The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It Read Free Page B

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    Helicopter parents hover over and around their children in school settings to be sure they are doing the right thing. Although their intentions may start out as good, their surveillance tactics not only undercut their kids’ independence, it prevents them from soaring on their own.
    This problem is seen in the extreme in modern China in the form of “sitting mothers.” Moms accompany their prized only child to college, especially the male, who must become the pride of the family and its legacy. They take apartments near the school and keep a keen eye on all the goings and comings of Junior. In some cases, when moms cannot live close by and dads have business to attend to, a “sitting grandmother” will do the job instead.
    Failing is an inevitable and much underrated part of life, but many parents aren’t letting their sons learn that it’s OK to fail. This costs them later in life. One male college student from our survey offered this suggestion: “Let men fail when they are young. That way it doesn't seem like the end of the world if they do when they are older. I think a mistake my parents made when I was young is they always rescued me from the brink of failure. My biggest problem moving on to college is I never learned to learn from my failures. I see men around me fail over and over because they seem incapable of deriving any lessons from it.”

The truth shall bite thee in the ass
    A hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach. So he gave up trying and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, “I thought those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”
— Aesop, “The Fox and the Grapes”
     
    In stressful situations, many of us adjust our understanding of what’s going on to preserve our sense of self. The core message of “The Fox and the Grapes” tale is not in the fox’s failure to get the grapes but in his reaction to that failure. He maintains his pride by a wee bit of self-deception. “And therein lies the appeal,” says D.L. Ashliman, professor emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. “Each individual reader can respond to the fox’s self-deception according to his or her own expectations and needs. We can criticize the fox for his dishonesty and inconsistency, or we can congratulate him for his pragmatism and positive self-image.” 44
    The fox’s response preserved the integrity of his self-image. Stanford University social psychologist Claude Steele was the first to describe the theory of self-affirmation, in 1988. Psychologists David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen described it in their own research nearly two decades later:
    [The theory] asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened, people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth. … One way that this is accomplished is through defensive responses that directly reduce the threat. But another way is through the affirmation of alternative sources of self-integrity. Such “self affirmations,” by fulfilling the need to protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable people to deal with threatening events and information without resorting to defensive biases. 45
    Guys’ attitudes are similar to the fox’s. The ego reigns king in American society today, and our delusional self-perceptions have dissociated us from mundane reality. Most people confuse comfort with happiness, preferring familiarity to truth. Our politically correct culture has become stifling for any form of critical analysis. Although stigmatizing people with labels can be damaging, it also allows people to externalize their problems and avoid taking personal responsibility to improve themselves. The