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Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#491

Post by dumpsterdiver »

corinroyal wrote: post #406
_8j50 wrote: post #311

It is not a father's job to be the person a child goes to for emotional support. A father is indeed supposed to pass down masculinity and how to manage it and how to become a socially functional and acceptable man. Mothers on the other hand are supposed to be the primary person that provides emotional support and care. But, the immediate community is supposed to provide that support as well. This is how human society…

Be careful not to confuse nature with nurture. Naturally humans have a high degree of variation. The traditionalist system you refer to is a construction, if a long-standing one. We can critique the success of this system like any other human construct. To argue that stoic fathers tend to produce better sons requires evidence. We might ask, "Better for what?" Better to be a disposable cog in a rich man's machine, per…

> The traditionalist system you refer to is a construction, if a long-standing one.

All social systems are constructions, and yes you are correct, we can observe and critique them. The sky is also blue. I like oranges. Snails are slow.

> To argue that stoic fathers tend to produce better sons requires evidence.

Likewise, to argue the opposite also requires more evidence than saying that "there is quite a bit of evidence" for your point. Saying that there is evidence is not evidence.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#492

Post by brigandish »

Shared404 wrote: post #472
brigandish wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> (that humans are sexually dimorphic and ramifications of that) We're actual a bimodal distribution. Even not accounting for intersex folk it's a lot less binary than most people assume or was covered in 8th grade bio.

[flagged]

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#493

Post by tgv »

anon291 wrote: post #388
foogazi wrote: post #240

> Fathers are also more likely to sing to and soothe their toddler daughters at night when they cry. 100 years ago father’s wouldn’t even talk to their kids. I don’t think dads even went into the delivery room Dad’s didn’t get time off from work to be with their wives when the baby was born or get bonding time Things are definitely getting better on this front

What utter rubbish... Where did you read this? Or get this impression? My grandfather was the epitome of "manliness". Blue collar worker. Hunter. Army service. My mother and her sisters have vivid memories of him singing to them. Something is honestly sick with so many families in this country. Men have been caring for their children for millennia. It's what separates humans from the lesser beasts.

If this matters, its effect in society is going depend on the number of fathers who behave like this. If that number were much smaller 100 years ago then it is now, etc.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#494

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

theptip wrote: post #408
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless of the debate on how tough (or not) love should be, the absent fathers issue seems like something concrete and impactful that we should be trying to address. Where would we even start? The only circumstances where we could hope to do anything at all are those where it's either not a problem, or is still only a minor one... if daddy's doing 20 for murder or dealing at the kilo level, are we supposed to le…

A simple answer (the one other developed countries tend towards) would be to emphasize / invest more in rehabilitation than in retribution/deterrence in the criminal justice system. Another set of approaches would be to fund pro-natal/pro-family initiatives such as child income tax credits, to make it easier for fathers to participate in family life; at the margin economic instability drives families apart among othe…

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#495

Post by lelanthran »

klik99 wrote: post #224
Panzer04 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say the problems facing people other than man are far worse? I'm genuinely curious, because often conversation around these topics will go along the lines of "well, women have to worry about getting beaten up" (or (sexually) assaulted, etc), but men have problems too! The above attitude I feel like minimises men's problems - the implicit assumption is that everyone else has it worse, whether that attit…

I was wrong to use the word "obviously", and would change it to "in my opinion" if I could still edit that post. And definitely did not intend to minimize mens problems - I'm a man myself and have first hand experience. I've had this conversation with a friend who is a outspoken feminist who I felt erased the problems men faced. I don't have time to show my thoughts with any objective metrics, so I'm just going to la…

> I don't have time to show my thoughts with any objective metrics,

Here's the thing though, there are objective metrics. On almost all of them, women have it better as a group than men.

Victims of violence? Overwhelmingly male. Suicides? The same. Deaths and injuries at work. The bar charts for all of those look pretty much the same.

Other objective metrics reveal females to have the upper hand: education (better for females, worse for males), health (better for females, worse for males), family court (better for females, worse for males), employment (better for females than for males), homelessness (better for females than for males).

So your assertion that there exists objective metrics but that it would take too long to present is, I feel, maybe correct, but there's so few of those metrics and they need to be applied to narrowly, they may as well not exist.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#496

Post by qball »

Doxin wrote: post #484
dumpsterdiver wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your take about society, I disagree that boys have less space to be boys. Boys will be boys, no matter what the world does. There will never be a shortage of boys who want to throw rocks and jump in mud until their feet get stuck.

> Boys will be boys, no matter what the world does. I dunno man. In school it seems that gossiping is more or less accepted where roughhousing is clearly banned. That sure seems to me like the world is trying to repress at least part of "boys will be boys".

>In school it seems that gossiping is more or less accepted where roughhousing is clearly banned.

In its majestic equality, the law prohibits boy and girl alike from engaging in socialization activities overwhelmingly favored by boys.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#497

Post by oblio »

screye wrote: post #477
noname2021 wrote: post #444

Here's a thought and I am writing this as I don my kevlar flame retardant jacket. For most things in life where we could impact the lives of other people materially - driving is a good example - we ensure some minimal amount of training before letting people perform that activity. However with parenting we have nothing and the result it seems is we pay with a ton more resources downstream in the way of therapy, deten…

People aren't having enough children. Every extra hurdle is going to reduce the number of people who end up parents. > Potentially break the cycles of bad parenting You can't break cycles of bad parenting, because they are 2nd order effects of cycles of trauma. And cycles of trauma have been a fundamental part of human civilization since we've existed. We absolutely should teach compassion, good parenting 101s and ba…

> People aren't having enough children. Every extra hurdle is going to reduce the number of people who end up parents.

There's 8 billion of us.

Reducing the number of (unfit, unwilling, unplanned) parents is a net positive.

Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#499

Post by nprateem »

davidguetta wrote: post #108
hkt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. When my kid was young and I was out with him the other parents (invariably women) treated me as an oddity and assumed I would be incompetent. Yet, many don't like the fact they're saddled with the majority of childrearing. Dating is much the same: the majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity. This gets better as one gets older,…

> majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity This is so insane. Anyone who's been enough a player of the dating game and treed to optimise your strategy known you will end up becoming or (in my case) pretending to be "toxic masculinity" because it work so much more on girls.

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Re: Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

#500

Post by pseudalopex »

pyuser583 wrote: post #423
throw3823423 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of this in the US is our continued evolution in suburbs: In practice, in person contact with others is a lot more work than historically. This makes children have very little contact with adults other than teachers and their own parents. Even contact in businesses is depersonalized, given this world of chains, large stores and many employees with changing shifts, leading to minimal recurring contact, and i…

When suburbs were first built they were much more social. You had churches, Kiwanis clubs, veterans clubs, unions, bowling leagues, etc. But those third place institutions have been gradually replaced by the internet.

Bowling Alone said declining civic ties started in the 1960s. Critics said even earlier.
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