U Not Gonna Like This

I keep hearing all this fuss from women now a days on how men "won't grow up." It's reflected in the media in films like Failure To Launch talked about on television, books, and elsewhere. But where exactly does this "Peter Pan Syndrome" come from? Peter Pan Syndrome has two different meanings as I have found out. The first is an actual personality disorder HERE is the first explanation:

The ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ affects people who do not want or feel unable to grow up, people with the body of an adult but the mind of a child. They don’t know how to or don’t want to stop being children and start being mothers or fathers.

Peter Pan Syndrome can affect both sexes, but it appears more often among men. Some characteristics of the disorder are the inability of individuals to take on responsibilities, to commit themselves or to keep promises, excessive care about the way they look and personal well-being and their lack of self-confidence, even though they don’t seem to show it and actually come across as exactly the opposite.

However there is a second explanation based on something called "the Social Clock":

The Life Cycle and the Social Clock

Early models of adult development sometimes assumed
that marriage is a requisite life task for full
adulthood. Stage models posited a linear set of stages
that people progressed through over the course of a
lifetime. The concept of the social clock describes
societal expectations for the time at which people are
expected to marry, have children, and accomplish other
life tasks. What are the implications of these
expectations for the ways in which people who are
single are viewed at different ages? For example, are
people who have always been single viewed more
negatively when they are middle-aged adults than when
they are young adults? What are their actual
experiences? That is, do older people who have always
been single fare any differently in terms of health or
well-being than people who are married or who once
were married? (See also the section on Health and
Happiness.)

Stage models, especially those that specify marriage
as a necessary life task for adulthood, prejudge the
lives of singles as deficient. More recently, scholars
have questioned the adequacy of linear stage models,
especially as age-based norms seem to have become less
rigid. A few have attempted to address adult
development issues as they pertain to people who are
single. However, even these sometimes presuppose that
singles must reconcile themselves to their single
lives, rather than posing that possibility as a
question that allows for positive construals of the
single life course.

So there it is. The "Peter Pan Syndrome" that women are currently referring to is based on the idea of the Social Clock and is nothing more than a shaming tactic meant to pressure men into marriage. But as anyone who has ever read this blog will tell you my only advice to men is don't do it : Don't Marry.