over the course of the day.
Traditional feminism has its strengths and good points too: we need to structure employment and even our courts to focus less on gender and more on performance. You can't support and system where men take all the financial risks in marriage (and divorce settlements) and expect equal support from both genders. For divorce, for example, I've long believed the two individuals should be examined without the court knowing the gender of either party (plaintiff A and B, or random numbers). The same should be true of resumes and other evaluations for employment: the gender should be increasingly ignored in favor of abilities.
Boys need more active learning, and that's not impossible to create. Nor is a roughly equal world where both sexes get their due and fair share of both responsibilities and challenges at home and at work. We can and should do so.
Whether we will as a society is a separate question unfortunately. I have my doubts, like the author.
A fine essay, on an important topic. Well said.
This is great reflection! I have two boys now and hope to have more children—boys and girls, G-d willing! I think about them growing up with some sadness, but also joy—I’ll be the Grandma! And they remind me about it: “When I’m a Dad…” Moms who love and support their sons’ growth, including their individuation and eventually their marriage, can hopefully have a wonderful, continued relationship with them.
I see this with my brothers and with my husband. In fact, I’m close with my mother-in-law, and we currently live right next door to my in-laws!