Ken Solin

I’m disheartened by the number of twenty to thirty-year old men who are seemingly lost and not likely to get found, any time soon. Too many Boomer dads have been careless about preparing their sons for manhood. They have failed to create independent, emotionally conscious men with strong character. The result is a generation of coddled boys who haven’t a clue what it means to act like men. The effect that their immature, dysfunctional behavior is having on young women is equally devastating. This is an unequivocal lose/lose for Boomer fathers and their sons.

Perhaps it’s more expedient for fathers to infantilize their sons than to teach them how to become self-sufficient men. And I can’t begin to fathom what fathers are thinking when they invite their sons to come back home to live when they can’t find jobs in their chosen fields. What I do know is that fathers are cheating their sons out of the opportunity to face their problems, resolve them, and build strong character in the process. Instead, we have spawned a generation of young men who unwittingly wear the emotional diapers we put them in.

I can’t blame young men for the fix they’re in, because they’re the victims. It’s understandably difficult to reject being taken care of when faced with having to find any type of work to pay the rent. Fathers created this co-dependent relationship with their sons in the naive belief that they were sparing them the pain of struggling. In the process, they denied their sons their shot at self-esteem and the growth that comes from overcoming adversity.

Perhaps it was our own experiences as Boomer boys that suggested this flawed path. Our fathers weren’t particularly emotional men, and few knew how to relate to their sons on that level. What they did teach us though was the value of hard work, and that meant any work. No one looked down at a young man who did what he had to do in order to survive. Many of us, it appears, have decided to go to the other extreme, spoiling our sons to the point of keeping them juvenile and helpless.

Instead of sparing our sons the pain that is part and parcel of the rights of passage, we should have prepared them for the tough times we’re experiencing now that are worse in many ways than what Boomers ever faced. Why would they feel the pressure to become independent men when their boyhood bedroom is made up and ready to welcome them home again? Dinner is ready, son, go wash your hands. Inviting our grown sons to come back home to live, however briefly, is a sure-fire way to ensure they maintain the emotional development of high school students.

I don’t recall many Boomers who couldn’t survive, even in difficult times. We expected life to be hard, and when it was, we were neither surprised nor discouraged. Since we expected it, we were prepared to face it. We were tough enough to absorb the blows that came our way, and we were proud of our ability to stand on our own two feet and survive. We are, and always have always been, independent men.

We also failed to teach our sons the importance of voting. In the last Presidential election, as in previous elections, young men failed to vote in significant numbers. Since we didn’t explain the importance of voting, and young men consequently don’t vote, there aren’t any politicians who care a whit about the fate of young men who can’t find work or begin careers. Politicians aren’t afraid of losing young men’s non-existent votes. Young men have the voting numbers to better their opportunities, but first they’re going to have to find politicians that either give a damn about them or fear their voting power, or both.

It’s not too late to help our sons. Whether or not you’re a dad who ever envisioned his son sharing a cheesy, two bedroom apartment with five other guys while holding down a shitty job, is irrelevant, because that’s likely his fate if he’s able to find work that isn’t related to his college degree. You aren’t helping him by sparing him what he has been taught to believe is the indignity of low-paying jobs. His princely attitude about certain work being beneath him is your doing, and it’s your responsibility to apologize for putting that foolish notion into his head. Begin encouraging him to find any type of work so he can start living like a man.

If you love your son but still don’t understand that character is developed only through facing adversity, bite your tongue and tell your son to move out and find his way in the world, anyway. That would be doing him a favor by allowing him to struggle and grow into his manhood. If we don’t begin to push our sons to learn how to survive in tough times, they never will, and the consequences of that are too horrible to imagine.

Boomer fathers have to let go of the notion that they are better fathers than the fathers they grew up with, because, in many cases, that isn’t saying much anyway. The next time you think you have the right to shove advice down your live-at-home son’s throat because you’re still supporting him, think again. Just because he doesn’t tell you to go fuck yourself, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t like to. You’re playing a losing hand, and you’re playing it to an unnecessary, disastrous conclusion.

I’m concerned by how young men are faring socially. Relationships are being replaced by hooking up. No emotional skill is required. Just ask young women how difficult it is to find a young man to date who has any grasp on emotional intimacy. We can blame the porn industry for poisoning our sons about women, but the important lessons about women and intimacy, were ours to teach them, not theirs.

Boomer fathers have failed to make men of their sons. It’s time to change that paradigm, and that means cutting the umbilical cord that prevents them from being independent, strong men. Disabuse yourselves of the notion that you did your best, because you didn’t. If you had, your sons would be able to fend for themselves. Stop writing checks. Stop subsidizing them. Stop inviting them to come back home to live.

Start letting them grow into the men you hoped you were creating, but weren’t. Let them struggle, and let them grow from that struggle. Let them build the depth of character that will serve them as men. It’s the fatherly thing for a man to do.

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Anyone who rejects that women are smarter than men need only look at the recent statistics for students enrolled in the graduate schools of business, law, medicine, and dentistry. Women now outnumber men in those graduate schools and will soon hold the majority in those lofty careers. Does this make women smarter? I don’t see how anyone can deny this. They came from way behind fifty years ago, and are currently leaving men in their dust, proving that all they ever needed was an equal opportunity.

Women endure physical pain in a manner men could never consider. Think childbirth. And single mothers are raising half of the children in America by themselves, while holding down full-time careers. Are women tougher than men? Clearly they are. There are few jobs any longer that require brute strength alone, and even physically challenging careers in firefighting and police work are being handled capably by women.

But women’s greatest power is in their enormous emotional strength that they call upon when necessary. They can capably provide the love and emotional care their children need, and support their husbands’ needs simultaneously. They aren’t afraid of their emotions, and, unlike men, don’t hide from them out of fear or ignorance. They know how to deal with their feelings as they arise. Men who think women are weak because they cry more easily than they do are delusional. Women cry to release their pent-up emotions, instead of holding them in and blowing up. Men have yet to learn this simple lesson.

What does all of this mean to men? It means that its way past late for men to respond to the deafening wake-up call and become fully embodied men. That means becoming men who are confident in their manhood and can express, feel, and control their emotions. It means men who don’t feel threatened by women, and mistreat them because of their own inadequacies. It means that men are now the ones behind the eight-ball, and sadly, many still haven’t figured that out. Men are being left behind in so many arenas that they are becoming angry instead of resourceful, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Men used to wield all of the power in relationships and were responsible for the day-to-day, general well-being of the women they were in relationships with. That was a burden that men didn’t handle very well, and that women decided to assume. Women have beaten a path towards success and independence that is faster than any social change I can recall. They accomplished all of this with a minimal amount of fuss and noise.

How could women have achieved this if they weren’t smarter, tougher, and more emotionally centered, and what are the lessons men can learn from women? Men who fail to answer the wake-up will be left holding the bag of discontent and loneliness. Women are clever enough to realize that waiting for men to come around is going to take too long. Many now view men in the same way men used to see them, as necessary sexual partners with little else to offer.

Men should feel threatened, at least enough to change their dysfunctional behavior. Fathers who don’t spend time with their children damage them because they deny their children the most important aspect of fatherhood, emotional support. Fathers who cheat their children by withholding child-support because they don’t like the notion of supporting their ex-wives too, have to be plenty stupid, or in serious denial, to believe that baloney. Men can’t choose whether or not to be fathers. If you have a child, you’re a father, end of story.

Men are portrayed as jokes on television, and while it’s grating for me to watch, it’s not entirely out of the realm of reality. Most of the male dysfunctional behavior that causes so much pain to everyone, including men, is related to their inability to respond appropriately to their own feelings. Angry men aren’t angry at women; they just take their anger out on women because women are convenient and physically smaller. Imagine a man trying to rage against a male friend. How long would that friend be willing to tolerate that dysfunctional behavior before he said good-bye and good luck?

While women have been working hard together in small groups to find their places in the world, men have been sitting on the sidelines, watching helplessly as they’re being left in the dust. Men should be angry, but not with women. Men should be angry at their own emotional laziness, which causes them so much unnecessary pain and suffering. Men who continue on a path of emotional laziness will wake up one day to find that not only are women in charge, but that their services are no longer required.

The solution is for men to begin a dialogue with each other that’s entirely directed at their lack of an emotional center. I’ve worked with men for over twenty years, and I’ve seen how easy it is for men to engage each other in this dialogue. The results are men who aren’t afraid of their feelings, and who know how to use them appropriately to work through their issues. I hope I don’t see a time when men are permanently left behind, but all indications are that I might.

A lot has changed regarding responsibility for raising sons. It’s important to know that men were primarily responsible for raising their sons prior to the 1850′s and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. That’s a fact that’s been mostly forgotten. As a culture we’ve paid a heavy price for diminished fatherhood. The role of fathers has become mostly that of financial support, and this is true of men who remain married as well as men who don’t. Men must make fatherhood a proud and meaningful role again.

Prior to factories and mass production, men took their sons with them each day into the fields. They taught them how to grow food, hunt, and how to behave like men. They taught their sons trust by being trustworthy. They provided role models for their sons to emulate and imitate. These lessons were the rights of passage from boyhood to manhood that fathers had passed down to sons for centuries, and they were lost in a flash.

When fathers left the fields to work in the factories, women assumed the role of raising sons. While their intentions were good, women can’t be expected to know how to teach boys to become men. Women have raised boys to become the men they imagined they should be. What has made this situation even worse is that few fathers today have those skills any more either. Fatherhood has become a murky proposition. Men are portrayed as idiots and fools, particularly on television. Real life and cartoon fathers are typically pathetic losers. Perhaps art is simply imitating life.

The first man a boy learns trust from is his father. A father who makes promises to his son and breaks them has taught his son that he can’t be counted on, he can’t be trusted to keep his word. A father who abuses his son, physically or emotionally teaches his son that men are angry, unpredictable, and absolutely not trustworthy. A father who chastises or berates his son when his son expresses his passions and desires has taught his son that he can’t be trusted to listen to him with an open mind and see who he really is. A divorced father who doesn’t assume at least half the responsibility for raising his son simply continues the disconnection between boyhood and manhood. He shouldn’t be surprised if his son becomes problematic.

There are social repercussions from boys not feeling they can trust men that follow into adult life. There are reasons why few men have close men friends. Fear and trust are the culprits. Fear of looking less successful than other men, less manly, and less intelligent, stem from the lack of trust between sons and their fathers. What man would trust other men to treat him more fairly than his father did? That’s a risk most men prefer to avoid, and the alternative to trusting other men, being a loner, while painful, is preferable to being betrayed like they were when they were boys.

I raised my son from the time he was a year old after my wife moved back to Europe. I was twenty-one, a boy with a boy in many ways, but I felt an overwhelming commitment to my son. I was determined to raise him in a manner I had been denied, and that meant building trust with him. I coached soccer and baseball and drove on school outings because he knew he could depend on me. I still remember the triple batch of chocolate chip cookies I baked for his school that our dog ate and almost died. My son never feared volunteering my services. I’m sure he knew that sometimes it was difficult for me, but that he trusted me enough to know I’d be there for him was reward enough.

When he talked about his musical preferences as a teen, I didn’t tell him I hated his music. I did, but I kept it to myself because I knew it was a part of his believing in himself, part of building his character. When he told me he didn’t want to go to college, but wanted to join the Marines instead, I didn’t tell him that he was foolish just because I’d avoided the draft during Vietnam. He had a passion about patriotism and doing his part for his country that I respected and admired. I feared for his well-being, but I didn’t show him fear. I showed him respect and admiration for doing what he truly believed in. I prayed each night he’d be spared going to war, but I kept that to myself too. He didn’t need to carry my burden.

When he mustered out of the Marines and asked me to pay for college, I told him I would because I wanted to show respect and support for his decision. When he graduated four years later and moved far away from me for his first job, I cried some, and told him how difficult his moving away was for me. He reminded me that this was his life, not mine. I respected his desire to make it on his own without his father looking over his shoulder.

My son is forty-four now, and the father of his seven-year old son. I often tell him that he’s the father I wished I’d had; he’s that good at it. What’s immediately noticeable is that my grandson trusts his father unconditionally, and that’s huge progress in my family. I broke the chain of mistrust with my father, and my son has built trust with his son because of the lesson I taught him by being a trustworthy father.

Some things have changed since my son became a man. I never offer an opinion regarding what he’s talked about unless he asks for one. The quickest way to lose trust with an adult son is to berate him for his life’s decisions, or worse, second guess him. That’s disrespectful and kills trust instantly. Whoever or whatever you are as a man has nothing to do with how your son necessarily conducts himself as a man. I hoped my son would be a better father than I was, and in many ways he is. He is a man who other men look up to and trust. He’s suffered betrayal by a few men, but he’s never betrayed another man.

My son has men friends who are important to him. They ride motorcycles together and treat each other like brothers. He has men in his life he trusts, and that’s big for any man. He has become the incredible man he is at least partially because I allowed for his personal growth path and didn’t interfere unless I felt he would be permanently damaged. I didn’t want or expect him to be like me, I wanted him to be who he wanted to be. We share many character traits, which make me feel good about both of us, but in many ways he’s his own man. I couldn’t be a prouder dad, and I couldn’t have been any more involved.

If you’re the father of a son, don’t walk away from the boy who can grow up and become your most trusted and loved friend. Give him more than you received from your father. Teach him trust by being trustworthy. Teach him respect by respecting him. Teach him love by loving him. Teach him fairness by treating him fairly. My solemn promise to you is that you will know what it feels like to behave like a man. Your son will be living proof you were a father in the oldest sense of the word.