Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

You, as a child, were given responsibility as the "man of the house" because there was no father? Shouldn't your mother have been the head of household?

It says a lot about society that a male child was implicitly given responsibility instead of his grown mother. And based on your age, I'd guess this was in the 70s or 80s, not the 50s.

View on HN

This is very indicative of the 70s and 80s - at least for the US.

No fault divorce was first legalized here in California in the late 70s, and in most states by the mid-80s. This increased the number of divorces, and I don't know the numbers, but I imagine there was an initial "boom" of pent-up unhappy marriages that took advantage at first before the numbers leveled out.

There's a reason the sitcoms of the era tended to involve single-parent homes (often with friends/family filling in) - this was an attack on the cultural idea of "norm". Putting children in the role of "man of the family" when there wasn't a father was a big thing, at least in the culture I grew up in. And since everyone now has grown up with that, it isn't going away quickly.

No idea of the quality of this db, but a search for "you're the man of the family" in movies turned up over a dozen matches for that exact phrase: http://www.quodb.com/search/you're%20the%20man%20of%20the%20..., with most being between 1980-2010 - and it looks like those were generally delivered to children (a few to female children).

The Mom may have been head of the household, but the eldest son was (and is) treated as if that Y chromosome imbues him with mystical powers and responsibility, even if very young.

Stupid question about that website, how can you see what character is being spoken to? I'm curious what the context would be for telling a female child "you're the man of the family", so I'd like to dig into those if possible.

I was also a son raised by a single mom.

My take: I certainly didn't have authority over my mom, but I definitely felt like I had a lot of responsibility. Households are typically run by (at least) two people, and for good reason. I stepped up where I could--helping manage the dog, helping make food, staying out of trouble when she couldn't watch me, in general trying to keep stress off of my mom--not because I felt like I was in a position of authority, but because there wasn't another adult to help shoulder the load, so some of the load fell to me.

If you were raised by a single father and/or you were a girl, do you think the same responsibility would have fallen to you?

I was the born in the 80's, oldest brother of three siblings, mother died when I was 7 and my father didn't remarry until after college. tenecious_tuna's comment sounds very familiar. I wouldn't put too much stock in the "man of the house" phrasing in this case. I'm not so sure it's a male/female distinction, I just felt like I had a different set of worries and responsibilities than my peers growing up. To be fair, it wasn't just me as the oldest. I think my brother and sister shouldered many of the same worries that I did; I was just a few years older than them so I had the older brother experience and the single-parent experience at the same time.

I've certainly seen multiple cases of girls embracing quasi-parental roles in the partial or permanent absence of a mother in the home.

There's no need to invoke gender-wars arguments in this discussion; it's a simple matter of people in families doing what they can to manage difficult situations.

I was born in 1990, to a single mother whose most profitable year was thirty eight thousand dollars. When I was 14 I got a job at Subway to help contribute to family money. I worked the maximum amount of hours the state would allow.When everyone is struggling to get by, you can't say "This isn't fair and I'm not going to do it", you just kind of do it.

I think the issue is cascading. If families had greater resources for support, their stressors wouldn't trickle down to their children. I think this problem exist in "full" families but is much more exacerbated in single parent settings.

Maybe it's not a binary thing - not all the responsibility, just some of it, which is particularly suitable for boys. I think culturally it happens often, it's not just a matter of old times vs. modern times.

Even when mother is the head of household, elder son gets more things around to, um, worry about.

It is not necessary that he had authority over mom. But, he was likely responsible a lot for younger kid - maybe when she was not around or too tired or just in general. He might be babysitting too much basically and have to solve siblings issues parent would normally solve.

It has name in child psychology, through I can't recall the name now. But in general, altrough it makes older kid more responsible, it does harm him overall.

Note: it is different isue then chores and some help around the house. Kid won't be harmed by helping and working then, it is responsibility beyond kids age and having to grow.l too soon.

What does it say about society? That there's something problematic, inherently, with the concept of a "man of the house" as a necessary authority figure. Joyce Byers, in Stranger Things, is a strong-willed and determined woman, but it takes a village to raise a child, and she did not have that. Her 80s Indiana town is exemplary of the ways modernity--industrialization, capitalism, Calvinism--alienate us from one another, leaving mothers like Joyce with no ontology of family without a "man of the house," and no option but to install her eldest son in that role.

In this view, the greatest social crime committed in that series (aside from the government atrocities) is Chief Hopper's self-isolation. As a good man, with earnest intentions, his desertion of the town's emotional needs (regardless of his performance as a law enforcer) is a betrayal of their material needs.

See, I didn't mention Stranger Things because it's a bit of a special case. Joyce went crazy, so her eldest son had to step in.

(Of course, she actually wasn't crazy because her fantastical visions were real, this is a TV show, etc.)

Admittedly, we don't know what the son's role was like before Will went missing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com