I’ve also heard the term “prolonged adolescence”. This is a phenomenon that I think started with Gen X and continued into Millennials. When I was a kid growing up, high school and college were the supposed “best time of your life” years where you had relative freedom to party, date around and generally just act irresponsible until the “real world” of jobs, mortgage, marriage, kids, etc imposed itself after graduation. There was maybe a brief transition in one’s early twenties as people graduated college or left the military or whatever and settled into their careers and found someone to marry.
But over the decades that “brief transition period in your 20s” seems to have extended longer and longer into an their 30s and beyond. If one isn’t careful, continuing to act as if you are still an 21 year old college student can turn into long term “inability to get your shit together”.
I’m willing to give a pass to past generations, although only those farther back than you’ve cited. A man who supported his wife and kids, was independent of his own parents, didn’t drink to excess or abuse anyone, was fulfilling his role as defined by the times. “Separate spheres,” and all that. For that matter, any man whose wife is in full agreement with such a relationship is not a child.
I was going to include house, lawn and car maintenance as an acceptable trade-off, but I do have one nagging quibble. By and large, those things can be done on the man’s schedule. If the grass gets mowed tomorrow instead of during the ball game, no big deal. If the kids are hangry, there’s no putting off dinner. But I guess if it’s OK with them, who am I to judge?
For me, I don’t give a damn what someone’s hobbies are, I don’t care if they live with parents, or didn’t bother with any of the traditional life milestones. ‘Manchild’ to me just means that, despite being physically capable of looking after themselves, they’ve decided that it’s someone else’s job to do so, indefinitely (not just, say, coming to an agreement that their partner does all the housework while they finish off a pHd or something with the full intention of repaying the work debt later).
I have a few friends who still living with parents well into adulthood who have good reasons for doing so and at least pull their own weight with housework and responsibility. I also know people who live by themselves but simply parasitise off friends and family, getting constantly bailed out.
Manchildren aren’t always immediately obvious. I consider the uncle who thinks it’s his wife’s job to manage the house and his diabetes (while he tries to cheat on his diet) and never so much as washes up a plate to be far, far more of a manchild than my friend who still lives with his Mum at 29, does all his own cooking and most of the cooking for guests, half the cleaning, and pays half the bills and more than half the mortgage, even if said friend does play lots of computer games.
I would expand that slightly to not only housework, but more in general viewing the world through the lens of a mature, emotionally stable adult.
I see this in the tech industry a lot. You have these kids who are really smart who get paid a lot of money at a young age in an industry that is fixated on youth and “disruption”. Well what happens when you lavish young people with gifts and toys, keep telling they they are “special”, and give them carte blanche to break things? They turn into spoiled jerks.
I work with one. He’s a 38 year old technician in our lab who reports to me.
He is obsessed with three things:
Disney World
Halloween
SpongeBob SquarePants
Every October he takes an incredible amount of sick time (“Bad back”). The truth is that he travels the state and attends haunted house attractions.
And even though his title is “technician,” he can’t do anything technical. If someone asks him to drill a hole in a piece of metal, for example, he will get someone else to do it. 95% of the time he has nothing to do. He’s pretty much worthless.
