Article from Anthony Bradley at Resurgence website
One of the least talked about devastations in masculine formation is the boy who was not rescued from the bosom of women and initiated into the world of men. Many fathers fail to initiate their sons into the masculine journey which has very damaging, long-term effects. Preachers and teachers must figure out a way to initiate these men into kingdom mission.
Moms that are married to either passive or abusive men or are divorced often turn to their sons for emotional (and sometimes physical) intimacy that they lack from their husbands. Many moms can't "let go" of their sons even when rightly protecting them from violent men, and put their son's masculinity in arrested development.
A woman recently commented on her blog about her son Adam, "He is a Mama's boy through and through and I love that." I almost vomited just thinking about how sadly emasculating this kid's life is likely to be if his father does not rescue him. Remember how the Bible differentiates between Jacob and Esau: "Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was a quiet man, staying among the tents. Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob" (Gen. 25:27-28). Their parent's favoritism led to Jacob becoming a passive-aggressive deceiver—the quintessential Mama's boy.
A guy posted this on my blog recently:
"My parents never divorced; they just lived separate lives under the same roof. But as the older son, I became my mom's surrogate spouse. It took me years to figure out what I had gone through.
I'm 36, am a solid Reformed Christian, have a good job as a big-firm lawyer, and generally enjoy life. But I'm absolutely ruined as far as relationships are concerned. I give time to my church, work a lot, and use my spare time to travel the globe. I don't even bother dating anymore."
--anonymous
To be fair, it is good and natural for moms to be intimately connected to their sons because of the powerful bond forged from womb well into the first few years of life. Moms are the first source of food, comfort, safety, and nurture. This is right and good. But many mothers are inclined to hold on too long to their sons in what becomes an unhealthy mutual dependency. She can over-mother the boy using him to fulfill her own needs for love, companionship, and validation in a way that wounds his masculinity.
Leon Podles, author of The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, masterfully puts it this way:
"A boy must complete his masculine identity by identifying with a male, especially his father, whom he sees is loved by his mother. He must give up his desire to be his mother, and learn to love her, or at least love another woman."
The father gradually becomes the primary source of the boy's identity and models what a relationship with a woman should look like. Fathers display what life is like to picture God the father. Good fathers function as a healthy check on a mother's natural tendency to keep her son too close.
In order to satisfy her own needs many mothers keep their sons from entering the world of men claiming that, "he'll get hurt," "he'll get dirty," "it's not safe for him," and so on. She may even continue to call her son an emasculating nickname, like "my sweet little boy." For many moms, sons are easier to relate to than grown men. She can be intimate with her son without experiencing conflicts she might have with the man she can't manipulate or control: the boy's father.
When the boy gets hurt, is rejected by other males, is disciplined by the father, and so on he runs to the mother for sympathy. Her desire to meet her own needs instead of the boys discourages the boy from ceasing to look to women to solve his problems. This may actually encourage the boy to stay isolated from his male peers when he is hurt by them instead of learning how to exert himself or depend on a healthy community of men for encouragement and affirmation.
Guys that grew up in homes with passive, distant, or abusive fathers, and are reared primarily by women, develop various strategies to cope with absence of masculine initiation. When Moms are too close, as Podles rightly describes, it can lead guys to "misogyny, mistrust of women, and insensitivity, an inability to place trust in another and to commit himself to that other."
Others go to the complete opposite path and become womanizers. Women are reduced to mere objects of false intimacy. You've become addicted to consuming femininity wherever you can get it. You're prone and open to random "hook ups" and you're proving to the world that you are free from the rule of women by seducing and conquering them. You desire to control, manipulate, and use women in order to resist the power you fear they will have over you. Many over-mothered and uninitiated men call it a good night if they "made out" with a girl they met that evening.
Preachers, small group leaders, etc.: you have lots of mama's boys in your community and your job is to give them their God-made masculinity back. What should you say? That depends much on your own context but what we do know is that women, children, the church, and world are desperate for a generation of men walking in healthy, holistic God-made masculine identity.
