This week on the podcast ([link removed]) Zach and I discuss the crisis among American boys and men – the data around boys struggling is very clear and has been for years. Boys are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed as having ADHD, are five times more likely to spend time in juvenile detention, and are far less likely to finish high school than girls.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t get much better when men become adults. Men now comprise only 40.5% of college students. Average male wages have declined since 1990 in real terms. At least one-sixth of prime working age men 25-54 are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men aged 18-34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.
Economic transformation hasn’t helped. Almost three-quarters of manufacturing workers are men; the sector has lost about 5 million jobs since 2000. That’s a lot of unemployed men.
For women, the single biggest factor they look for in a partner is a steady job. For women who don’t have college educations, their male counterparts often can’t find jobs and don’t seem like stable partners. The proportion of working-class adults who get married has plummeted from 70% in 1970 to only 45% today.
Boys are thus often growing up in tough circumstances, raised by single Moms. The share of children born to unmarried mothers more than doubled between 1980 and 2015, from 18 to 40 percent. One study found that boys appear to be “more responsive to parental inputs (or the absence thereof) than are girls.” There’s also an increasing sense that being good at school is something more for girls than boys. Said another study, “As more boys grow up without their father in the home, and as women are viewed as the more stable achievers, boys and girls alike come to see males as having a lower achievement orientation and less aptitude for higher education . . . college becomes something that many girls, but only some boys, do - the opposite of the earlier cultural norm.” In 2012, 70 percent of U.S. high school valedictorians were girls.
Zach is very passionate about masculinity issues in part because his father worked at a ministry for men. I think about these issues as a father to two young boys, and I’ve long felt that these struggles are being overlooked and underreported in America today, partially because boys and men are not generally framed as sympathetic figures.
One obvious outlet for boys and men – video games. Jonathan Gottschall wrote: “Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life . . . it gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.” That’s the kind of thing that many boys are looking for. Unfortunately, “there is some evidence that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s or 40s” playing video games writes Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago.
I can relate. I’m 47 now. The things that generate excitement and camaraderie in your twenties seem less lustrous later. A number of my guy friends have gotten divorced in their thirties and forties. Others have become detached from society. Male dysfunction tends to take on an air of nihilism and dropping out. The world and relationships take work.
Many men have within us the man-child playing video games in the basement. The fortunate among us have left him behind, but we understand him all too well. He’s still there waiting – ready to take over in case our lives fall apart.
Some of the material above is from my book The War on Normal People. Check out my conversation with Zach here ([link removed]) .
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