No doubt a precursor to a thriving marriage is trust. But another thing to consider is just how much else in society is built on top of that foundation. George Vaillant, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, ran the longitudinal Harvard Study of Adult Development, informally known as the Grant Study, for over forty years (since 1966). It was started in 1938 as a way to measure not just pathology, as was trendy at the time, but how nature and nurture influenced mental and physical health outcomes in men. The original researchers wanted not just to observe health over time, but optimum health.28
All the participants were sophomores from the all-male Harvard College. In his latest analysis, marking the seventy-fifth year of the study (many of the remaining participants now in their nineties), Vaillant mentions on multiple occasions the importance of a warm childhood—one that had a stable home environment where the child was close to his parents, parents were supportive and encouraging of initiative and autonomy, and the child was close to at least one sibling—and its role in the development of trust as well as future happiness and success. He noted that “children who fail to learn basic love and trust at home are handicapped later in mastering the assertiveness, initiative, and autonomy that are the foundation of successful adulthood.”29
Men with the warmest childhoods also made 50 percent more money than the men who had bleak childhoods.30 The most independent men were those who came from the most loving homes: “they had learned that they could put their trust in life, which gave them courage to go out and face it,” and a “lack of hope and trust in other people made [a man] extremely vulnerable to loneliness.”31 A young man in his mid-twenties who replied to our survey, and who largely grew up without a father, echoed this sentiment, telling us that he had been unable to leave home or finish his education until this past year: “It has only been since I started really taking a look at the underlying network of issues I had [growing up] that I recognized my false beliefs [around the impact of my upbringing], which has really been a major step in my personal growth.”
In a survey by the National Fatherhood Initiative, 56 percent of mothers who were married or lived with the father of their children said the father had a “very close and warm” relationship with the children versus 15 percent of mothers who did not live with the father, and just 3 percent of mothers who were married or lived with the father of their children said the father had a “distant and unemotional” relationship with the children versus 47 percent of mothers who did not live with the father.32
Although it seems like the warmth of a lone individual's childhood or their ability to trust and their choice to marry or not is not such a big deal, on a mass scale there are significant ramifications. More than mere social implications stem from this lack of trust; countries in which citizens don't trust each other don't do as well economically. As Paul Zak, professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University said: “countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous . . . In these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. So poor countries are, by and large, low-trust countries.”33 It is primarily the Nordic nations that have seen an increase in trust since the 1980s, with Danes being the most trusting of their fellow citizens (76 percent). Several nations with rates of trust below 20 percent include Mexico, France, South Africa, and Argentina.34
In his book Trust, Francis Fukuyama wrote: “Liberal political and economic institutions depend on a healthy and dynamic civil society for their vitality,” which all builds on a strong and stable family structure.35 Charles Murray shared a similar view in Coming Apart, arguing marriage is one of the foundations of a nation's strength and financial resilience. He wrote that families with children are the core of communities, which are the core of society. It is around these families that communities must be organized, he says, because families with children have always been “the engine” that makes society work.36
There is a strong correlation between partner status and employment status. Married men spend more time than single men and cohabiting men in the labor force. For women, there were no significant differences found in the number of weeks worked and partner status, though women with no children spent more time in the labor force than women whose children have left home. By twenty-seven years old, eight times the number of single women have a child living in their household than single men. These trends are more pronounced for those of minority backgrounds, the less educated and the unwed (see endnotes for specific statistics). Overall, the US unmarried population grew 41 percent between 2000 and 2010. The main alternative for unmarried couples, cohabitation, has grown 1,400 percent in the US since 1970.37
Though it can be a convenient setup for adults, it is well established that cohabiting and single parents do not provide as stable a foundation for children, who often end up living in two different worlds. Compared with children in intact, married families, children in cohabiting families are about twice as likely to drop out of high school, use drugs, or become depressed. Compared with marriage, cohabitation also provides less commitment and safety to children (who are three times more likely to suffer physical, sexual, or emotional abuse) and romantic partners. Consequently, cohabiting couples are more than twice as likely to break up and four times more likely to be unfaithful to each other.38 Thus, whatever benefits may accrue to cohabitation, there are clear negative costs and consequences.
There may also be a strong correlation between family trauma—like divorce—and being overweight. In a survey of almost 300 morbidly obese patients, researchers found a very high occurrence of severe family dysfunction, particularly sexual abuse. About half of the men and women reported they were sexually assaulted or abused as children. That rate is 300 percent higher than the general male population. Pretty much all those surveyed reported experiencing some lasting form of childhood trauma. Weight gain often immediately follows a distressing life event. Examples of this on a large scale include divorce, and divorce rates increased considerably just before obesity began to soar.39 Young boys often have more difficulty adapting to a parent's divorce than young girls—especially if the father leaves the home, putting them at higher risk. For example, a recent Norwegian study revealed that children that had frequent and positive interactions with their father, such as the father paying attention to the child's interests, offering encouragement, and smiling, during the first year of their life were calmer and better behaved than other children at age two. This was especially true for boys. Both mothers and fathers were equally positively engaged with their daughters, but fathers were more often positively engaged with their sons than mothers were.40
Interestingly, Vaillant found that, although recovery may take decades, with the passage of time the good things that happened in childhood outshine the childhood traumas, which become less important: “A warm childhood environment appeared to be a far better predictor of future social class and of adult employment (or unemployment) than was either childhood intelligence, parental dependence on welfare, or the presence of multiple problems within the family.”41 Even as the Grant Study men aged into their seventies, their level of contentment “was not even suggestively associated with parental social class or even the man's own income. What it was significantly associated with was warmth of childhood environment, and it was very significantly associated with a man's closeness to his father.”42 This relationship is now what is missing in all too many homes these days.
Where's Dad?
A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men.
—Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia43
If we do not initiate the boys, they will burn the village down.
—African proverb
As mentioned earlier, many children are now born and raised by single mothers. Forty-four percent of millennials and 43 percent of Gen
Xers think that marriage is archaic,44 which raises the question: what will commitment look like in the twenty-first century? And how will those attitudes affect future generations and how those children are raised?
America leads the industrialized world in fatherlessness45—not something to put on a banner and salute. Among those who have fathers, the average school-age boy spends just half an hour per week in one-to-one conversation with his father, according to David Walsh, founder of Mind Positive Parenting. “That compares with forty-four hours a week in front of a television, video game screen, [and] Internet screen,” he says. “I think that we are neglecting our boys tremendously. The result of that is our boys aren't spending time with mentors, with elders, who can really show them the path, show them the way of how it is that we're supposed to behave as healthy men.”46
Jeff Perera, who does community engagement for the White Ribbon movement in Canada and founded the blog Higher Unlearning, both of which involve discussions on men, masculinity, fatherhood, healthy relationships, and working to end violence against women and girls, spent a morning in Toronto talking to eight- and nine-year-old boys from around the city about what they liked and didn't like about being a boy. One group came up with this list for what they didn't like about being boys:
Not being able to be a mother.
Not supposed to cry.
Not allowed to be a cheerleader.
Supposed to do all the work.
Supposed to like violence.
Supposed to play football.
Boys smell bad.
Having an automatic bad reputation.
Grow hair everywhere.
Perera said many of the boys “usually share thoughts such as how they don't like that boys get very competitive, leading to aggressive behavior or cheating to be labeled a ‘winner.’” In all respects, it is all about being a winner for boys, sometimes at all costs.
Some will talk about how boys always are in trouble, as one boy indicated here with having “an automatic bad reputation.” Perera asked the boys if they could explain what they meant by not being able to be a mother. Most of the boys agree that they like that they don't have to give birth, but felt they would be missing out as parents. One boy stood up and said in commercials it's always girls playing with the dolls and boys don't get to do that. When Perera mentioned to the boys that they could be fathers, the boys looked confused. Perera writes:
My mind raced as I wondered just how many of these fifty boys had physically-present but not emotionally-present fathers or role-models, or had fathers who were present at all. If they did hang out, they did little more than throw the ball around. We need more Maps to Manhood. When we reinforce outdated codes and ideas of manhood, these young boys will strive to achieve a standard of being a man that ensures they will fail as a human being.47
The effect of fatherlessness and the lack of modern rites of passage are both underestimated as having negative causal influences on the social-emotional development of boys. Boys suffer when there's no father in the home or no positive male role models in their lives; they start to look for a male identity somewhere else. Some young men find it in a gang or terrorist group; other young men find it in drugs, alcohol, playing video games, or objectifying women. For example, it could hardly be a coincidence that all three of the gamers featured in the 2014 documentary Free to Play are young men who grew up without their fathers around. One of the gamers, “Dendi,” whose father passed away when he was young, poured himself into video games after his father's death—he said it was the “push to play more.” Another gamer, “Fear,” whose father walked out on his family when he was very young, started spending large amounts of time gaming after he wasn't picked for a basketball team, saying that his father's absence in many ways made him what he is today. The third young man, “Hyhy,” said his father worked fifteen to sixteen hours a day when he was growing up and had “pretty much given up on everything else in his life.” The documentary follows their individual journeys as some of the world's best Defense of the Ancients (DotA) players competing to win a one million dollar tournament prize.48 We should note that the prize pool of the 2015 International DotA 2 Championship increased to an incredible $18 million, and was won for the first time by a North American team, which was led by “Fear.”49
Another side effect of fatherlessness is increased incidence of attention and mood disturbances. A study of more than a million Swedish children aged six to nineteen found that children raised by single parents were 54 percent more likely to be on ADHD medication.50 The National Center for Health Statistics reports that children of unwed or divorced parents who live with only their mother are 375 percent more likely to need professional treatment for emotional or behavioral problems.51
Craig McClain, cofounder of the Boys to Men Mentoring Network, offers an unfortunate view of why men do not often engage teenage boys:
Men are afraid of teenage boys, deathly afraid, and they don't want anything to do with them. I saw it in a lot of my talks to men's groups, saying, “Hey, how many of you guys want to go up on a weekend with 30 teenage boys with me? Raise your hand.” And one of them will raise their hand, and I'll say, “That's the problem.” Men are afraid of teenage boys because all they remember about their [own] teenage years is pain and sorrow and sadness and being alone, and when they see teenage boys in that place, that's where they go, so they back off.52
What are young guys to do? The documentary film Journeyman followed two Minnesota teenagers—Mike and Joe—as they went through the Boys to Men mentoring and rites of passage program. Initially both young men were very distrusting of the world. Neither one had a father figure in his life. Mike and Joe were both individually matched with a male mentor. Both of the male mentors also had absent fathers and struggled with feelings of shame and guilt about who they were in their youth. Dennis Gilbert, one of the mentors, was unsure of his abilities as a mentor:
At first I was like, “I don't know if I want to be a mentor.” I had some issues then that I didn't know I had with adolescent boys, particularly in groups. I had this fear thing. A lot of times, we'd just sit in the car and we'd stare, and [I'd get] almost no response back from [him]. After about six months I thought, “Am I doing this right? I'm not noticing anything.” We're not feeling like good friends, I'm just somebody who picks him up because he's bored sometimes. So I called Charlie. I said, “I think I'm failing at this mentor thing. He doesn't like me, we don't talk about anything . . . Maybe there's somebody out there better to be a mentor here.” And Charlie said, “Dennis, you're doing . . . exactly what you need to be doing.” He was right. It passed . . . In another three months he started opening up.53
One of the most crucial things for these young men transitioning into manhood was simply having an adult male around who enjoyed their presence and could guide them so that they could be loved for who they were but also held accountable for what they did. Being loved simply for who they are is the unconditional love that moms usually give, and love based on performance and effectively trying to achieve something is typically Dad's domain. In this case, the mentors gave both.
After two years, Mike went from failing in every class to getting top grades across the board, and he did his first staffing on a Boys to Men weekend. He said the experience was transformational; he said he could see himself having a future now, whereas he couldn't before. Joe now had a child of his own and was looking forward to raising his family. The boys' mentors also found that they went on an emotional journey of their own to face unresolved issues from their youth that came to light through their interactions with the boys.
With involved dads or positive male role models, kids are more open, receptive, and trusting of new people. Compared to kids not living with Dad, one group of elementary school children surveyed who were living with their fathers scored better on twenty-one of twenty-seven social competence measures.54 And perhaps as a result, they also have more playmates.55 They're also more likely to do better and go furthe
r in school. Elementary school children raised with their fathers do better on eight out of nine academic measures, and a father's impact remains significant through high school.56
There's no question boys need men in their lives. A mother's role is extremely important, too, but “there's not one thing a single mother can do to help her . . . sons in adolescence to calm down and to be moral,” says Michael Gurian, author of The Minds of Boys. “Boys need a father. And why? Because that's how nature's set up. Because it's human nature. There's maternal nurturance and there's paternal nurturance, and they're wired differently. Males nurture in a somewhat different way than females do, and children—girls and boys—need both maternal and paternal nurturance.”57
Guys also need to learn that it's okay to want to be in their son's life. Gender issues researcher and activist Warren Farrell suggests that a more balanced perspective about what is possible for young men will benefit everyone, not just young men:
Prior to the women's movement, girls learned to row the family boat only from the right side (raise children); boys, only from the left (raise money). The women's movement helped girls become women who could row from both sides; but without a parallel force for boys, boys became men who had still learned to row only from the left—to only raise money. The problem? If our daughters try to exercise their newfound ability to row from the left, and our sons also row only from the left, the boat goes in circles. A family boat that goes only in circles is more likely to be sunk by the rocks of recessions. In the past, a man was a family's breadwinner and he might be with one company for life. In the future, advanced technologies make economic change the only constant, increasing the need for a family boat with flexibility—with our sons eventually able to raise children as comfortably as our daughters now raise money.58
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