The child-man

Did we talk about this yet? I can't remember. Anyway, I wanted to bring to your attention a provocative piece by Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute, in which she analyzes the phenomenon of the Child-Man. We published a version of this in the Dallas Morning News on Sunday, and it quickly became the most e-mailed story from our website. People are really talking about this.

Here's the lede of Kay's original piece:

It’s 1965 and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you’re an adult!

Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”

But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men. With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends [see “The New Girl Order,” Autumn 2007]. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it’s receding.

How come? Partly it's feminism, says Kay, and the reconstruction of social roles. Partly it's because there's lots of money to be made by corporations in extending male adolescence. But mostly young men are choosing to put off adulthood because ... they can. Here's Kay:

For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it is marriage and children that turn boys into men. Now that the SYM can put off family into the hazily distant future, he can—and will—try to stay a child-man. Yesterday’s paterfamilias or Levittown dad may have sought to escape the duties of manhood through fantasies of adventures at sea, pinups, or sublimated war on the football field, but there was considerable social pressure for him to be a mensch. Not only is no one asking that today’s twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father—that is, grow up—but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything that he needs to settle down in pig’s heaven indefinitely

Now, I wrote a column to accompany Kay's piece (DMN version). To the surprise of no one here, I took a Rieffan view on the matter. Excerpt:

The culture warriors of the previous generation were not wrong to question conformity, but they went too far. They have deprived their sons of authoritative tradition, both in word and example, and with it the ability to transcend the adolescent state. Much in our dominant culture conspires to keep young men in a permanent state of adolescence: conscious only of their desires and the impulse to fulfill them. This dependency is tailor-made for a consumerist economy built on creating and exploiting wants. Making the world safe for big business, no doubt, wasn't what the '60s generation had in mind, but it's a little late for do-overs.

The fathers of today's child-men gave to their sons the freedom to choose their own paths through life. But how to choose and what to choose?

Apparently the Atlanta Journal-Constitution picked up the column today. I've received two e-mails from Atlanta. Here's one:

I just read your article "A bracing slap....." in the Atlanta Journal. I don't know who you are, but that was the best written article about the relationship between "boomer" men and their sons. I am 42......and I largely feel I have not been given a map. My Dad is typical for that generation....he is so focused on his needs and pleasures that he had no wisdom to give me. So where was I going to get that wisdom? Hard to find in such a soul-less culture. I went to visit Oxford in England several years ago and noticed how tradition played such a big part in their lives. But it wasnt stifling tradition.......it was tradition that gave you a comfort where you could then go out and do your own thing. A map........but not a fundamentalist restriction. Your article moved me. I want to send it to my Dad and maybe he and I can dialogue about it.

Here's another:

Women and society have brought it on themselves. There is an old, crude saying which sort of sums up the situation: "If you can get the milk for free, why buy the cow?"

A man wrote that. But you know, I was talking about the Hymowitz piece with a female friend the other day, and she said exactly the same thing.

UPDATE: This e-mail just came in from a teacher:

I have seen my share of child-men in the making. I have dated MANY a child-man, and to this day, thank my lucky stars that I didn't marry one.

You asked in your article if a man submits to the concept of duty and respect. We have been living through a revolution that has rendered most young people incapable of recognizing and submitting to authority.

I should know. I teach high school. I have seen what the child-men have taught their soon-to-be man children. I have seen child-men and child-women refuse to see their son or daughter anything less than perfect and scoff at the authority who mentions that their perception might be skewed. I hear "My dad can get me out of this" and "all I have to do is call my mom". I know.

Most young people I encounter do not have a road map. Most young people I see are wandering aimlessly through their lives, angry at anyone and everyone when they don't get their way. It is disheartening, to say the least, to be a teacher in these trying times.