Posted on 06/07/2013 6:28:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
Between the baby boomers on one hand and Generations X, Y and Z on the other, cultural and economic changes have transformed the landscape of our culture. It's difficult to wrap a description around what sociologists call a "cohort."
"I'm not a real person yet," says a 27-year-old college graduate in the movie "Frances Ha," the latest and hippest of the contemporary coming-of-age scenarios. She has no credit card and explains that she even has to look for a cash machine to pay a dinner check. But if she doesn't yet feel mature enough to assume "personhood," at least she has enough cash in the bank to live an independent life. Many modern young adults never leave home.
The latest generation to arrive at adulthood is not only economically adrift, but many of the privileged among them are adrift without time-tested values to anchor them. Sex is readily available, but the most creative among them complain there's no thrill of a romance and the joy of falling in love. Bonding takes place in friendship, but smartphones dominate communication -- there's a lot of looking at flat screens but not so much looking into a beloved's eyes.
Sociologists say that becoming an adult no longer begins where adolescence ends. The age of 20 to 30 is more "post-adolescent" than grown-up. Young adults put off moving past the traditional benchmarks -- a job with benefits, marriage, and the responsibilities of motherhood and fatherhood.
As young singles seek to "know thyself" through connections on iPhones, Twitter, Facebook and other destinations on the Internet, the traditional next stage -- marriage and family -- is undergoing radical change, too. New arrangements in raising families arrive with fundamental alterations in male-female relationships.
A study released last week by the Pew Foundation, putting numbers to these trends, is drawing heated discussions among sociologists, psychologists and economists about the impact of the changes. Nearly 40 percent of mothers with children under the age of 18 are either the primary or sole breadwinner of the family, up from 11 percent in 1960. This statistic covers another more troublesome change: While 5.1 million, or 37 percent of these mothers, are married with a higher income than their husbands, another 8.6 million mothers, or 63 percent of the female population, are raising children alone.
How you interpret these figures may depend on whether you focus first on the individual, then the home or finally the society -- but however you consider them, the numbers are serious issues for reflection about what they mean for the future. What does it mean when a man no longer gets his identity through work, or as the support for his wife and children? Women are better educated than men at every level, but how does it affect culture and personal relationships when a man has a diminished role in a woman's heart and at the family hearth?
When the Pew findings were released, a conservative male panelist on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business News show expressed the once routine observation that animals tracked the human complementary sex roles: The male offers strength and protection, and the female provides nurturing. One blogger shot back angrily that he should tell that to a lioness, a black widow spider or a female praying mantis. But if women are no longer perceived as traditional nurturers, women who work full time either as single or married mothers continue to worry more about their children than men do.
Few Americans are eager to return to rigid formulas for parental roles. Most agree that a woman should work if she wants to, but men urgently need expanded job opportunities now that the blue-collar industries have fled to foreign shores. A boy still needs a man to look up to, and a girl still gets her first impression of the opposite sex from a father, even if he's not there.
In an information society, women have the edge, and both men and women with better educations are leaving behind men who traditionally were trained for industrial vocations. The most startling statistic in the Pew study is that "the total family income is higher when the mother, not the father, is primary breadwinner."
These startling observations won't make the cut in college, where women's studies dominate the curriculum and professors prefer to discuss "The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie," or the "mythic maleness" of Che Guevara. Feminists must move away from their narrow protests over pay gaps, which are largely determined by personal choices. Rather, they should look at the support gap of psychological and economic accountability for their challenged sisters who have no men around to take paternal responsibility for their children. That's far more important than out-of-date grievances, and will profoundly affect the next generation, whatever we decide to call it.
Why doesn’t college grad “Frances Ha” have a credit card? I thought they gave those out like candy to students? Did she wreck her rating already?
The “next generation” will be in bondage because we aren’t raising men, but politically corrected and browbeaten males trained to act like women.
both men and women with better educations are leaving behind men who traditionally were trained for industrial vocations.
Sound like men need to get off their asses and head back to school. Those "traditional" industrial male jobs aren't coming back.
An interesting article, it brings out some stuff we here on FR have discussed over the years. And I agree with most of it in relation to Education and the changing landscape of available work here in the U.S.
But I am perplexed that she has ignored the Elephant in the room. How are the men that should be the young fathers being treated by the women in their lives and the social system they grew up in? How many of them are the result of broken families? How many of them have seen first hand how their fathers were treated by the courts and by their own mothers. Was it good treatment or was it bad? How many of them have seen through the subtle bias of how fatherhood is treated on TV. The smart supremely intelligent and capable woman and the bumbling sub-par father whose pre-teen children are far smarter than he ever will be.
Does he think of how he was as a pre-teen, was he as smart as those actors on TV? Does he wonder how he will be regarded and treated once he becomes an adult and a father? Or does he decide that being a adolescsent is far better and living in Mom’s basement and interacting with the rest of the world by a computer is far preferable to the reality awaiting him outside the doors of her house.
And when the day inevitably comes for the women who brought about the ‘fairness and equality’ of the men in their lives wonder where did the men go. All they need to do is go look in the basement.
I wonder what life will be like for the next generation of real men. Will success be easy as those few sheepdogs run circles around the numerous sheep, or will life be frustrating as they carry the load for so many who are content to be carried by others? Can they push the pendulum hard enough to get it swinging the other way - but somehow keep it from swinging too far?
Not everyone can handle college.
Most people on FR are fairly intelligent, but I’m telling you, there are millions who (even through no fault of their own, we’ve always been a certain number of lower IQ people since history began) cannot get through college.
And most stupid people are willing to work, even as a skilled laborer. If there are no jobs... well stupid people like to eat too.
It’s in society’s best interest to get those industrial jobs back here.
“are either the primary or sole breadwinner of the family...”
What the article makes a point of not saying is that among married men and women, 90 percent of the men make more than their wives.
So how do they get to 40 percent? Simple - most of the women who are the breadwinner do so because they are single moms. Why? Because the state actually pays them more money to raise their child by themselves than many men can make while working.
A woman with a kid who marries actually makes less money as a family in giving up this subsidy.
You put it better than I was about to.
Where are you going to fine those ‘spare people’? There aren’t any.
Again, the article has an agenda. Thanks for promoting that agenda.
Most of the women who make more than their ‘man’, don’t have a man to make more money.
This is vastly overblown, again for the reasons already stated.
Couple things here.
1, there isn’t a crisis between the married men and women.
2, there IS a crisis with the single mothers.
So what we have to ask ourselves is why is this crisis come about? Why are 40 percent of all women choosing to raise their children alone? Where are the boys?
If, as you say the problem is that the boys aren’t interacting with the girls -where are all these babies coming from?
The reality is much more simpler. The boys who are at home are the ones who are:
1, trying to save up money so that they can get married.
2, working part-time where the cost of rent would far outstrip what they make working.
The job market is atrociously bad for young men 30 or under. It’s absolutely terrible. If you do get a job, you aren’t going to get benefits and you aren’t going to get any commitment on the part of the employer.
As for school + education you might want to take a look at what is actually going on. ;) There is preferential admissions policy for women, and look at the degrees that they tend to get. There are women quotas all the way through in degree classes where women are less likely to get degrees, but none for the men.
Then you get all the benefits that the women qualify for and the men do not. So it’s actually cheaper to get an education, easier to get in and easier to stay in and we wonder why more women are getting degrees? It’s not hard.
Some of the colleges are waking up to the fact that having it 66/33 women is a bum deal for the women looking to find a guy to get married. Every single college with enrollment like that is seeing their enrollment collapse.
The only thing keeping the college industry going are the loans. We make it cheap for a student to spend 4 years studying and offer loans for it when we will not offer a similarly aged man a loan for 4 years to not study. This represents a significant distortion in the market.
I don’t understand your post.
Who cares? The gloBULLists and so called free traders made fortune over the last 30 years selling out to the third world and communists. / sarc
Don’t you get it? The Free Trade people like to blame the unemployed while driving to see their bankers.
The problem is where are you going to find these people to work these jobs?
There’s a people shortage and a skill gap in bringing the manufacturing back to the US. You can’t just dial it back up again. One of the problems with offshoring is the issues with continuity.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. A few modest proposals to help get industrial jobs back: Reduce or eliminate the minimum wage; reduce or eliminate the corporate income tax; reduce the 60 or so federal safety net programs that incentivize idleness; and no more free trade pacts with developing, low wage countries and a scale back of the existing ones where we can.
The mental and moral islands that are modern men and women; their pronounced attachment to the seeming stability offered by technology and programmimg and the drift away from their selves as the embodiment of their souls has made them less able to peer into their subjective experiences and build satisfying outward purpose. Disinherited of purpose but processing information urgently, nothing is cherished or preserved. Instead, the profound truths are cast off - discarded for ultra-sensory informational input, partaking of nothing - shunned light, shunned truth. They are the property of information masters only because they allow themselves to be so devoid of reason. This is the Winter of our species. That which isn’t building is resting - or gestating, possibly. There’s at least the hope that we will locate again our authentic humanness, not accept a future where all our affinities and aversions are predetermined for us via inaccurate and unreliable carriers, by knowing life only from staring into the bottom of a polished pan of information.
I was fortunate to have myself been born into a cohort of the baby boom in 1960 into a large family and to have suffered the old school of hard knocks, boom dot bust careers and a stable marriage undertaken only after I reached my own “post-adolescent” phase. If I were a “Dad Whisperer” I’d say to modern males to get that Engineering degree or be a great mechanic, not much different today than when I was young.
Honey, I have known lots of stupid people who have graduated college, and the curricula that many are subjected to in colleges today leave them with little knowledge of history or of writing skills.
Bugs the heck out of me to see an elitist attitude about who is and who is not college material.
Students can be divided based on their abilities and preferences at a relatively young age. Their curricula can then be tailored to their test results. At one point in our history, this was a practice in education.
But, somehow, vocational schools came to be viewed as inferior to college prep. Manual labor and the trades came to be looked down upon.
What we are now stuck with is a glut of degree holders who have no common sense or problem-solving skills and who don’t know how to do much of anything unless it involves phone apps of some sort.
Rather, they should look at the support gap of psychological and economic accountability for their challenged sisters who have no men around to take paternal responsibility for their children.
***
I have some psychological support for them:
Show some self respect and stop having babies unless you are married to a man who can support you and them.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.