Only a few decades ago, boys had not only dads but also uncles, grandfathers, older cousins, male family friends, and next-door neighbors who provided an extended, tribal family system that was often an informal source of social support and regulation. Facebook, Twitter, gaming forums, and a host of other Internet social media sites now try to replace those functions—but they cannot do so. Young men need more than “contacts.” They need confidants. They need people who will physically be there when they are down in the dumps, who can sense their need because they interact with males enough to recognize changes in their moods without them having to ask for help. It is hard and awkward for anyone to ask for help. Given that this is true for most people, most of the time, we should all be alert to ask if we can help others when we perceive that help is needed. This is another reason why young men need compassionate friends and family who are likely to notice they need help and who come to their aid. It is also important to have others recognizing when young men positively contribute to a situation, or achieve goals—to offer warranted praise and build up their sense of pride and honor.
At the same time, only men can hold boys to the accepted social and moral norms. If there is not a presence that holds a boy to a concept of real consequences for faltering, the boy will push his boundaries as far as they will go. This is a difficult, if not impossible, role for a mother to play, particularly during adolescence; she cannot be unconditional love and enforcer at the same time to a boy who is transitioning into a young man. Attempting to teach a boy to be a man through the conflicted position of a mother or technology is better than nothing but is giving boys and young men a diluted and virtual sense of connection to manhood.
Media influence
What does it mean to be a man? And where do young men get their information about what it means to be manly? Many males who we have surveyed said they felt most like a man when they were honest about who they were, confidently made decisions, and actively pursued their dreams. Men are naturally risktakers and explorers, they like to master things. Knowing that they're needed motivates them, and they want respect from their peers, specifically from other men. Again that respect is based both on who they are and what they do.
But that meaningful respect needs to come from doing pro-social things that make life better in some way for their own future and for others. It should not derive from out-drinking their buddies or doing some stupid shit better than them. Popular films and television shows, unfortunately, present few alternatives to this latter asshole image of males.
We strongly believe that television programs could use more men with triple-digit IQs. Why the overwhelming majority of male characters are testosterone-driven meatheads, douchebag detectives, obsessed chefs, vampires, womanizers, or overweight men with really hot wives is perhaps not such a mystery. Researchers at the University of Maryland concluded from over thirty years of data that unhappy people watch significantly more television.59 That makes sense—television is passive, provides an escape, and is an easy way to tune out of one's life. Drama is an amazing distraction. When you can watch tanned guidos duke it out like two betta fish in a small aquarium, you feel less inadequate about your own life. Disharmony seems to be appealing, too. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”60 Watch one show about happy people and you've seen them all.
The problem is, without better role models in real life, young men become confused about what is and is not acceptable male behavior. Violence and sex, two overrepresented topics in media and underrepresented topics in conversation, become especially unclear. “It's very confusing to little boys . . . all around them they see violence on the news, on television, on video games—and at the same time, they're getting the message that the fantasies that boys seem to have always had are bad . . . I think the danger is giving the boys who are having those thoughts the idea that it says something bad about them as people,” says Jane Katch, kindergarten teacher and author of Far Away from the Tigers.61
Warren Farrell elaborated on this point in The Myth of Male Power by saying many young boys unconsciously learn that sex is dirtier and worse than killing, because parents will allow their kids to watch a Western in which people kill each other but will turn off the television or change the channel when there's nudity or sex.62 No doubt the graphic pornographic images that many young boys have access to today online do little to counter the sense of sex being dirty and void of love or emotional connection.
By thirteen or fourteen years old, the message comes across to boys that they want sex more than girls do—or that the girls who initiate sex are untrustworthy—so they feel they must take on the role of initiator. Naturally, there is a huge fear of rejection, which is a potent motivation inhibitor. Sex on television and porn reduce that fear of rejection. If a young man doesn't perceive himself among the best performers, he believes the girl he is most attracted to will reject him. Watching television and porn requires no commitment and has a zero rate of rejection; it provides instant gratification that can alleviate the fear to some degree. As a side effect, however, it also reduces the motivation to get the skills needed to attract the girl, creating further distance between a man and his ultimate goal.
The Flawed Welfare System
In 2015 an average of 4.2 million people in the US received welfare, known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), or State Supplemental Program (SSP) benefits each month during the fiscal year; most were children.63 A recent report from Pew Research indicated 18 percent of American adults have received assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or “food stamps,” at some point in their lives. Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to have used food stamps, women were about twice as likely as men, and minorities were twice as likely as whites to have received food stamps. People over sixty-five years old were the least likely age group to say they had received food stamps, while people with less education—a high school diploma or lower—were three times more likely than college graduates to have received those benefits.64
Over the last twenty years, the amount of cash assistance provided for the poorest families has grown weaker, not stronger.65 The lifetime limit of receiving benefits is five years, and many people have reached the imposed TANF limit in the most recent financial crisis. Whether or not you believe that welfare promotes out-of-wedlock childbearing, destroys the motivation to seek and attain an income, or does not offer adequate support to those most in need, most people can agree that the current system is flawed in many ways—particularly in the way that it is not balanced by adequate federal investments in public education, job training and support, and job creation.
The current system also discourages single mothers from establishing a stable two-parent household, despite a portion of welfare funds allocated to promote this kind of family structure. Surveys from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), part of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), show:
that the incentives of TANF-eligible women with children to cohabit or marry are affected by TANF program rules. The way in which incentives are affected depends on the financial resources of the male with whom the woman might cohabit or marry and on the male's relationship to the children. The relevant TANF rules that affect these incentives are those governing eligibility, how the basic grant is structured, how blended families are treated, how unrelated cohabitors are treated, and work rules.66
Women who marry or maintain a home with the biological father of their children can face the reduction or loss of their benefits:
Our main finding is that if a male has financial resources, TANF provides the greatest disincentive to form and/or maintain a biological family, and the least disincentive, if not an incentive, to form an unrelated cohabitor family. In a biological family, where the male is the father of all the children, he must be included in the unit and his resources counted. In an unrelated cohabitor f
amily, where he is father of none of the children, he is not included and his resources are not counted. In addition, most states disregard unrelated cohabitor vendor and cash payments to the TANF recipient and her children.67
In other words, the current structure of TANF actually promotes having nearly any man but the biological father heading the house, inhibiting family formation and even inciting family breakdown.
These trends are happening elsewhere in the Western world. Britain, for example, has more single-parent households than the majority of European countries (only surpassed by Estonia, Ireland, and Latvia).68 On average, single-parent households in the UK claim more than double the amount of government benefit support as two-parent households,69 and are two-and-a-half times more likely to be in poverty.70 The Centre for Social Justice estimates that the cost of “family breakdown” is more than the entire defense budget.71 Here in the US, children of single parents are also far more likely to grow up in poverty and have lower rates of upward mobility than children of single parents.72
Essentially, the current systems are not helping people get out of poverty, and often the cycle continues from generation to generation.73 Most importantly, reform efforts are failing to address the effects of children being born into poverty. Children who experience family breakdown growing up are less likely to stay in school or get secondary education. A person with a poor education is more likely to rely on benefits and less likely to enter or stay in the workforce, and as a result is more likely to have debt or go to prison and live in poverty eternally.
Helicopter Parents
On the flip side of absent parents are “helicopter parents”—often of a higher socioeconomic status—who are reluctant to relinquish control over their children's environment, to allow them to grow up, develop resilience, and find solutions to their own problems. Lori Gottlieb, a clinical psychologist in New York, wrote about the role parents play in shaping their child's sense of happiness in Atlantic magazine. She wondered whether protecting children from unhappiness while they were growing up actually robbed them of happiness as adults. The rise of so-called helicopter parents, who hover over and around their children in school settings to be sure they are doing the right thing, supports this idea. The University of Vermont has even hired “parent bouncers” to help keep these parents at a healthy distance.74
Although their intentions may start out as good, helicopter parents' surveillance tactics not only undercut their kids' independence, they prevent them from soaring on their own. By making their kids their sense of purpose, these parents are robbing their kids of developing their own sense of purpose. This problem is seen in the extreme in modern China in the form of “sitting mothers.” Moms accompany their prized only child to college, especially the male, who must become the pride of the family and its legacy. They take apartments near the school and keep a keen eye on all the comings and goings of Junior. In some cases, when moms cannot live close by and dads have business to attend to, a “sitting grandmother” will do the job instead.
Failing is an inevitable and much underrated part of life, but many parents aren't letting their sons learn that it's okay to fail at most things some of the time. A life without failure is a life without risktaking; it is settling for the sure thing and not the best thing. This costs them later in life. One male college student from our survey offered this suggestion:
Let men fail when they are young. That way it doesn't seem like the end of the world if they do when they are older. I think a mistake my parents made when I was young is they always rescued me from the brink of failure. My biggest problem moving on to college is I never learned to learn from my failures. I see men around me fail over and over because they seem incapable of deriving any lessons from it.
Another perception that has come from helicopter parenting is the belief that neighborhoods aren't safe places any more, deterring their kids from playing pickup sports games outside their parentally managed and supervised teams, and indirectly cheating them of the opportunity to practice social organization skills as well as learning to resolve conflicts on their own. People generally spend time in nature to improve their physical, psychological, and spiritual sense of well-being, but kids aren't learning that. The fear-based mentality being passed down from their parents has effectively made kids neutral or apathetic toward the outdoors. Young people in their late teens are now the least likely age group to go to a national forest or wilderness—accounting for just 3 percent of the total visits in recent years.75 Again, we believe strongly that everyone's human nature is enhanced by regular connections with physical nature, with feeling part of the external environment. Being in a forest, or desert, or in the mountains or ocean often generates a sense of awe that contributes to a feeling of aliveness. It also helps your brain perform better on tasks.76
Gay Parents
While co-parents are not as effective as parents with intact marriages, the effectiveness of gay parents is a question that remains not fully studied. Do children need to have a married mother and father to have the brightest future, or will two same-sex parents who are in a marriage-like relationship and have been with the children since birth produce similar results? Gay marriage is now legal here in the US and in some countries around the world, but many gay couples who could be married are not. This means that some children with gay parents grow up with married parents while others grow up with parents who are technically cohabiting but perhaps model an analogous family dynamic.
The current data from the slim amount of research done on the parental efficacy of gay couples who have children is conflicted. One highly criticized study found that children with gay parents who began a same-sex romantic relationship later in the child's life were more likely to smoke marijuana and cigarettes, were more likely to have been arrested, were more likely to be in therapy or counseling for anxiety or depression, and watched more television than the children in intact biological families.77 In contrast, other studies with their own limitations suggest that the children of gay parents are just as happy78 and healthy,79 and develop normally sexually and socially (although they are more likely to experience bullying80), when compared to children with biological parents in intact marriages. The American Psychological Association says there's no scientific basis for believing that gays and lesbians are unfit to be parents based on sexual orientation alone.81
We expect that as the number of desirable men of marriageable age becomes a scarcer commodity, there will be an increase of women living in unconventional or bisexual cohabiting arrangements, as witnessed in the rise of the nonmonogamy movement.82 Throughout history, when there has been an oversupply of women, a lower value is placed on marriage and family, and sexual relationships outside marriage increase and become more openly talked about and accepted as the norm.83
Family dynamics are changing at a rapid pace, and the ripple effects from this evolution have yet to be fully felt. Education, on the other hand, is one institution that is lumbering along at a painfully slow speed, as we will discuss next.
NINE
Failing Schools
Young men might be failing at school; but the school system is also failing them. The US spends more money per pupil than the majority of other developed countries,1 but it achieves less gain per buck. And now that many schools receive federal and state funding based on test results, teachers teach for those outcomes, but not for stimulating student curiosity or critical thinking, nor for learning nonspecific principles or values. Over time such training to focus on fact memorization may come to lower the intellectual level of the teachers themselves, not just their bored students.
“The quality of teachers has been declining for decades, and no one wants to talk about it . . . We need to find a more powerful means to attract the most promising candidates to the teaching profession,” said Harold O. Levy, chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, back in 2000.2 There are a lot of amazing teachers out there, but in general, the current batch of teachers are less intelligent
than earlier peers, buried in the bottom third of the SAT class.3
IQ is definitely not the sole predictor of good teaching, but the difference between having a strong or weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Kids who have a good teacher at nine years old are less likely to become teenage parents, are more likely to go to college and will, on average, earn $50,000 more over a lifetime.4 This research most likely could have used any other grade and got similar positive correlations.
But because there are few tangible incentives to being a dedicated teacher (poor wages, less status), over time many educators get discouraged and don't invest the effort to make their classes engaging or relevant to current events. Thus many kids end up just dumbed down by rote memorization to achieve teacher approval and school-targeted results. Much education is not problem-focused or solution-oriented, or relevant to real-world challenges, as many people believe it should be.
What else is wrong with school dynamics? Too much boring homework, and too many overworked or absent parents who are not interested in their kids' progress or academic problems, only the results on the report card. Too many schools have eliminated gym class and structured playtime, which means there is no longer a time or place to release pent-up energy, socialize at recess, or develop imagination. Financial constraints have led to science courses without labs, dropping courses with any kind of creativity altogether, and limiting nearly all field trips to places like natural history museums. And as kids are less challenged in their classroom, there arises the ever-tempting option to text and surf the Internet in class, which swamps directed attention away from the lesson.
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