Listen to thisThe idea and practice of role models remains commonplace as an intervention in CYC. The belief that adults have something to offer young people through a demonstration of a competent performance of adulthood remains largely uncontested. The professional consensus seems to be that we as adults know how to live and that we can share our wisdom by modeling what a successful adult looks like so that young people can emulate what they see and become successful as well. It strikes me that there are quite a lot of unexamined and at least marginally dubious assumptions in the way we have formulated this model of care. The issue for me is the way in which definitions that have been seriously contested and questioned in the drive towards greater equity and justice, seem to be accepted as simply common sense when we get to the practice of adult role models. I would argue that it is worth taking a moment and digging a little deeper into what we mean by adult role model and the ways this effects CYC practice.
Let’s begin with what I would consider the quite loaded term adult. For many of us this may seem to be an obvious designation of a mature human being, but I would suggest that everything associated with the term is quite problematic. To begin with we would have to ask what we mean by mature. We could read this as a certain level of biological development. Certainly, this is the implication when we refer to frontal lobe development as a key indicator of the capacity to make mature decisions. But is that really any kind of universal indicator? Certainly, many of us have full frontal lobe development by age 25, but does this guarantee that all people with this level of neurological development will act as the kind of adults we want as role models? Probably not.
So, then what do we mean by adult in the context of an adult role model? Do we mean people who have settled into successful careers and can role model business acumen? If so, why is this something to which we would want young people to aspire? Is it simply that we want young people to be able to make money and support themselves? Is this a worthwhile goal if the world of business success sometimes requires taking advantage of others in order to make a profit? Do we mean to suggest to young people that maturity is the ability to win at the cost of others losing?
For me, these kinds of ethical questions are not asked often enough. When we refer to being a mature adult, I am concerned that what we really mean is someone thoroughly assimilated into mainstream capitalist culture. A respectable member of the community who can introduce young people into networks of privilege that might assure their induction into the hierarchies of business success. And at some level this could seem to make sense. But it also masks a not so subtle critique of anyone is less “successful,” less connected, less assimilated, and less business oriented.
Does this mean that I am suggesting that the young people we engage in our work should simply be left to live in poverty or to struggle to make ends meet? Of course not. What I am concerned about is equating adulthood or maturity with financial success. We know that there are structural barriers in this society that will make it nearly impossible for many of the young people we work with to escape a lifelong struggle with fiscal precarity. The intersectional coordinates of race, gender, and class profoundly and differentially impact these young people. For them, the idea that being successful means making money belies the statistical actuality that many of them will encounter societal barriers that will constitute a lifelong struggle for survival. When we role model business success as a significant variable in being a successful human being we may well be setting young people up for a long-term sense of failure and inferiority.
To honor the struggle to fight back against a system that marginalizes and disenfranchises the poor would offer a different version of successful adulthood. To acknowledge the social necessity of a life dedicated to building community and networks of care that finds avenues that refuse racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, could offer a different kind of role modeling. A kind of role modeling that is collective and focuses on the “we” rather than highlighting the qualities of the “I’ who has managed to assimilate enough to make money. This kind of role modeling goes beyond adult modeling into the kind of collaborative struggle that has the capacity to change the context and not just a few individuals who can overcome their circumstance.
The final issue I have with “adult” role models is that adults no longer understand the world as it has evolved in the 21st century. I have made this point in many ways in this column, but it is particularly pertinent in the case of adult role models. Any model that adults offer young people today is already obsolete and, in some sense, nearly dangerous. Obsolete in the sense that the world that produced the role model is already dead and gone. The world of contemporary adults no longer exists, although we all continue to pretend nothing has substantively changed. But young people know this is not true. The world is radically different and becoming more so daily. In terms of demonstrating social competence in life skills, adults have little to offer in a world in which the skills necessary to negotiate life are shifting and changing dramatically. As adults, perhaps it would benefit us to learn from young people about the world as it is emerging rather than trying to teach them about a world that no longer exists.
All of which is to say that role modeling is both complex and contentious in ways that may not be immediately obvious. For example, in what we have looked at so far regarding traditional models of adult role models there are imbedded social constructs that support a status quo that perpetuates systems of oppression, marginalization, and disenfranchisement. These would include a range of colonial constructs including, individualism, class constructs, mythologies that appear to erase hierarchies of race, gender, class, and heterosexism, the valuation of self-discipline, private property, the value system of global capitalism, and colonial psychological constructs of developmental hierarchy. Unless we take the time to tease these out of the discourses that form and shape our work, we will inadvertently perpetuate the very system that has placed young people in harm’s way.
This gets even more complex and troubling when we examine the ways that gender plays out in the practices of role modeling. Gender based role modeling has also become fairly mainstream, particularly in relation to what has become known as the “war on boys.” This discourse, which argues that our society is neglecting boys and leaving them to languish while girls achieve ever greater makers of accomplishment, is riddled with suggestions of inherent male privilege. In this sense it is not unlike the White supremacist replacement discourses that claim that immigrants of color will erase and displace dominant white populations in Europe and the United States.
In this case the argument is that girls are erasing boys from social achievement. In both cases, there is no factual evidence that immigrants of color or girls are erasing anyone. Is their increased inclusion in society changing the parameters of social, political and economic life? Without a doubt. But are these changes in any way a threat to equitable relations between those designated white or male? To answer that question, we would have to assume that equitable relations is the goal. But the truth is that it is not equitable relations that are sought in replacement theory or the war in boys. What is really at stake is the continuance of white male privilege.
If we look at the actual evidence, middle- and upper-class white men and boys are continuing to dominate the social landscape. Women and girls still struggle to achieve overall equity, although they are finally beginning to make some headway which seems to be causing some degree of panic about elite boys losing their edge. I note elite white men and boys because it is boys of color and working-class boys who seem to be falling behind. The response to the complex and difficult social problems facing boys without the advantages of class and race privilege has been the introduction of “positive male role models.”
But as Ana Tarrant and her colleagues (2015) point out, “Existing research in educational and welfare settings indicates that the ‘commonsense’ assumption that there is a need for more positive male role models does not capture the complexity and diversity of subjectivities and experiences of boys, and of those men that are expected to be role models.” I would suggest that some of the complexities and diversity of subjectivities referred to include the ever-evolving definitions and practices of masculinity in the 21st century, as well as perceptions of raced and hybrid identities that exceed traditional classifications.
When the conversation is about boys who are missing masculine role models and the immediate assumption is that they are lacking father figures, what exactly do we mean? Are we referring to the perceived necessity of a heteronormative patriarchal head of household who can teach boys how to be men? If so, do such men have a clear idea of what masculinity might mean in the context of what we now know about toxic masculinity and its social costs and implications for health and wellness? The implication that women can’t raise boys adequately because they are not men has disturbing misogynistic resonances with such dangerous tropes as mama’s boy or girly boy.
The idea that boys are a homogenous category that only men can transmit knowledge about, belies the actuality that the great majority of men have a limited scope of understanding of how complex and fraught 21st century masculinity can be. Gender is a continuum not a binary and we must be very careful about slippage into binary formulations when we worry about boys without male role models. It may not be the absence of men so much ass the absence of a society that actually cares for all children in real and material ways. When we frame the questions as one of gender, I would say that we are missing the point.
As Tarrant and her colleagues note,
Often, concerns about poor outcomes among boys are implicitly about working-class boys and young men and there is a question here about whether the issues identified are as much about class, and other structural inequalities, as they are about gender. When the ‘problem’ is constructed as facing all boys it can create a class- and ethnicity-blind category that is not critiqued in the media and in some academic writing.
In other words, to frame social inequities within the parameters of masculinity can obscure the broader context of the effects of global capitalism on the lives of marginalized boys and young men. To argue that what is missing is a father, denies the toxicity of social relations in the hetero-patriarchal models of domination that structure hierarchies of class and race in such a way as to produce ongoing patterns of structural inequity. Such a view reduces the problem to an oddly Freudian dilemma. You just need a daddy and all will be well. We just need to reinstate the 19th century model of the family and boys will realize what it means to be a man and become successful and productive citizens. Of course, in doing this we once again teach boys that men are more important than women and that even a mother figure can never measure up to a father. This is a dangerous and misogynistic message that perpetuates male deafness to what women have to offer. It is a potent form of gendered denial at both the level of social analysis and gender relations.
As Tarrant argues,
structural explanations for the difficulties some young men experience are strategically avoided through this discourse, and the male role model discourse thus becomes an individualising and often blaming strategy that seems to serve interests quite removed from those of young men. Such an approach therefore ignores the agency of the individuals comprising the group considered to be experiencing problems. Evidence indicates that the experiences, perspectives and social contexts of young men are shaped by various forms of inequality that need to be taken more fully into account, particularly in the development of public policy.
For those of us in CYC it is not just in the development of public policy, but in the very core of a developmental relational approach to care. To tacitly accept the adult male role model approach can insidiously imbed subtle and not so subtle misogynistic, classist, racist, and ageist assumptions into the work we do and how we see the young people we work with. It can deeply influence our sense of who they are and what they need. It can produce a kind of deafness that makes it difficult if not impossible to hear what boys are telling us. It can even blind the boys themselves to their own subjective experience. And when the role model fails to produce the life promised, there can be resentment and even rage that will somehow be seen as characterological rather than symptomatic of a society that has no real intention of caring.
From my perspective, it is our role to build alternative relations of care that function within the material reality of young people’s lives today. This requires a collaborative struggle to build equitable relations that refuse binary constructs that would reduce our capacity to work together across ages and genders to build a better world for all of us. It is a monumental task that we perform in a million small ways every day we work with young people and in the process mutually transform ourselves and the world around us.
Reference
Tarrant, A., Terry, G., Ward, M. R., Ruxton, S., Robb, M., & Featherstone, B. (2015). Are Male Role Models Really the Solution? Boyhood Studies, 8(1), 60-83.
