I mean, 40 year olds dress like teenagers (sneakers, t-shirt, jeans, sometimes a cap), they often have the same hobbies as teenagers (e.g. video gaming), and responsibility is low because there is a high level of social security.
> I mean, 40 year olds dress like teenagers (sneakers, t-shirt, jeans, sometimes a cap), they often have the same hobbies as teenagers (e.g. video gaming)...
I'm with you to this point. The 'adult' father figures of the past - for example, as exaggerated in the character of George Banks from Mary Poppins - were much more austere and had higher societal requirements regarding acceptable activities and behaviors. If that means that they are involved in the lives of their children rather than simply trusting that the nanny has them scrubbed, tubbed, and adequately fed, so much the better!
As Mr. Banks lamented,
You've got to grind, grind, grind
At that grindstone
Though childhood slips like sand through a sieve
And all too soon they've up and grown
And then they've flown
And it's too late for you to give
Just that spoonful of sugar
To help the medicine go down
> and responsibility is low because there is a high level of social security.
Uh, I took a different track than you did. You seem to be of the opinion that fathers being more involved is due to the fact that they are kids. I believe that they choose instead to decline the negative aspects of traditional masculinity and, in so doing, are better than if they had maintained those aspects. This may mean that they wear comfortable clothes rather than suffering in a suit and tie, or that they are more active (their children may see their fathers doing undignified activities like running when they could be walking), or that they change their kids' diapers or feed them rather than leaving those tasks to the womenfolk. All positive changes, in my opinion!
People shouldn't need a fear of death by starvation to motivate them. If a removal of this fear allows them to be better people, that's a good thing. If some people abuse the safety net, things would not be better if it were absent and they simply crashed.
I don't think behaving more like kids is something confined to dads, or even men as a whole either. It seems modern adults are maturing far more slowly or even showing some signs of regression now.
I don't have anything to compare it with, but grown men burning their evenings in front of a games console, playing games aimed at children, and grown women slathering pictures of themselves all over social media in an attempt to garner attention and social acceptance, with both groups seeming to want to be their kids' "buddies" more than ever, doesn't seem to be a positive direction for things to go in.
Who knows. I may be bah humbugging here. I'm young enough that I can't reasonably say "in my day adults were adults!", just that the direction things appear to be going in (socially, and as role models for children) does not appear to be promising.
You are. Two things:
1. How is spending (not burning) an evening in front of the console any worse than spending it in front of the TV?
2. You're painting with a really, really broad brush there. Some grown men play a lot of video games, and some women post a lot on social media, but not all of them do, and in any case, I'm not entirely sure what the problem with socializing online is.
2: The damage being done by social media and the rise in narcissism, toward society at large, towards children and towards mental health, is pretty well documented at this point.
Not in America.
But tell that to the soon-to-be-homeless dev who posted this morning, tell that to people who aren't in our industry, tell it to minimum-wage earners, tell that to people in Bumbleshit, Nebraska.
Dads in the past were remarkably shitty and it isn't really even clear why.