Mom Can't Do It Alone

As we see a slight increase in single moms, and also must acknowledge that being a boy in 2025 is different than being a girl in 2004, is this something we need to discuss?

You could also look at: Boy Mom Toxicity | Men Need To Raise The Bar | What Exactly Is A “Family Man?”

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About a year ago, I was talking with this woman at my church. She was mid-30s and on the dating scene, looking for someone to spend some time with and maybe get that beautiful slice of the pie known as “motherhood” from. She told me that almost every guy she matched with and went on a few dates with was horrible and dysfunctional and couldn’t hold a conversation, which tracks with much of my experience of trying to make male friends over the age of about 32.

She told me that it infuriated her because Boomer women she knew would always coo “Boys are so much easier to raise!” (which, come to think of it, I have heard Boomer women say) and she wanted to scream in their face: “You raised the worst generation of men we’ve ever seen.”

I always found that funny.

Well, there’s a lot to the whole “boy mom” narrative, not the least of which is the Freudian aspect, whereby you have a derp husband that doesn’t do much, and then you get Baby James, and Baby James is cute and does whatever you want and follows you around, and maybe James kinda sorta replaces your husband, and then when Baby James is older and more strapping and an athlete, maybe once in a while you jump into his arms after a game and some people in the bleachers think “Hmmm…” That’s the toxic side of the boy mom coin, which absolutely does exist, although we tend not to discuss it openly.

There’s the other toxic play of boy moms, where they over-baby boys and turn them into “simps” or whatever the term of the day is.

Point being: it’s hard to be a boy mom. There is a lot of criticism and backlash towards it right now, and moms often don’t do themselves any favors on The Gram as regards their boy-mom-dom.

Here’s a good post about all of it, from

Anne Helen Petersen

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This is an interview with Ruth Whippman, who is the author of a book on Boy Moms. She frames up the terms early in the discussion:

Masculine norms keep men emotionally repressed and make it hard for them to access intimate connection. Boys and men are lonely and depressed and dying by suicide at nearly four times the rate of their female peers. Since #Metoo, we have focused heavily on how patriarchy only benefits men at women’s expense, and this narrative has almost been weaponized to silence and shame boys. This is not to say that the anger directed toward men is not righteous or legitimate — it is — but if we want to get boys and men onside to the feminist cause, we need to acknowledge their pain too.

Many boys are getting drawn into this idea coming from the right that feminism is the enemy and the cause of all their problems. But in some ways the feminist movement is playing into the hands of this narrative. As feminists we should be selling “smashing the patriarchy” as a liberation to boys but instead we are almost selling it to them as a punishment. Which in a way is the same basic framing of the masculinity influencers that feminism is only going to make their lives worse, not better. In the book, I explore lots of complicated, and conflicted feelings and ideas about what it’s like to be a feminist and a mother of boys in this fraught cultural moment, but where I landed was very much we are all on the same side here: patriarchy harms all of us, and we shouldn’t act as though we are enemies.

OK. On these two paragraphs, I agree with the first — men are often emotionally stunted and society wants them to be that way because it fits a masculine ideal that’s supposedly evolving — but the second is weird and gets into a lot of cross-stitching with feminism and how bad the patriarchy is. The patriarchy isn’t bad on face, and when you say that, you just empower guys like Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson to make more money on YouTube. Parts of the patriarchy are very bad, but no children would exist without some sperm, so right there men are doing something. Believe me, I think about that shit every day since I can’t really do it for anyone I’ve been with.

This paragraph, however, is interesting:

Before the old paywall (am I not worth $4 to you?), here’s something on the other side of the coin — men feeling useless and worthless, even when they have families.