Male role model question for men.

[Flagg]

As someone who grew up with no male role model in their life, I was ruminating about whether which is better/ worse? Is it better for a boy to be raised with no real male role model in their life, or to have a bad role model?

[Ahriman238]

That's a more complicated question than it has any right being. Definitely not something that can be reduced to binary options. Mostly because there are many degrees of bad. It is absolutely possible, even easy, to have male role model so fucked up, literally anything, even no MRM would be preferable. At the same time, having a merely flawed role model, say a loving father and hardworking family man who also drinks, is almost certainly a net positive. If he's a violent drunk, things get more complicated still.

It's highly situational, and a lot of the time damnably difficult to call even on a case-by-case basis. The kid has never (or scarcely) known anything else, or it wouldn't be a concern. As an outsider looking in, there's too much you simply can't know.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I guess I don't really understand what you even mean by the idea that you grew up with "no male role model". Are you saying that never in your childhood you ever actually encountered a grown man from whom you learned any implicit lessons whatsoever? The idea of a "role model" is incredibly vague, and the entire way a human child's brain develops socially is contingent on observing adult social behavior. You may never have had a singular "role model" in a Hollywood sense of the word, but you can't say you had no role models whatsoever unless you literally never interacted with adult men at any point in your formative years.

[Flagg]

I'm talking about having a constant male presence in their lives that taught life lessons from a male point of view as it relates to the real world.

[madd0ct0r]

meh, the closest my dad came to that was teaching the importance of cash flow over profit.

I learnt a lot from watching him and how he behaved with people, but being taught life lessons? nah.

[Raw Shark]

I'm talking about having a constant male presence in their lives that taught life lessons from a male point of view as it relates to the real world.

As somebody who had several, all of whom were somewhat-flawed but none of whom I would really classify as, "bad," I'd subjectively say that it helped me more than it hindered me. Being able to compare them against each other was useful. My Uncle Bob, for example, pretty much held the same ethical values that I ended up with (and taught them to me with comic books and cowboy movies), but was shithouse drunk most of the time and completely useless for most practical purposes. My Dad, on the other hand, disagrees with me about just about everything important, but showed me what being the pillar of strength for a family is. Uncle Arky taught me a lot about cheating at cards, talking to the cops, and generally being a mildly-shifty shitheel that has served me well on occasion, but was generally a mildly-shifty shitheel. My Godfather was a career Navy man who taught me a lot about knots and throwing a punch and who I suspect might've been deeply-closeted and unhappy about it. None of them knew a goddamn thing about dealing with women.

[Borgholio]

My dad taught me how to behave like a boy...rough-housing at times, but also how to do yardwork and necessary things like that. Once he became a woman...well...that stopped. So my next-door neighbor (yes, the Tea Partier) became like a father or big brother to me. We played video games and went fishing and talked about guns. My great-grandfather taught me how to use tools and fix things. I feel I could have learned a lot more from him as I grew up, as he was old-school male (raised in the 20's, considered leisure time to be sitting in a lawn chair out front on Saturday drinking Coors and listening to football on the radio), things like how to ask a girl out or how to win a fistfight...stuff like that. But he died when I was 11 so that didn't happen.

So I had a few different male role models and they all taught me something different. I just wish I had one consistent role model throughout my entire life. That would have been nice. Now I'm married and I have no real male role model any more, so I worry that when I have kids I won't be able to teach them the right stuff myself.

[mr friendly guy]

meh, the closest my dad came to that was teaching the importance of cash flow over profit.

I learnt a lot from watching him and how he behaved with people, but being taught life lessons? nah.

Funny enough, money issues was the same with me. I didn't get on well with my dad as a kid, but talking about money (saving, investing, mortgage etc) was the only thing we seemed to have in common.

[Edi]

Having a really fucked up bad male role model can result in a good outcome if the person decides to do everything the exact opposite of that bad model, but those cases are very few and far between. I've known one guy who had that experience. His dad made his life a living hell until he was 16, when he beat the shit out of his father, walked out and severed all ties, swearing he would never be like that. But you rarely encounter these stories firsthand. Usually a bad male role model is just bad enough to teach the impressionable target all sorts of undesirable behavior patterns that unlearning them later is going to be a big problem, if that ever happens. And then they get perpetuated.

In this respect, I would suspect having no male role model at all would be better. Some of our behaviors are hardwired, so as long as there is guidance on right and wrong, it is possible to form a direction independently. And you usually have some friends and their family members around.

I'm more or less theorycrafting here, since nearly all of the men in my family on both sides have been good role models, my dad especially. They've all had their flaws, but I've not had bad role models. It's been easy enough to spot rotten assholes just by comparing them to my dad, my uncles and their friends.

[Ziggy Stardust]

To be honest, I think most people don't have a role model in the strictest possible way to interpret it. Most people just have an agglomerate of different friends and family members and acquaintances. For me, at different points in my life and in different contexts, my role model could have been my dad, my uncle, my grandfather, my friend's dads, my neighbor, friends of my parents, teachers, etc. I think few people could really honestly only point to a single constant presence as being the singular source of information/influence/whatever-you-want-call-it.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Having a really fucked up bad male role model can result in a good outcome if the person decides to do everything the exact opposite of that bad model,

Funnily enough we looked at a study on those lines during my A Level Psychology course. Basically, people who had really strict, organised parents with well-defined boundaries (please not that "really strict" does not equate to "unloving" or "unkind" in this case) grew up to be the exact opposite: they had very low self-discipline, were poorly organised and their attitude was very much "yeah whatever" because their parents had always been there to provide structure and boundaries.

In contrast, the exact opposite was true: people who grew up with very laid-back parents with a "yeah whatever" attitude tended to be much more organised and self-disciplined, because they had to create rules and boundaries etc. for themselves.

In my own experience I had several very positive male role models. My dad, whilst often away working during the week, was always happy to explain stuff to me. He taught me the rudiments of science (well ahead of what I learned in school) and taught me far more about money and finance than anyone else (his job was finance-based so it makes sense). He didn't do much for teaching me stuff about sports and exercise but I had a couple of excellent primary school teachers who handled that.

I suppose the main question is "how "bad" (a very subjective term) does a male role model have to be before it becomes better to have none at all?" Also worth noting that you can (as I did ) have more than one male role model from whom you learn different things.

[Covenant]

I would say a bad role model (not just an ineffectual one) can do more harm than not having one at all, and doing the work of modeling your behavior yourself. I had several male role models but I never thought of them that way, even my Dad, who was more of a "dad" than a defined "male role" to aspire to. I have, since hitting my 30's and getting happily engaged, begun to see where so many of the laughable, endlessly patient and dope-ishly kind "dad traits" came from and have started to model them myself as a coping mechanism in a busy, annoying, frustrating world.

So good models (ie, any model that is not actively bad) are good, of course. No model at all is still fine, I did most of my aggressive masculinity modeling on people other than my teddy-bear dad anyway. But really, even if these role models are TV and Movie characters, we lack a lot of good, patient, sensible male role models and I could see how people flail about not knowing what behaviors work. I try what my dad did and it still fails to curb my (and my fiancee's) stubborn behaviors.

So really, it's always a crapshoot anyway.

[Havok]

I grew up without one. I turned out great.

Seriously though, I didn't have a dad growing up and by the time my mom married my step dad when I was 16, I was already a global phenomenon with the ladies, an atheist, made amends for my younger really fucked up behavior, knew I never wanted kids, pretty much knew my stance on most social issues and so on and so fourth. I still needed some fine tuning but I think I turned out all right.

Now, here's the thing, I picked up a lot of my personality traits from the males in my life growing up even though they weren't around all the time or I saw them sporadically probably up until the time I was 20 or so.

I guess, my point, other than how great I am, is that you don't need a singular role model and it certainly doesn't have to be a male as the best of me comes from my mom who did a bang up job raising the awesomeness that is typing this.

And I voted no male role model.

[Havok]

What the fuck? Most of you idiots voted BAD role model?

[cmdrjones]

meh, the closest my dad came to that was teaching the importance of cash flow over profit.

I learnt a lot from watching him and how he behaved with people, but being taught life lessons? nah.

Color me unsurprised. Nothing personal against you, its just that I see this as being rather common in teh last 20 years or so. Are you from Britain? or the US?

[cmdrjones]

Having a really fucked up bad male role model can result in a good outcome if the person decides to do everything the exact opposite of that bad model, but those cases are very few and far between. I've known one guy who had that experience. His dad made his life a living hell until he was 16, when he beat the shit out of his father, walked out and severed all ties, swearing he would never be like that. But you rarely encounter these stories firsthand. Usually a bad male role model is just bad enough to teach the impressionable target all sorts of undesirable behavior patterns that unlearning them later is going to be a big problem, if that ever happens. And then they get perpetuated.

In this respect, I would suspect having no male role model at all would be better. Some of our behaviors are hardwired, so as long as there is guidance on right and wrong, it is possible to form a direction independently. And you usually have some friends and their family members around.

I'm more or less theorycrafting here, since nearly all of the men in my family on both sides have been good role models, my dad especially. They've all had their flaws, but I've not had bad role models. It's been easy enough to spot rotten assholes just by comparing them to my dad, my uncles and their friends.

Even a terrible Hun is useful as a cautionary tale - Apocryphal quote attributed to Attila The Hun

[Covenant]

What the fuck? Most of you idiots voted BAD role model?

For worse. The poll says "Which is worse, a bad rolemodel or no rolemodel?" to which most people said a bad rolemodel (presumably one that teaches you bad behavior) is worse than no rolemodel. That would seem to align with what you said, where you said you had no major rolemodel and turned out fine. Why would you say no rolemodel is worse than a bad one, and then say you turned out rather well despite having none yourself? I suppose you could be saying that a bad rolemodel would have made you even awesomer, but I did not get that from what you said.

[Havok]

Wow. I totally read that as "Which one is better?" My bad. I, it turns out, am the idiot.

OK, so who are the idiots, besides me, that voted for none as being worse?

[Raw Shark]

[snip] OK, so who are the idiots, besides me, that voted for none as being worse?

Given that my male role models were all beneficial in some ways and deeply-flawed in other ways, I'm on the fence and didn't vote in the actual poll.

[madd0ct0r]

meh, the closest my dad came to that was teaching the importance of cash flow over profit.

I learnt a lot from watching him and how he behaved with people, but being taught life lessons? nah.

Color me unsurprised. Nothing personal against you, its just that I see this as being rather common in teh last 20 years or so. Are you from Britain? or the US?

Brit, but was also at boarding school from age 11, where a lot of life skills where explicitly taught, so not a typical data point.

[cmdrjones]

meh, the closest my dad came to that was teaching the importance of cash flow over profit.

I learnt a lot from watching him and how he behaved with people, but being taught life lessons? nah.

Color me unsurprised. Nothing personal against you, its just that I see this as being rather common in teh last 20 years or so. Are you from Britain? or the US?

Brit, but was also at boarding school from age 11, where a lot of life skills where explicitly taught, so not a typical data point.

I'd say I'm the opposite, had a great father role model, nuclear family etc, but he was a WWII vet, somewhat distant and let us "figure it out ourselves" (my brothers and I).

[Alyrium Denryle]

I had a large number of surrogate dads. My uncles, and my two best friend's dads primarily. From them, I got the work ethic, the even-headed warmness toward other people etc.

From my actual father I got 10 years of emotional and physical abuse from a literally psychotic christian dominionist.

Had my parents not divorced, or had Daddy Dearest won custody, I would likely have either killed myself in my teens, or been murdered.

You can guess how I voted.

[Meest]

My father wasn't that bad, but did instill fear and anxiety about everyday issues. If you can get over admitting that your parents were wrong in some aspects, can see it being a good lesson. If that leads to avoidance and other phobias then yes having none might be better, question is what leads most people to better themselves, no examples or a prime example to avoid repeating?

[Starglider]

I learned dogged determination, dedication to friends and family, respect and fair-play, a fair bit of science, engineering and history (when I was young) several sports and quite a few practical and technical skills (e.g. how to swap out a gearbox) from my father. Even as a teenager he helped me learn how to be patient, how to get angry as constructively as possible when patience is exhausted, how to work with beurecracy and management heirachies and why it's worth doing. I would say he was an excellent role model and made a very positive difference. Not just in the cliched father things (sports, cars, how to use power tools / chainsaws...), lots of general life skills and advice that I didn't appreciate at the time.

My mother on the other hand taught me how perception is reality in social situations, how to influence people, how to handle animals, when to abandon slackers and cut your losses, and most importantly how, why and when to fuck the rules, defy the management, incite a riot and get away with it. Also that never giving up meant keep trying new approaches, not banging your head against a brick wall, setbacks are an opportunity to adjust your game plan, and to enjoy life while you can. In fact both my parents were and are awesome and I can't think of anything significant they got wrong when raising my sister and I.