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Boy Crisis - Solutions

🛠️ Solutions

⬅️ Hub: Boy Crisis MOC

Education reform, mentorship, national service, the three Ps, policy.

Solutions

  • Educational Reform: The panel called for early childhood interventions, recruitment of male teachers, community schools, and holistic wraparound services that involve entire families.
  • Career & Purpose: Moore emphasized that not every student needs a 4-year degree. CTE (career technical education), public service years, and meaningful work opportunities help young men find dignity and identity.
  • From Programs to Policy: Strautmanis said while small programs are helpful, they’re insufficient. We need population-level change—massive structural reform to raise graduation rates, reduce crime, and ensure equitable opportunity.
  • Redefining Manhood: Moore concluded that real manhood is about service, humility, protection, and lifting others up—not dominance or aggression.
  • We Need Our Boys: Society must actively signal to boys and young men that they are valued and needed. As Strautmanis said, “We need you to heal, protect, and build our future together.”
  • Men's Groups
  • Masculinity Debate - Diary of a CEO > What to do
  • For Parents:
    • Scott advises single mothers to involve men (e.g., uncles, coaches) in their sons’ lives and forgive themselves for struggles, citing his own upbringing with a single immigrant mother who ensured male mentors
    • Encourage physical activity and structured programs like sports or Scouts
  • For Society:
    • Scott advocates for vocational training, national service (noting Israel’s low depression rates due to mandatory IDF service), and more college seats to provide purpose and opportunity.
    • Increase male teachers and role models in education and communities.
  • For Men:
    • Scott’s “three Ps”: Be a provider (economically disciplined), protector (kind, defending the vulnerable), and procreator (open to relationships, taking risks).
    • Logan suggests reading fiction to build empathy, addressing the emotional intelligence gap.
    • Both emphasize seeking help (e.g., therapy) and building support systems to combat loneliness.
  • Reframing Masculinity:
    • Scott rejects “toxic masculinity,” defining it as surplus value—contributing more than you take. He unlearned selfishness, teaching his sons to prioritize generosity.
  • Scott: Urges young people to forgive themselves, recognizing 18-45 as tough years. He shares his shame at his son’s birth due to financial failure, offering a “SCAFFA” method (sweat, clean eating, abstinence, family, affection) to cope.
  • Policy Changes: Suggestions include reforms in custody laws to encourage more shared parenting, workplace policies that support fathers’ involvement in child-rearing, and education systems that cater to boys’ learning styles.
  • Community and Mentorship: Encouraging community involvement, mentorship programs, and roles where men can contribute positively to the upbringing of children, not just through financial means but through time and emotional investment.
  • Personal Choices: Encouraging men to seek balance between work and family, advocating for fathers to spend quality time with their children even if it means less focus on traditional career advancement.
  • Personal growth is the strongest predictor of male mental well-being.
  • Dr. Barry argues that psychology must:
    • Drop ideological biases.
    • Seriously investigate the real needs of men.
    • Develop male-friendly mental health approaches.
    • Recognize that neglecting men harms everyone—families, partners, communities.
  1. Importance of Dad
    1. Boundary Enforcement (Versus Boundary Setting)
      1. Teaching a child to treat boundaries seriously teaches him or her to respect the needs of others.
      2. What moms are more likely to bring to the family table is a deep-seated understanding that children need empathy (as does everyone). Dad’s contributions are more counterintuitive: first, that empathy is a virtue which, when it only goes from parent to child, and is not required oI the child, becomes a vice. And second, that empathy for a child’s desires does not imply being controlled by the child’s desires.
    2. Exploring Nature, Taking Risks
    3. Roughhousing
      1. Researchers consistently find that fathers who spend time with their children give their children the gifts of self-control and social skills. 18 Might the roughhousing component contribute to this? Studies of baby rats that engaged in rough-and-tumble activity find they become less aggressive and have more social skills as adults.
      2. Post-poned Gratification
      3. Empathy
      4. Increases Bond
        1. Learn to “win” from father
      5. Assertive vs. Aggressive
        1. Social Skills
          1. Better friends = More Success
    4. Teachable Moments
    5. Challenging the Kid’s Limits
    6. Hangout Time
      1. When two researchers examined the many possible reasons why children do so well psychologically when they either have about equal parent time or live primarily with dad, high on the list for boys was hangout time with dad. 23 Hangout time with dad, though, was number one on the list for girls. Although girls express their feelings more easily, what they receive most often from girlfriends and mom is reassurance. Unlike boys, who are frequently challenged by their friends (as we’ll see below), girls are less likely to have anyone besides dad to go to with the anticipation of being challenged by someone who has her best interest at heart.
    7. Teasing
      1. provide practice with interpreting the nuances of a yellow light.
      2. Teasing is a core component of teaching emotional intelligence, dad-style.
      3. Teasing in moderation doesn’t just inoculate us against criticism. It is also male-style bonding. The commerce of masculinity is the trading of wit covered put-downs.
        1. The exchange oI wit-covered put-downs is boys’ and men’s unconscious way oI training each other to handle the criticism it takes to become successful.
    8. Mom’s provide encouragement, dad’s teach the obstacles, discipline, sacrifice.
  2. Boy only support groups
  3. Boy only activities like Boy Scouts
  4. Time
    1. We have seen the conclusion from sixty-three studies that children benefit more from quality of time with dad than the quantity of money from dad.
  5. Heroic Intelligence vs. Health Intelligence
    1. Since training to become a hero is socialization for a short life, and “health intelligence” is socialization for a long life, heroic intelligence is in tension with health intelligence.
    2. Hollywood
      1. Man has to risk his life for her love
      2. if the life of a beloved woman—whether romantic partner or mother—is at risk, his liIe is at risk. His first job is to save her life. He is born male. That’s what he signs—or rather, is signed—up for.
      3. iI a good woman is killed, a man is to blame.
    3. Had your son heard “a man’s body, a man’s choice,” your daughter might not have had a body about which she could make a choice. That is, our daughters’ lives—all of our lives—were dependent on our sons’ requirement to risk theirs.
  6. Emotional Intelligence
    4. Most boys experience a “compassion void.” Why? For starters, boys’ peers rarely listen; boys resist church, its fellowship, and the faith that someone will always hear him and love him; they resist therapy and its confidential disclosure that reduces isolation and alienation; and a boy senses that revealing insecurities to a potential girlfriend is only appealing if his Lois Lane first sees him as Superman, not as Clark Kent. And yes, that’s just for starters.
    5. when a potential girlfriend hears a guy complain, it violates her instinct to be protected; but when a mom hears her son complain, it triggers her instinct to protect.
  7. Vocational Education in schools
  8. Recessed in Schools

The Role of Coaches and Male Mentors

  • Coaching and informal mentorship roles, such as teachers who coach sports or scout leaders, offer an indirect form of mental support for boys and young men.
  • Reeves argues that these “shoulder-to-shoulder” contexts (e.g. playing sports, coaching) are more comfortable for boys than face-to-face therapy, allowing them to open up more naturally​.
  • There’s an unfortunate cultural suspicion around men mentoring boys—due in part to past abuse scandals—that further discourages male mentors, especially non-fathers.

Starting with Clear-Cut Issues

The Institute began with education and mental health because:

  • The data is clear: boys and men are falling behind in school and suffering disproportionately from suicide and addiction.
  • These issues are politically less controversial than others, like family law or masculinity.
  • It’s hard to look at the data and not care—making it harder to dismiss or politicize the issue.
    Reeves shares how they strategically chose these issues to build credibility and avoid ideological baggage early on. Just as he carefully chose who first reviewed his book, he’s chosen topics that are hard to ignore, regardless of political leaning.

Redshirting

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Specifically, I argue for three main reforms: giving boys an extra year of pre-K before starting them in school; a recruitment drive of male teachers into classrooms; and significant investments in vocational education, including more technical high schools. I am aware that parts of this agenda may seem radical.

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The idea got a burst of popular attention in 2008, when Malcolm Gladwell presented evidence in his book Outliers that children older than their classmates do better on academic tests, and in life generally. He argued that being either old or young within a class cohort leads “children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.”

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The main reason for starting boys later is not so that they will be a year older in kindergarten. It is so they will be a year older when they get to middle and high school.

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A raft of studies of redshirted boys have shown dramatic reductions in hyperactivity and inattention through the elementary school years, higher levels of life satisfaction, lower chances of being held back a grade later, and higher test scores.

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Third, a related objection is that boys will lose a year in the labor market once they become men, potentially reducing their lifetime earnings. This is one of the main concerns of Deming and Dynarski. “Holding constant retirement age, a person who starts school a year later spends one less year in the labor force,” they point out.

Male Teachers

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But one school reform would dwarf all of these: more men at the front of our classrooms. In the U.S, the proportion of male teachers is low, and falling. The male share of K–12 teachers is now 24%, down from 33% at the beginning of the 1980s.27 Male teachers are especially scarce in elementary and middle schools, as figure 10-1 shows. Similar trends can be observed in other nations, including the UK and South Korea.28

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Honestly, I don’t know how anyone could not see this trend as a problem. But it is important to spell out why. For one thing, if children grow up seeing care or education as women’s work, this reinforces gender stereotypes across generations. As Gloria Steinem said in 1995, “The way we get divided into our false notions of masculine and feminine is what we see as children.”

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When the share of men teaching in Finnish primary schools was boosted by a 40% quota for training courses, both boys and girls did better in school.33

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While the evidence that male teachers matter is strong, the precise mechanisms are not well understood. Attitudes may be one factor. Female teachers are more likely than male teachers to see the boys in their class as disruptive, while male teachers tend to have a more positive view of boys and their capabilities.35 There may also be a role model effect. It is worth mentioning here that the race of teachers is important too, and that teaching skews even more white than it does female. But it seems that Black boys benefit most from having a Black teacher.36 “Having both male and female teachers is likely good for students for many of the same reasons that they benefit from a racially and ethnically diverse teacher workforce,” writes Lisette Partelow, an education scholar at the progressive Center for American Progress.37

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There are now twice as many women flying U.S. military planes as there are men teaching kindergarten (as a share of the professions).

Vocational Training

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The third major policy reform I propose is a massive investment in male- friendly vocational education and training. our educational system is tilted toward the standard academic track, up to and including a 4-year college degree.

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High school curricula need more “hands-on” elements. This does not mean sending all the boys into shop class to learn a trade while the girls polish their college application essays. But it does mean incorporating more practical and more vocational elements (i.e., CTE) into the general curriculum, and especially creating more stand-alone technical schools. The broader goal here is more of what philosopher Joseph Fishkin calls “opportunity pluralism.”55 Rather than a single narrow path in what he calls a “unitary opportunity structure,” there should be many different routes to success.

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expanding apprenticeships.

Jobs

HEAL

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First, given the decline in traditional male occupations, it is imperative that men look to these sectors for jobs. Second, diversifying these professions would also help to meet their growing demand for labor. Third, it would make it more likely that boys and men could find male providers of these services.

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HEAL occupations can be seen as the opposite of STEM. They are more focused on people, rather than things, and they tend to require more literacy than numeracy skills; hence the L in place of the M.

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In 2020, STEM jobs accounted for 9% of U.S. employment among prime-age workers, while HEAL jobs accounted for 23%. Health care and education are very large sectors, between them accounting for around 15% of all jobs.

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Women now account for almost half (45%) of the life scientists and physical scientists working in the U.S., for example, up from fewer than one in five in 1980.6 Among engineers, the proportion of women has risen from 4% to 15%. The tech industry has seen much smaller gains in recent decades, with women’s representation stuck at about 25%. Overall, women now account for 27% of STEM workers, up from 13% in 1980

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But the trend has been the other way in terms of male representation in HEAL jobs. In 2019, 26% were held by men, down from 35% in 1980. (I should note again here that all my figures are for full-time workers aged between 25 and 54.)

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equally absurd to think that the 18% male share of social workers is an authentic representation of the true level of interest in the job among men, especially since it has halved since 1980

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Harvard’s David Deming calculates that between 1980 and 2012, “jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force.” Meanwhile “math- intensive but less social jobs … shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period.”8 It is true that STEM professions are more often described as the jobs of the future. The glossy photos of bright young people in lab coats certainly add to that sense. But in terms of raw job creation, HEAL is outpacing STEM; by my calculations, for every new STEM job created by 2030 there will be more than three new HEAL jobs.9

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As a nation, we should set the twin goals of reaching 30% female representation in STEM jobs, and 30% male representation in HEAL ones by 2030. Achieving this “30 by 30” goal means getting more than 3 million more men into HEAL jobs. This will take money, like the efforts to increase the number of women in STEM.

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As a society, we recognized the need to get more women into STEM jobs, and invested accordingly. Now the same is true of men and HEAL. I propose at least a $1 billion national investment, over the next decade, in service of this goal.

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We need to get more boys and young men thinking about HEAL careers early. one of the lessons of successful STEM initiatives is that the pipeline really matters. That is why there is a “She Can STEM” campaign aimed at middle-schoolers, with learning resources, online concerts, and active social media channels. How about a similar “He Can HEAL” campaign? I

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It is inevitably tougher to persuade young men that nursing is a career for them when 94% of the professors are women.37 There is some evidence that women taking STEM classes by a female professor get better grades and are more likely to take more STEM courses in later years and to graduate with a STEM degree.38 I know of no similar studies on male professors in HEAL subjects, but there is no reason to imagine it wouldn’t work the other way around as well, especially given the research on male teachers in secondary schools.

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Despite the fact that women have overtaken men in post-secondary education, there are almost no scholarships for men, and virtually none aimed at encouraging them into HEAL.

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There is also a strong case for increasing pay levels in some of these critical occupations, including social work, counseling, and teaching. Higher wages are likely to attract more men into these roles, but would also help the women working in them already. The pay of K–12 teachers is the same today as it was at the beginning of the century.48 Following a series of teacher strikes, President Joe Biden told teachers in 2021, “You deserve a raise, not just praise.”49 He wants to spend an extra $20 billion annually through the Title I program, which provides resources to schools serving poorer students. For $15 billion, we could give a $10,000 pay raise to every teacher in a high-poverty school.50 That just seems like a no-brainer to me.

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In 2000, Rachel Kranton and George Akerlof created a new scholarly field of “identity economics.” They showed that individual decisions are shaped not just by the hard numbers of a cost–benefit analysis but by the more personal aspects of human identity. “In a world of social difference, one of the most important economic decisions that an individual makes may be the type of person to be,” they wrote. “Limits on this choice would also be critical determinants of economic behavior, opportunity, and well-being.”51 Breaking prescribed gender identity norms, for example, comes at a cost to an individual. This acts as a deterrent.

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Jennifer Bosson, a University of South Florida psychologist who has studied men’s attitudes toward traditionally female jobs, told NPR’s Shankar Vedantam, “You could spin nursing as a very masculine occupation. It’s dangerous. It’s physically grueling. Our stereotype of the nurse—you know, you could modify that stereotype and turn nursing into a profession that does seem masculine or male appropriate.”67 I think “male appropriate” is the right way to think about it. The goal is not to make professions like nursing, social work, mental health, or teaching seem like masculine rather than feminine ones, but to emphasize a range of opportunities that they can provide for both men and women. We don’t need to make men feel like being a nurse will somehow bolster their masculinity, just that it will not diminish it.68

Fatherhood

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Unfortunately, rather than being a subject of serious cultural attention, fatherhood has become another victim of the culture wars. Progressives resist the idea that fathers have a distinct role to play, afraid that this will somehow undermine mothers or belittle same-sex couples. So they recoil from any proposal that might smack of “fathers’ rights.” Conservatives meanwhile lament an epidemic of fatherlessness but simply want to restore traditional marriage, with clear and separate roles for men and women.

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Fathers really came into their own about half a million years ago, when human brains had a growth spurt. The need for food, especially meat, to nourish new mothers and their babies increased dramatically. From this point on, as anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy points out, it took about 13 million calories to rear a human from birth to nutritional independence. “This is far more than a woman could provide by herself,” she says.5 If fathers wanted their children to survive, they had to stick around and provide for them. So they did. Fatherhood is a product of evolutionary selection. As such, writes Anna Machin, anthropologist and author of The Life of Dad, “Fathers are not mere adjuncts to mothers, occasional babysitters or bag-carriers. They are the consequence of half a million years of evolution and they remain a vital part of the human story.”6 Machin observes that while fathers and mothers can do many of the same things, Dads are wired to make two distinct contributions, “protection and teaching.” Of course, their expression will vary by social context. To “protect” your child means something very different in twenty-first-century New York than on the savanna half a million years ago. Fathers matter for their children’s welfare in ways that are different from, but equal to, those of mothers.7 Engaged fatherhood has been linked to a whole range of outcomes, from mental health, high school graduation, social skills, and literacy to lower risks of teen pregnancy, delinquency, and drug use.8 Three-year-olds with involved, supportive dads score more highly on tests of cognitive development.9 A study in the state of Georgia found that infant mortality rates were twice as high among children whose fathers were not listed on their birth certificate (a proxy for paternal involvement) after taking account of differences in health conditions and socioeconomic background.10 It is hard to pin down direct causal effects here: we can hardly remove or add fathers at random to children’s lives in the name of social science. But as Harvard scholars Marc Grau-Grau and Hannah Riley Bowles write, “The importance of engaged fatherhood is now undismissable in ways it was not in earlier decades.”11

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growing recognition that the teen years are in fact a vitally important period of development. As the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine note in their 2019 report, “The adaptive plasticity of adolescence marks it as a window of opportunity for change through which mechanisms of resilience, recovery, and development are possible.”

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fathers “play a particularly important role in stimulating children’s openness to the world … encouraging them to take risks and to stand up for themselves.”

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Fathers who are engaged with their teenagers help to reduce harmful forms of risk-taking behavior,, for example. Delinquency rates are lower among the adolescent children of involved fathers.17 These effects seem to last too. Sixteen-year-old girls who are close to their fathers have better mental health at the age of 33.18 Father involvement predicts stronger academic outcomes in adolescence too.19 The teaching role of fathers really seems to kick in strongly during these years. Machin writes that “many dads in the West really step into their role during late childhood and adolescence, particularly when the time comes to teach their children. It’s that allimportant role in preparing children to step into the big wide world.”

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“fathers appear to especially make unique contributions to the well-being of their children through their human capital while mothers make unique contributions through their availability and closeness to their children.”22 Dads teach, moms tend.

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One study finds that adolescents close to their nonresident fathers do better than those with resident fathers with whom they are not close, as measured by higher self- esteem, delinquency rates, and mental health.25 There is no residency requirement for good fatherhood. The relationship is what matters.

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Fatherhood in the Inner City, they show that most fathers want involvement in their children’s lives but are stymied by their own problems—poverty, mental illness, crime—as well as legal and child support systems that seek primarily to extract money, and mothers who act as a “gatekeeper” to their children.

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As one study concludes, “Black nonresident fathers … shared responsibilities more frequently and displayed more effective coparenting than Hispanic and White [nonresident] fathers.”29

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A policy agenda to support the new direct model of fatherhood will have three key elements. First, equal and independent paid leave eligibility. Second, a reformed child support system. Third, father-friendly employment opportunities.

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Fathers and mothers should be legally entitled to six months of paid leave for each child.

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Even after the huge rise in women’s employment over recent decades, most mothers with children under the age of 3 are either out of the labor market or working part-time.39 By and large, this seems to be by choice; over half of mothers working part-time (54%) say that this is their preference at this point in their life, and 14% say they would prefer not to be in paid work at all.40 (The remaining 33% would rather be in a full- time job.)

Child Support

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“Virtually every legal and institutional arrangement governing these fathers’ lives tells them that they are a paycheck and nothing more,” write Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson in Doing the Best I Can. “At every turn an unmarried man who seeks to be a father, not just a daddy, is rebuffed by a system that pushes him aside with one hand while reaching into his pocket with the other.”42

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Courts are now obliged to treat mothers and fathers fairly in determining custody, and the usual legal standard is now the best interests of the child or children. As a result, there has been a dramatic shift toward joint custody arrangements.

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Nationally, fathers now get about a third of the time with children after separation or divorce.44 These trends are extremely positive. The legal default ought to be shared custody, with children wherever possible spending equal time with each of their parents.

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The problem is that there are no similar laws for unmarried parents. In every U.S. state, an unmarried mother is the presumed sole custodial parent.

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Married fathers are seen as three-dimensional beings. Unmarried fathers are seen as walking ATMs. In 2020, $38 billion was collected in child support, and an estimated $115 billion was owed in arrears.

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Child support payments should be set with greater sensitivity to a father’s ability to pay, and considering their nonmonetary contributions, including the direct provision of care for their children.

Father-Friendly Jobs

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I support efforts to increase access to childcare and provide after-school clubs and so on.54 But I do worry that the goal of public policy often seems to be to create work- friendly families, rather than family-friendly work.

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Twice as many fathers as mothers say they spend too little time with their children (46% v. 23%).

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Major employers are finding that, especially among younger workers, expectations of a better work/life balance are rising rapidly, ranked second only to salary in many surveys