No that was not my title but the title from a recently published article in Psychology Today by Jennifer Musselman (yes a woman).
“Guys are flaming out in school, wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women,” says Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford University in a TED talk just last year. According to Zimbardo’s recent research, guys are 30 percent more likely to drop out of school, girls are surpassing boys intellectually at all grade levels, boys are five times more likely to have ADHD and boys make up two-thirds of all special-ed and remedial students.
What’s causing the rapid decline of these modern men? In addition to the video gaming and porn usage that Zimbardo points to, my colleague and mentor, Matthew Healy (a licensed Marriage and Family therapist and former psychology professor) suggests that women may be playing a larger than expected role in the contemporary guy’s demise.
She goes on to conclude:
While the biology of sex suggests that there are great differences in ways of nurturing, Healy notes he doesn’t think one is better and each can do the job without the other. However, if a woman perpetuates the notion that childcare is gender based, she is not only maintaining her superiority, but Healy says she is passively expressing her low opinion of her man’s ability to care and nurture. Moreover, she is preventing her male counterpart from learning the stereotypically female skills that may be granting women an upper hand. Perhaps worse, she may be partially responsible for the growing imbalance of responsibilities in male-female relationships and contributes to the overall modern male demise.
So the real question is whether or not childcare is gendered–do men and women take care of children differently? I am sure the gender essentialists have a POV on that topic but I tend to think that we as men and women do bring something different to how we care for our sons and daughters. And that as the primary caretakers of the past generations, women rightly feel that they know better. Men might do it differently–even better in some distinct regards–but they won’t always be viewed that way by their wives because a dad’s way may not always be a mom’s.
Or I could be completely wrong. I do think it worth thinking about and talking about. What do you think?
About Tom Matlack
Considering that %90 of k-12 teachers are female explains a lot about why the percentage of boys being drugged has risen in direct proportion.
Not to mention all those male teachers run off by either false accusation of the inherent power of false accusation.
Is it possible women are NOT contributing to the downfall of men when some demographics have a %80 single mother household?
The more honest question would be:
Are men allowed to help boys in this culture?
The answer is no.
Consider those %90 female teachers have taken womens studies courses where they learn false ideas like toxic masculinity and testosterone poisoning and realize their actions in the classroom are biased.
Or to use (her) words from these comments :Bigots.
Bigots in positions of power in the school and at home to enforce
the gender raunch handling of what could have been normal young men.
(if only dad was still at home)
Ironic when those with all the power cry victim to gain more power, isn’t it?
Either disingenuous,deluded,or outright lying to avoid responsibility.
(or the appearance thereof)
“So the real question is whether or not childcare is gendered–do men and women take care of children differently?”
Differently… yes. I was reading an article on this at fathers and families, with an interview of a nursemaid who described some very different tendencies between men and women. What I liked about the interview was the nursemaid described the benefits of both styles. One observation she made was that women tend to hold their infant children facing them, chest to chest, allowing the child to see the mother, and offering a consistency and assurance to the child. Meanwhile, fathers tend to hold their infants facing outward (back to chest), allowing them to observe and explore the world around them.
Doctor Farrell describes children raised with their fathers involved as exhibiting 26 traits less prevalent in fatherless children, including empathy. That said, I’m not certain how many traits were examined, and how many were seen in children with mothers vs without, but it shows, at the very least, that fathers involvement can have a noticeable and unique impact on a childs well-being, that isn’t easily replaced.
” And that as the primary caretakers of the past generations, women rightly feel that they know better.”
I wouldn’t say “rightly”. Women may have been the caretakers of the last generation, but that isn’t nessessarily due to them being better parents, just that when they become a parent, they generally have made the choice to do so, and they generally have the access, due to the current state of family courts.
It will continue to be difficult to judge if men are or aren’t good parents until we can assure that men are given just as much right to choose to be or not be a parent as the mothers.
“but they won’t always be viewed that way by their wives because a dad’s way may not always be a mom’s.”
It can go deeper than that. I have a friend, he and his wife had just had a child, only about 3-4 months old. She needed to go to scottland for a funeral, so SHE decided her mother would take care of the child. Not her husband, the father of the child, nope, te grandmother. She (wife) was unemployed and he (husband) needed to pay for her trip, so he didn’t argue and choose to go to work. Then that vulcano errupted in ice/green land and shut down all of europe for two weeks. well, at this point, grandmother had no more time off, and so father gladly took care of his own son, he worked from home mostly, and made arrangments for when he needed to go in for meetings. He was very happy for the time spent (and I’m confident it sewed some resentment for not letting him do that from the start). Mother actually got angry with grandmother for not taking care of the child the whole time, and she got made at father for being irresponsable and taking care of his own son.
Worst, a few months later, when I stopped by for a visit on mothers improve class night, baby was sick, had a mild fevor and was passed right out. Father said “go out, have your night, I can take care of everything for the 2-3 hours you’ll be gone”. Mother refused, said she didn’t trust him (despite the two weeks he took care of him without her)… She said this right in front of me. When I challenged her on it, she had no good reason, but still refused to allow father to take care of his own son for 2-3 hours while the baby was sick. Really, what was his options at this point?
The point is, sometimes, it has absolutely nothing to do with the mothers way or the fathers way, sometimes, it has to do solely with the mother and the father, and what they are even willing to allow the other to try.
I simply cannot figure out how gendered childcare correlates to the demise of men. Women have always done almost all or majority of childcare chores throughout history and men have survived it.
This might serve you as an answer:
Since children primarily went to school (instead of working in the farm with parents), women have kept ALL children including boys. That means that boys were not being taught manhood very much. As men worked outside the home, this continued. Today, a woman can have just about any professional job a man can have, so officially women have encroached on what used to be “male” territory (working and earning money). Unfortunately, very few men are given the option to demonstrate competency at childcare, which is traditionally “female” territory. The result is that women have choices, and can do everything – but all a man can do is go to work. Now we have women to compete with in the workforce, so there are fewer jobs for men…so at the same time, we are less able to “provide”. Young men today are more out-of-sync with young women than ever before.
If the new ambition of men is to change diapers of babies, then certainly manhood would demise.
I would agree that men and women probably take care of children differently. I’d be interested in seeing how affected by culture this is. For example, Mark Neil mentioned an article describing how men and women hold babies differently. I wonder if it is similar in other cultures, or whether that is strictly something men and women in modern western society do. I definitely don’t think that either men or women are inherently better parents, though.
On an off topic note directed at Jennifer Musselman’s article: stop demonizing video games and porn!
“On an off topic note directed at Jennifer Musselman’s article: stop demonizing video games and porn!”
Agreed. Video games and porn use (to extremes) are more likely a result of the problem, not the cause. As boys and men are made to feel less and less valued, and begin opting out of a society (school, relationships, etc. ) that appears to hate them, they turn to things to compensate, sometimes sports, sometimes games, sometimes porn, sometimes other things. Things that make them feel good about themselves. Things that can challenge or stimulate them. Games aren’t the problem, they are a cooping mechanism.
It also bothers me to no end that people are so willing to point to boys and men themselves as the problem, whereas when it was girls and women in the same position, discrimination was the only possible reason. Even now I see efforts made to get more women into the STEM fields in post secondary education to “close the gap” and Harvard (?) deans getting career threatening flack for suggesting that women’s interests may very well be the cause women don’t enter the STEM fields, while the failure of boys is pinned on the fact boys are just inferior to girls and left to fend for themselves.
I get the impression women are extremely jealous of their power in this area. I wonder if they are afraid that a man might do a better job of parenting than them if given the chance? It’s completely unlike the reverse situation where men are happy for women to do work traditionally done by men. It’s ironic because of all the sexist slogans about men fear strong women and so on, but I think women are a LOT more reluctant to give up their power and that may be because the “power” men are giving up wasn’t really power at all, but the power women would have to give up is power indeed.
At best it seems to be the attitude that men can “help” women in a hapless and incompetent manner for short periods of time.