Your decisions are always limited to the immediate situation, what you are feeling, what others are doing and saying, what the tempting thing looks like, smells or tastes like. You never imagine the future risks and costs, as future-oriented people do. Meaning, when you see something you like, you “go for it,” enjoy it, derive pleasure from it—and then you are dependent on it. That is addiction in action.
One male college freshman told us a story that is becoming more and more common:
In the first grade, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I began taking Ritalin soon after. That diagnosis has complemented the trajectory of my social and academic life up to this very day. My teachers and parents always told me I was smart, but I had a hard time believing them, as I always found myself in trouble or with a tutor. Middle school was particularly turbulent for me, as I moved to an elite private school in the seventh grade. My grades were abysmal, and from the start, up until I transferred after the end of my freshman year of high school there, there was not a semester where I was not on some form of probation, be it academic or social. Furthermore, trouble, in school and out, has never failed to find me.
He added that he smoked a fair amount of marijuana, which was a common practice across campus.
In Part I, we briefly examined the “tip of the iceberg,” exploring a set of symptoms that we believe young men are manifesting in various ways to their detriment, including the overuse of video games and online porn, overreliance on prescribed medication and illegal drugs, lack of motivation and drive, social and sexual difficulties, and poor health choices. We believe these symptoms have resulted from a complex combination of interconnected causes, which we will now consider in Part II.
The Drug Enforcement Agency made the possession and sale of synthetic marijuana illegal in 2011; since then its use by high school seniors dropped from one in nine to one in sixteen in 2014.
† Not to be confused with the Buddhist practice of being in the present moment, which emphasizes mindfulness and a nonjudgmental focus on one's emotions, thoughts and sensations.
PART II
Causes
EIGHT
Rudderless Families, Absent Dads
Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
—Wallace Stegner, historian and novelist
The environments and social conditions in which young men hang out, go to school, mature, and woo girls have changed in recent years. If we take a closer look at those worlds and the way young men are conditioned to operate within them we can better understand the meaning behind the data that we just reviewed in Part I. In this section we'll examine the main situational and systemic factors that influence young men's thoughts and behaviors, including cultural changes, social expectations, and what's happening in schools, within families and among peers.
Throughout history the vast majority of humans lived in multi-generational, often multi-family groups, so whether or not they wanted to be, kids were surrounded by adults. Essentially there would have been two parents as well as other caregivers in the picture: siblings, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Today, however, with classroom ratios at about one teacher per twenty students,1 with only one or two adults living at home, and with great distances between extended family members, children have far fewer quality relationships with any adults. Today the average household size in America is three or fewer.2 Furthermore, these ever-shrinking family units spend less time together, especially quality time like sharing a sit-down meal. Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, authors of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential—and Endangered, suggest this lack of relational richness is having a negative effect on our culture's capacity to care for others.
As infants we depend on our primary caregivers—first Mom and then Dad—to feed us when we're hungry and protect us when we're threatened. In other words, our parents regulate our level of stress until we are able to self-regulate, and how they respond to stress affects the way our stress response develops. Our earliest interactions with our mothers will serve as a kind of template for how we react to future human contact. But lately there has been a problem: because of modern demands, mothers are under constant pressure and stress. And if a mother is under stress, if she's not being nurtured, it's far less likely she's going to be able to provide consistent nurturing for her young children.
Furthermore, stress is regulated by social systems; the brain regions involved in social relationships are the same ones that control stress response. They develop together, and therefore development problems in the stress response can interfere with the development of social and emotional functioning and vice versa.3
Over the last few decades, the birth rate for unmarried women in the US has risen steadily from 18 percent in 1980 to 41 percent in 2012.4 For women under thirty years old, who bear two-thirds of all children, the rate is 53 percent. Many of the unmarried women are cohabiting with a partner at the outset of their child's birth, but those couplings disintegrate at twice the rate of marriages—two-thirds of them will break up before their child turns ten years old.5 In total, about a third of boys are raised in father-absent homes.6
With such high percentages of children born to single mothers today, who is nurturing these young, new mothers who raise these children? How will these children deal with stress when they have their own children? Moreover, as human life-span increases, there is an ever-larger number of older relatives in elderly care facilities. Who is responsible for visiting them regularly and dealing with their survival issues, even their basic legal and accounting problems? Usually, it's their daughters—the same overstressed mothers—who must deal with this new stress of caring for beloved parents who are feeble, suffering memory losses, and are able to give back little affection to their now grown girls.
One place where families used to talk, exchanging experiences, ideas, values, and more, was around the dinner table. That is now an ancient tradition, honored more in the breach than in practice. USA Today newspaper did a survey twenty-five years ago on the “time crunch” that people increasingly felt. One alarming statistic uncovered was that three in five of families said life was more hectic than five years ago and they were not able to do things like have regular sit-down family dinners.7
Today, about half of teens report having frequent dinners at home with their parents.8 According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, compared with teens who have five to seven family dinners a week, teens who have infrequent family dinners (fewer than three times a week) are almost four times more likely to use tobacco, more than twice as likely to use alcohol, two and a half times likelier to use marijuana, and nearly four times likelier to engage in future drug use.9
Unstable Role Models, Tarnished Trust
Although it was far from routine, in the early twentieth century Americans had enough trust in each other that some actually affixed stamps to their children and “mailed” them to another destination, often to a relative's, via the US Postal Service.10 Contrast that to today where we don't even trust the babysitter; people buy small “nanny cams” that can easily be hidden in stuffed animals or alarm clocks to monitor what goes on in their own homes while their children are being “looked after.”11
The percentage of Americans who believe “most people can be trusted” plummeted from 55 percent in 1960 to 32 percent in 2009, meaning the majority of Americans now view other citizens as untrustworthy.12 Although numbers have increased since for the general population, in a 2012 Pew Social Trends survey, only 19 percent of millennial felt others were trustworthy.13 Sources of this downsizing of trust is the media highlighting instances of corruption, deception, and deceit by politicians; unreliable eye-witness accounts; shifting perceptions of the lower class as the gap between rich and poor widens; celebrity scandals; and the collapse of reputations of other public figures.
Other causes that merit further exploration are actual events people observe
or experience firsthand. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, explained:
In virtually all societies “have-nots” are less trusting than “haves,” probably because haves are treated by others with more honesty and respect. In America blacks express less social trust than whites, the financially distressed less than the financially comfortable, people in big cities less than small-town dwellers, and people who have been victims of a crime or been through a divorce less than those who haven't had those experiences.14
We think that the high divorce rates of many nations are of particular concern, because the destructive effects of divorce are never isolated, even in subtle ways that we may not connect right away. For example, when psychologist and marriage expert John Gottman studied blood samples of divorced people and those in unhappy marriages, he found their immune systems were depressed and contained fewer white blood cells, making them less effective at fighting infectious diseases. When he examined samples from preschoolers being raised in various home environments, he found chronically elevated levels of stress hormones in the children from homes with hostile parental environments.15
In 1969 Governor Reagan of California enacted the nation's first no-fault divorce bill, eliminating the need for spouses to state a reason why they wished to end their marriage. Other states followed over the next decade and by 1980 the divorce rate more than doubled from what it had been in 1960.16 Today, more than half of first marriages in the US will split up before “death do us part”; about half of them will occur in the first seven years.17
Around the world there are similar trends. In the UK, which also allows for no-fault divorce, 48 percent of children will see their parents divorce by the time they are sixteen years old.18 In China, more people are filing for divorce than are tying the knot. The country's overall divorce rate is low, but it has been rising every year, with the most divorces occurring in larger cities.19 Even traditionally Catholic European countries like Poland, which have lower divorce rates than the less religious surrounding countries, have seen a spike in recent years—one marriage in three now ends in divorce there.20
One Polish mother wrote in observing that divorce was the result of many contemporary social phenomena:
The “dissolution” of the family and the instability of human relations are just some of them. Feminism, overprotectiveness of single mothers coping with raising a boy without any help from the male partner and the economic pressure to provide a livelihood that the women are under. Together with the omnipresent, stupefying media that promotes quasi-moral models. Young people are weak and lost as never before . . . The best example would be my unemployed, 30 year old son, who still runs away from life and responsibilities.
Divorce isn't easy for anyone. But it's not so much the separation itself that affects young people's perceptions of trust as it is how the parents handle the situation. Many children lose faith in relationships because they watch their parents become emotionally unstable and react irrationally, sometimes violently. Before the battles become overt, children often witness bickering, humiliation, and other negative social confrontations between their once loving parents.
This is the pattern many kids observe right now: man and woman meet, fall in love, get married, and make babies. Enter stress. Babies take over lives. Distance grows between man and woman; communication was never great to begin with but is now much worse. Enter stress-relieving but relationship-destroying behaviors, such as physical abuse, drug and alcohol use, and emotional and physical infidelities. Everyone is unhappy. Divorce follows. One or both parents now are struggling and are emotionally, mentally, and/or financially broken. Is that not a sad scenario for any child to observe and become a part of?
Many stay-at-home moms today express resentment and, while happy they had kids, wished they had maintained a career so that when they got divorced they weren't in such a tough position, having been out of the workforce for too many years to readily catch up. Only 10 percent of mothers surveyed in a 1962 Gallup poll hoped their daughters would follow the pattern of their—often traditional—lives.21 Fifty years later, not a whole lot has changed. Those daughters of 1962 now have daughters of their own, and the messages that those young women are getting from their own mothers are terribly inconsistent; on the one hand they say they wouldn't trade their kids for anything, but on the other hand they send the message that a career is more sustainable than having a family. Certainly there are few real-life examples of women who are able to do both well—by their own standard. Indeed, a Pew Research survey conducted in 2012 revealed that unmarried and working mothers are less happy than married and nonworking mothers.22
Daughters also pick up on the higher levels of unhappiness and stress that accompany divorce and single motherhood, and sometimes resent the position it puts them in growing up. As one young woman from our survey commented: “my mother was not empowered by the separation [from my father] . . . This happened when I was 15, and I felt like instead of becoming a young woman, I took over as man of the house, but my opinion of women suffered.”
The other, deeper message that is passed on is guilt: when mothers talk about how their lives would have been different (better) had they stayed in the workforce or communicate to their daughters that they do not want them to repeat “their mistakes,” they are indirectly telling their children that their existence is part of the mistakes, and has impeded the success they could have had in their prime years. Thus the children must live according to her wishes as a form of payback for Mom's mistake in having given birth to them.
Those messages from Mom, one of our most important mentors, along with the slew of celebrity mothers, such as Sofia Vergara, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Heidi Klum, being touted as “superwomen” who do it all and have it all, and still look hot at forty and fifty years old, leaves ordinary young women feeling anxious and confused, and eventually leaves them feeling disappointed when they realize they won't have it all—and not even much of what they had imagined and hoped their lives would be. The problem with these messages given to young children is that they erode the underlying beliefs necessary for a trusting and caring relationship to be built around. In short, it's divorce training. Daughters who do not take on a full-time career can feel like they are betraying their mother's wishes. Sons observe their mothers and wonder if they'll ever be able to make a woman happy; how could they when Dad failed miserably in doing so? After all, women initiate nearly seven out of ten divorces23 and largely determine the tone and direction of a relationship.24
On the other side of this sad ledger are all the dads who have watched their marriages disintegrate into a series of alimony and child-support payments. Only 10 to 15 percent of men win in custody battles,25 and many men end up feeling like they are spending their lives working for people who have been turned against them. Some even go to prison for falling behind on child support payments—for example, in South Carolina, one out of seven inmates is there for that very reason.26
When a man works long hours to try to keep up with payments and is then called callous, he feels misunderstood. If he has any blemish on his personal record he could be deemed unfit to parent; if he takes up a new hobby he's called selfish; and if he shies away from new intimate relationships out of fear that the cycle would repeat itself, he is told he has a fear of commitment. It's not a stretch to say these men have a deep sense of despair, their suicide rates after divorce being ten times higher than the suicide rates of women.27 While this might initially suggest that marriage must be more rewarding for men than for women, and many women undoubtedly feel they have to take on the bulk of the child care and household chores, it's clear from the health benefits alone that both men and women benefit from being married. However, because men are conditioned not to ask for help or reach out to others, they have more pent-up emotions and are likely to take more drastic action in times of crisis.
Since most children today are still brought up on a diet of Disney movies and fair
y tales to think that conventional marriage is for everyone and that marriages are supposed to last forever, the break-up is devastating to the entire family. As a kid you think, “Is this what I have to look forward to?” Then as an adult you think, “Why bother? What's the point? The entire burden will fall on me in the end anyway.”
It doesn't have to be that way if the divorce is amicable and both parties communicate to their children their love for them and respect for the role of the other parent, but that's usually not what happens. Young people are not growing up seeing great role models for trust and reliability, especially in intimate relationships. Long-term monogamous relationships are now thought of in terms of what you lose rather than what you gain; they're seen as a restriction on independence and freedom, and commitment is seen as sacrificing your own goals and passions for something that will most likely fail in ten or twenty years, if not sooner. In my (Nikita's) observations and experience, many young people are more focused on Plan B—their escape plan—than Plan A. They are terrified of putting all their eggs in one basket, but it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy of relationship failures.
Some young people also feel that they are one of the reasons why their parents' marriage ended, and avoid having children of their own in an effort to spare any potential future children the pain they witnessed and experienced. This conflicts with our childhood conditioning. We are still expected to want long-term committed relationships even though we are never taught how to talk about or handle the challenges that come with these commitments. Ultimately young people growing up wonder who they can trust. They wonder, “If I can't trust those closest to me, whom can I trust? If Mom and Dad can't even keep it together, who can?” Learning how to trust others starts with our primary relationships, so when our primary role models are unreliable and don't deliver on their promises or aren't there for one another, we will find it harder to rely on others or allow ourselves to be depended upon by others.
Man, Interrupted Page 6