Men to Boys

A new book called Men to Boys by history professor Gary Cross, compares the current generation of young men with the post-World War II generation, and children raised in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, Cross discovered that over-parented kids take longer to mature while the first two patriarchal generations “knew how to wield power” and “looked out for someone besides themselves.”

As Joseph Epstein recently noted in The Weekly Standard, children raised in the 1940s and 1950s grew up and went about their business. “My mother never read to me, and my father took me to no ballgames,” noted Epstein. He said that children benefited by being treated like regular people, as opposed to later generations that produced “snotty little brats” filled with anger at “the System” and “intellectual lightweights, certain . . . that their every thought is of great consequence.”

Epstein recalled that during his teaching days, he “was tempted, more than once, to write on his students’ papers: ‘D-. Too much love in the home.’”

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Deborah Lambert writes the Squeaky Chalk column for Accuracy in Academia.
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