Sociologist and Author Michael Kimmel has recently released a new book — Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men — in which he explores the results of his conversations with nearly 400 young men between the ages of 16 and 26. According to Kimmel, many of them are stuck in “Guyland,” in a Peter-Pan-like state where their high school or college life continues on well into their twenties, where the focus is on having fun and playing video games, rather than finding a good job and becoming independent. Here’s how Kimmel describes Guyland:
Guyland is the world in which young men live. It is both a stage of life, a liminal undefined time span between adolescence and adulthood that can often stretch for a decade or more, and a place, or, rather, a bunch of places where guys gather to be guys with each other, unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids, and the other nuisances of adult life. In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan mindset, young men shirk the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated on the trappings of boyhood, while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men despite all evidence to the contrary.
If your son is stuck in Guyland, you may benefit from some of the strategies in our book, The Hands-On Guide to Surviving Adult Children Living at Home.
You can read a longer excerpt of Guyland on the USA Today website.