The Nine Modern, Social Pressures That Make a rite of passage rare
“People who can’t make love, make money.”
James Baldwin
What you face as a parent of a boy approaching adolescence is rarely personal. It has deep historical roots.
Here is an overview of some of crucial historical moments at the root of the social pressures on modern day families. This simple timeline holds true for many western countries. It suggests some of the reasons why we’ve come to wrestle so as parents of boys today.
Each social pressure we face is an artefact of the machine’s continuous, accelerating and often intentional erosion of communal bonds for social control and profit, valuing mechanical, rational efficiency over complex, mythical aliveness.
Seeing how we came to be where we find ourselves today, doesn’t absolve us of parental responsabilities. It situates some of our troubles as consequences from the past, and clarifies some of our present obligations to our boys.
1700s
industrialization
Men are forced into long work hours and factory jobs away from home, severing boys’ traditional apprenticeships with fathers or male kin. By necessity and coercion, small, mobile families gradually become the most efficient economic units.
1700s
the self-made man
Since the enlightenment, capitalism exalts the myth of rationality and the self-made man over rituals and collective traditions. Later, the surge of neoliberalism vilifies interdependence as weakness, praising self-reliance and survival of the fittest. Words like “solidarity”, “union”, or “collective” fall out of use or favor, shrinking the neighborhood even further to private and solitary family matters behind closed doors.
1700s
alienation from nature
18th century enclosure acts, 19th century urbanization, 20th century sprawl and pollution all sever boys’ ability to roam freely and play in nature. Fear-driven policies since the 1980s have increasingly limited unsupervised outdoor play in many countries. TVs, social media, smartphones, Netflix, gaming, AI, algorithms, porn and screen addictions now all thrive on the inactivity of boys and their sedentary routines, feeding them a constant, competitive, perfectionistic, abstract view of life.
late 1800s
Forced Schooling
Early childhood is outsourced through the spread of kindergartens, commodifying play while reducing parental time for foundational bonding. Compulsory schooling locks boys into rigid, age-segregated classrooms, pulling them from flexible family-led learning and daily contributions. Sedentary discipline replaces embodied experiential learning. Parents and communities lose control over daytime education, and struggle to pass on family values and traditions that clash with the demands of standardized governmental systems.
1950s
isolated nuclear family
Social housing and the post war subsidization of isolated nuclear family units in suburban areas further dismantles multi-generational households. By tailoring products, advertising, and lifestyles to the nuclear family, the market further enthrones the ideal of minimal, insular and private family households at the expense of multi-generational extended families.
1960s
mobility&rootlessness
Mid-20th-century highways, the development of flight, market volatility and frequent job market relocations continues to unravel tight-knit neighborhoods. Globalization from the 1970s onward emphasizes rootless nomadism as an aspirational ideal rather than an unfortunate ordeal. Career trumps community, separating families from grandparents and local neighborhoods.
1960s
sibling society
Suburban isolation and the 1960s youth movements flattens social hierarchies, gradually replacing intergenerational neighborhoods with peer-dominated “sibling societies”. Boys absorb life lessons with minimal adult input. Social media later fuels peer envy for profit through dopamine-laced ideals of perfection, affluence and influence.
1960s
Single Families and Father Absence
Starting in the 60s, divorce rates surge. A sudden rise of single-parent households shifts full responsibility to one parent, often leaving single mothers to raise boys in the absence of fathers and stable male figures.
1970s
wage stagnation
Wage stagnation forces the need for dual-incomes that consumes and limits the time and energy available for communal child-rearing and informal mentoring, emphasizing parenting as an isolated task rather than a collective effort.