I am kind of surprised that people here would dislike everything a person says and be proud of it. Seems very short sighted.
I have watched a lot of JP because I have teenagers and young men in my life and some of them do resonate a bit with him. I wanted to be able to have reasonable conversations about it with them.
I love that he always tells people to be the best they can be. His "start with cleaning your room" speech was a very easy way for them to think about it. Clean up your life makes sense. Get yourself focused, etc.
We have been focusing so much on 'girl power' that we have made some boys feel cast aside. Take a look at your local elementary school it is a pink ghetto. We would never allow it to be full of all male teachers but we seem OK with the opposite.
Anyhow, I do not agree 100% with what JP says but I usually go away thinking a bit more about a topic. However, I also don't get up in arms about someone who has a different opinion then mine; rather I usually find those people the most interesting because I am forced to consider their thought.
Agree. A friend of mine is a male elementary teacher, and I feel so glad that he is because of the kind of person that he is. Boys particularly at that age benefit from having an integrous, strong, gentle, emotionally healthy man as one of their teachers. Some of them effectively have no Dads, or have Dads who are dysfunctional in their parenting, and for those kids especially having a good male teacher can be trajectory-changing.
Also, the role and influence of men in boy's lives can't be replaced by women. The importance of men to boys is generally diminished in our society, and we still accept culturally the abdication of male responsibility towards children and parenting. Culturally, its something we expect women to own.
And I see this even in men who are parents and feel strongly that they hold as much responsibility as their wives for child care.
Because when push comes to shove, when daycare fails or kid gets sick, the woman stays home. Even if she makes more $. (There's a study that confirms this but I'm not going to try to find it now.) It doesn't need to be her, the kids aren't breast-feeding any longer. But almost always, its her.
There's all kind of reasons for that, but I want to point at the cultural one. No matter how on-board a Dad is with having kids as high-priority, it will be way less comfortable for him to call work and say he's staying home to watch his kids, than it is for his wife. Because child-care is still a low-status job, and its the cultural responsibility of women still, no matter how we like to pretend we're equal and share equally.
If child-care was really owned by men and Dads as a group, culturally and historically over the last several decades, the way it is owned by women, every big accounting or law firm would have built in day-care. It would be a no-brainer, and a pretty important piece for keeping firms competitive in the hiring market.