To make matters worse, men don’t have fathers to look to for answers. Since 1960, the percentage of boys living apart from their biological fathers has nearly doubled from 17% to 32%. Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution scholar, noted that:
If you’re growing up in a single-parent household, and you go to a typical public school and typical medical system, there’s a decent chance that you will not encounter a male figure of authority until middle school or later. Not your doctor, not your teachers. No one else around you.
And then he adds, “What does that feel like?”
The answer is, “It feels like being lost.”
So what is the solution?
Glenn Stanton wrote an interesting article titled, “Manhood Is Not Natural.” Womanhood is, but not manhood. Womanhood is a natural phenomenon. Her very biology tends to make her grow into a healthy, mature woman.
Just think about sex. Sex makes babies. But for a man, sex can be just about pleasure. He’s not naturally connected to the potential of that act.
A woman is.
For a woman, it can begin shortly after conception, intensifying daily. It costs her in terms of energy, sleep and comfort, long before the pain of childbirth. Stanton writes that she is inescapably invested. The man is not. He doesn’t naturally become a mature man the way a woman naturally becomes a mature woman. It’s why the phrases “woman up,” “be a woman,” or “make a woman out of her” don’t exist.
They don’t need to.
But they do for men.
So how does a male become a man? It has to be learned. As an identity, maleness happens but manhood does not.
And how is it learned?
From other men. It comes through a father and the community’s larger fraternity of men. But that is also the problem. Either men are being mentored poorly,
…or they are not being mentored at all.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
