To raise a man
It has become more challenging than ever to parent boys
Sebastian Junger writes in ‘Tribe, On homecoming and belonging’1 that society always had coming of age rituals for boys. When fathers were engaged in hunting, gathering or in farming, children were raised in the village by the womenfolk. While girls had role models from their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, older sisters, and others, boys did not. They tended to model themselves after the womenfolk.
The Masai and other tribes take the boys out to hunt, boys in Hawaii would get tattoos. Samurais had genpuku. Most ancient religions like Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Judaism (bar mitzvah) have these built-in to their traditions.
The upanayana ceremony in Hinduism initiates young boys into the next phase of their lives; education. The ceremony preceded the journey of boys to ashrams where they would live and study under teachers. The father initiates the young boy to the sacred teachings. However, a key part of the ceremony is also a symbolic last meal (matrubhojana) in which the mother feeds the child with her own hands. This communicates the weaning away from the mother, that the boy will be different now, that he has responsibilities, will need to be strong, masculine, and virtuous, and will need to get the right kind of knowledge to thrive as a good human being. The child becomes twice-born (dwija).
Every culture had ceremonies that initiated the child into the tribe.
Tribes lent cohesion to society. A cohesive society was a caring society where the individual felt duty towards the larger community.
An unmoored society has greater instances of crime, murder and abuse. 2
American veterans suffer greater instances of PTSD than most other cultures, posits Junger citing research, including his own with the Navajo tribe3. PTSD does not take place during war, it takes place when the soldier comes back home and tries to re-integrate into society.
If you come back to a close, cohesive, tribal society you can get over trauma pretty quickly. And if you come back to an alienating modern society, you might remain traumatized your entire life. In other words, maybe the problem isn’t them, the vets, maybe the problem is us. 4
We in modern society are not equipping boys to wean away from their mothers. Carl Jung wrote about Puer aeternus, the man-child.
Many young men [….] are passive wanderers in life with no path or purpose, save the pursuit of momentary pleasure to ease their suffering.5
Tribes evolved to overcome the mother complex.
In most cultures throughout history individuals transitioned from adolescence to adulthood with the help of initiatory rites of passage. […]
Following the symbolic death of childhood, a ceremony of rebirth would be performed, marking the young adult’s transformation to a more mature state of being. He was subsequently taught by the elders the wisdom and knowledge of the tribe, and then sent off into the wilderness where he would spend many months alone struggling for his survival. Upon his successful return, he was welcomed back into the tribe as an adult member. The youth, from that point on, was expected to have overcome his “mother complex”; immaturity and dependency were no longer acceptable.
America has abandoned the coming of age rituals that govern these transitions. This does not portend well for boys. As it is, innocent men are being increasingly victimized or marginalized from college admissions to jobs.
Chris Arnade writes in ‘Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America’6;
Much of the back row of America, both white and black, is humiliated. The good jobs they could get straight out of high school and gave the stability of a lifelong career have left. The churches providing them a place in the world have been cast as irrational, backward, and lacking. The communities that provided pride are dying, and into this vacuum have come drugs. Their entire worldview is collapsing, and then they are told this is their own fault: they suck at school and are dumb, not focused enough, not disciplined enough. It is a wholesale rejection that cuts to the core. It isn’t just about them; it is about their friends, family, congregation, union, and all they know. Whole towns and neighborhoods have been forgotten and destroyed, and when they point this out, they are told they should just get up and move (as if anyone can do that) and if they don’t, then they are clearly lazy, weak, and unmotivated.”
Boys are being asked to do much more than ever before. Women too, but there are books written about them, by them, for them. There is hardly a book or study in a mainstream magazine on the burden of being a modern man. Boys and men are being told to fend for themselves, since it is always their fault.
“Never before have family relationships been seen as so interwoven with the search for personal growth, the pursuit of happiness, and the need to confront and overcome psychological obstacles,” the historian Stephanie Coontz, the director of education and research for the Council on Contemporary Families, told me in an email. “For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.”7
If you ignore the margins of toxic masculinity and toxic feminist-politics, there exists a center in which men and women are perfectly reasonable and want to do well.
However, men are being increasingly asked to perform multiple roles, as husbands, caregivers to parents, role-model fathers, egalitarian work colleagues, mentors, and citizens. They are asked to be a mix of Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy of Pride & Prejudice) and Mr. Zelensky.
As Andrew Sullivan wrote in his essay, ‘Between the world and men’.
No, the left is not calling all masculinity toxic. But they get pretty quiet when you ask for a definition of non-toxic masculinity that doesn’t end up sounding like being a woman8
How utterly bewildering.
I do not know what to make of all this as a parent of two boys.
I do know that our boys are being set up for failure.
I know that I will have to imbibe in them all the virtues of our ancients to make them capable of protecting themselves and thriving.
सत्यं ब्रूयात् प्रियं ब्रूयान्न ब्रूयात् सत्यमप्रियम् । प्रियं च नानृतं ब्रूयादेष धर्मः सनातनः -Manusmriti 4.138
Let him say what is true, let him say what is pleasing, let him utter no disagreeable truth, and let him utter no agreeable falsehood; that is the eternal law.
See this marvelous talk by Sebastian Junger at Google.
How PTSD became a problem far beyond the battlefield, Sebastian Junger, Vanity Fair, May 2015.
Sebastian Junger, ‘Our lonely society makes it hard to come home from war’, TED Talks.
Carl Jung and the Psychology of the Man-Child, The Academy of Ideas, June 2019.
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, Chris Arnade,
A Shift in American Family Values Is Fueling Estrangement, Joshua Coleman, The Atlantic, May 2022.
Between the world and men, Andrew Sullivan, Substack, Feb 11, 2022.
The alienation of the American male is indeed worrisome. Close tribes, which produced coming-of-age rituals, absorbed much of the angst of becoming an adult.
Those won't cone back - thankfully.
As parents, we have to ensure that the smaller families in which they grow offer as much support, resilience, and room to grow. That we don't present role models absorbed by work and society to the exclusion of family and growth.