The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It

by Warren Farrell

I asked Andy, “If you had to choose, which would you prefer—a boy or girl?” After a second’s hesitation, he said in a serious tone, “A girl. Today . . . today, a girl.” When I asked why, he was matter-of-fact. “Girls today can be whatever they want to be; guys can’t. And I’m more afraid a boy would screw up in school or get buried in video games . . . stuff like that.”

Today, young men between twenty-five and thirty-one are 66 percent more likely than their female counterparts to be living with their parents. For the first time in recent history, young men are more likely to live with their parents than with a partner. In contrast, women are more likely to live with a partner.

Kevin’s dad, William, told me, “When Kevin moved back in to his childhood room shortly after we gave him a wonderful thirtieth birthday party, I can remember thinking to myself, ‘This is “proof” I’ve failed as a dad.’ I never said this to Kevin, but it still haunts me.” Kevin nevertheless picked up on his dad’s shame. And yet something bothered Kevin even more: “This girl and I were flirting something fierce at a party. I wanted to ask her to leave with me, but I couldn’t invite her back to my parents’ home, so I just kept flirting. Finally, she says it: ‘It’s so noisy in here. Should we go somewhere else?’ So I suggest a bar. She looks at me like something’s wrong with me. Then her eyes become seductive, and she runs her finger over the buttons on my shirt, and says, ‘Maybe your place? . . . You live near here?’ “I said I did, but that I lived with my parents. I wanted to ask if she had a place we could go to, but I saw how the second I said I lived with my parents, her body language froze. She excused herself ‘to go to the ladies’ room,’ and when she came out, she walked over to a girlfriend, and they both started sneaking glances over at me and laughing. I don’t ever remember feeling more humiliated.”

With The Boy Crisis, I am trusting that when being straightforward conflicts with being politically correct, you would prefer that I be straightforward. By the end of The Boy Crisis I want you to walk away with a picture that reflects your family and son’s reality. Some of that may be hard to hear, but solutions that are not grounded in reality soon crumble, and are replaced by a deeper hopelessness.

Similarly, even if your son does live with both his dad and mom, if he sees his dad doing work that is meaningless to him because he needs to support the family, it can dampen your son’s inspiration to work hard, marry, and have children himself. He may experience a “failure to launch.” Especially if your son is bright and sensitive, this can emanate not from laziness or ignorance, but from his unconscious wisdom.

School shootings are homicides that are also suicides—even if the boy doesn’t end his own life literally, for all practical purposes, his life is still ended.

Thus, at the height of the Depression, 154 men committed suicide for each 100 women.8 Yet by 2015, in good economic times, boys and men were committing suicide three and a half times more often than women.

A friend of mine was a firefighter. He and his wife, both Mormon, had eight children. One day, when my friend was in his early fifties, his wife, in tears, called to tell me he had died of lung cancer from the chemical-laden fumes he had ingested over the years. Few parents realize, as they proudly watch their son don a firefighter’s uniform, that in hazardous professions, death after the job takes twelve times as many of our sons’ lives as death on the job.

Your son is more likely to seek a job in a sector that is being increasingly outsourced overseas—as with computer technology and manufacturing, as well as online jobs. Your daughter is more likely to hold jobs in stable sectors that are more recession proof, like health and education, both of which are 75 percent women.

If your son is tall and good looking, he may appeal to the one out of four women who would date him if he is unemployed. But although your handsome unemployed son may be accepted by her for a date and possibly sex, few young women will fantasize about falling in love with your son reading The Boy Crisis in an unemployment line! So unemployment means his good looks will ultimately only increase your son’s likelihood of being rejected for love.

In the United States, by eighth grade, 41 percent of girls are at least “proficient” in writing, while only 20 percent of boys are.

In one generation, young men have gone from 61 percent of college degree recipients to a projected 39 percent; young women, from 39 percent to a projected 61 percent.

“Boys who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math, and science tests are graded less favorably by their teachers.”5 Interestingly, the boys who behaved in the classroom in ways the study identified as more commonly associated with girls—for example, by being attentive and eager—did receive grades equal to girls who scored equally in standardized tests.

Ironically, as our sons become less educated, our daughters increasingly desire partners who are more educated. In 1939 women ranked education as only the eleventh most important attribute in a husband. Recently, women rank education as the fourth most important.

Japan has vastly increased its vocational education programs, with 23 percent of Japan’s high school graduates studying at vocational schools. The result: 99.6 percent of Japanese vocational students received jobs upon graduation.9 The psychological and economic implications of that difference are infinite.

Grades translate into expectations about one’s future. Internationally, girls now have higher expectations for their future careers than boys.9 Boys’ lower expectations can translate into depression, including one of its major symptoms, obesity. Obesity among boys and men is increasing worldwide. Roughly a quarter of Australian, British, Canadian, German, Polish, and Spanish boys and men are obese.10 A large study from the UK finds that boys’ IQs have dropped about 15 points since the 1980s.

For example, the rate of increase in male suicide in India is growing at more than nine times that of female suicide (37 percent versus 4 percent since 2000).18 We can see, then, why a dad-to-be might not want his next child to be a boy—to face the life a boy today faces. Or, perhaps, to face a life like his.

When our very survival is dependent on our sons’ willingness to die, sensitivity to the death and suffering of boys and men is in competition with our survival instinct. To win wars, we had to train our sons to be disposable. We honored boys if they died so we could live. We called them heroes. Because of the potential deaths of our sons, we could not psychologically afford to attach ourselves emotionally to our sons in the way we could with our daughters.

The Japanese call it ikigai, or “a reason for being.” Japanese men with ikigai are less likely to die of heart disease. And both sexes with ikigai live longer.1 Whether we call it ikigai or sense of purpose, when we pursue what we believe gives life meaning, it gives us life.

But as we saw in part II, as developed countries had the luxury to permit divorce, they responded by creating the “era of the multi-option woman” (raise children, raise money, or some combination of both) while continuing the historic “era of the no-option man.” That is, a dad’s “three options” were still raise money, raise money, or raise money. However, with women often sharing the breadwinner role, a young man could no longer find his purpose as a man by being a “sole breadwinner.” And, as fewer warriors were needed, boys began experiencing a “purpose void.” Dad-deprived boys, without the guidance of dads in finding alternative senses of purpose, were hit the hardest.

(Remember, we all have a relationship with our dads, even if based only on who we imagine him to be and whatever we imagine that he felt about us.)

I never really knew my dad—he left when I was four. I haven’t seen him in years. But I know he had an alcohol problem and an anger problem. I don’t for sure know what the answer is to the glint-in-his-eye question, but I know that before he had me, he used to win some trophies surfing. I don’t know that I’m right, but just thinking about him not being able to handle the change in life from surfing to wiping my rear, and giving up what probably made him sane . . . Well, it makes me think it probably wasn’t me he left, that his drinking and anger was probably about him losing himself. Realizing that, I’m feeling better about him, and that’s making me feel better about myself. This is cool.

For those boys who join the military, the brightest are often the ones most likely to become disenchanted with what they perceive as the purposelessness of their mission, and to feel the most disposable thanks to the way they are treated upon returning by the very government for which they willingly risked their lives. For example, Corporal Clay Hunt was a sniper for the marines. In 2009, after his second tour, he sought treatment for depression and PTSD. Though he fought tirelessly to get the VA’s attention, he felt thwarted by delays and inadequate treatment. Finally, he shot himself, ending his life at age twenty-eight.

When male vervet monkeys fight in their wars with other groups of monkeys to protect their territory or to get food, female monkeys reward the best surviving “warriors” by grooming them. The social status of these warrior monkeys goes up, and therefore more female vervet monkeys want to mate with them. In contrast, the female monkeys ignore and “snap” at the male monkeys who abstain from battle.

After 9/11, our first responders were on a pedestal.5 Of those emergency workers who lost their lives, 99 percent were male, and if your son was watching the news, it might have been the first time he saw men as a praiseworthy gender.

76 percent of American firefighters receive neither bonus nor pay. They are volunteers. Almost 100 percent men. The pay of the volunteer fireman? Praise. Respect. Purpose. The potential to graduate to hero if he kills the fire-breathing dragon and saves someone else’s life. The knowledge that if, in the process, he loses his own, his status as a hero only increases.

The catch-22 of your son as hero is that the more he becomes a hero as killer, the less likely he is to become a hero as husband. As we’ll see in the chapter on heroic intelligence versus health intelligence, many of the qualities your son develops to kill in war—or be a hero at work—undermine the qualities it takes to love at home. In brief, what he does to be loved often divorces him from love.

When the therapist asked Ethan to explain the picture, he said the little box was like the apartment his dad lived in. “I know my dad wants to be with us—he’s looking out the windows to see us. And we’re looking out our windows, but with that big fence we can’t see him.” When asked if he would like to be a dad someday, Ethan hesitated. “Maybe not.” Then only his eyes spoke, with sadness. When the therapist asked why he was sad, Ethan said, “I would want to have children, but I’d want to see them, and they’d probably be too far away and they couldn’t get over the big fence to see me.”

Nick’s personality was unconsciously adopting traits that would help him succeed at work, but fail at home. And Brittany, feeling less connected to Nick, immersed herself more in the children, friends, exercise, spiritual, and alone time. Eventually, yearning for the same care that had originally made her fall in love with Nick, she met a teacher at the gym and began a passionate affair. Nick, spending lonely nights on the road, feeling the lack of his and Brittany’s prechildren passion, and having less time than Brittany with children and intimate friends, also found himself with a sex and intimacy void. His occasional affairs were momentarily satisfying, but left him with an even greater yearning for the intimacy with Brittany he was missing.

When success requires supporting five people, as in Nick’s case, then the qualities it takes to succeed at work are in tension with the qualities it takes to succeed in love. Nick was becoming less lovable even as he yearned more for love. Brittany felt she had “lost” Nick. This feeling contributes to the reason women initiate 69 percent of divorces. From the woman’s perspective, she really isn’t filing for divorce from the man she married. She is filing for divorce from a different man.

Many of the children recruited by Hitler Youth were fatherless boys.21 History Place reported that these boys, once recruited, were isolated in camps where weakness was despised.22 They were trained “without any counterbalancing influences from a normal home life . . . The youngest and most vulnerable boys were bullied, humiliated . . . including repeated sexual abuse.”23 Reports from British and Canadian soldiers fighting in World War II noted that, in battle, these boys “sprang like wolves against tanks.” Even if encircled, they fought until the last boy was killed. “Young boys, years away from their first shave, had to be shot dead by Allied soldiers old enough, in some cases, to be their fathers.”

The more years children spend with no or minimal father involvement, the fewer years of school they complete;5 71 percent of high school dropouts have minimal or no father involvement. Dad-deprived children are also more likely to skip school or be kicked out (expelled).

Father involvement is at least five times more important in preventing drug use than closeness to parent, parental rules, parent trust or strictness, and is a stronger determining factor than the child’s gender, ethnicity, or social class.

Children who were born poor and raised by both married parents had an 80 percent chance of moving to the middle class or above; conversely, children who were born into the middle class and raised without a married dad were almost four times as likely to end up considerably poorer.

As the workforce increasingly evolves from muscle to mental, and rote tasks are increasingly handled by robots or computers, humans will be increasingly required for our emotional intelligence and empathy.22 And boys, already behind in this area for reasons we will explore in part V, “Heroic Intelligence Versus Health Intelligence,” will experience a greater gap in future employment opportunities if dad deprivation decreases their empathy, assertiveness, and emotional intelligence.

Sadly, our “solution” to dad deprivation has been to reinforce it. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is available only if dad is absent, which then creates needier families and crowded prisons.

Prisons are the United States’ men’s centers (93 percent male). A staggering 85 percent of youths in prison grew up in a fatherless home.23 More precisely, prisons are centers for dad-deprived males24—boys who never became men.

If your son commits a minor crime, he is also more likely to go to jail or prison than your daughter. First, if he has no criminal history and has committed a crime identical to that of your daughter, your son is more likely to be charged; second, he is more likely to be convicted of that crime; and third, when he is convicted, on average your son will receive a 63 percent longer sentence.25 We have discussed how, in an era of consciousness about racism in law enforcement, we are comparatively blind to the sexism that can magnify that racism. It is unlikely that your son will learn in school that the gap in sentencing is six times greater for men versus women than it is for blacks versus whites.26 Black boys, of course, bear the dual burden of both racism and sexism.

Yet another study found that students coming from father-present families score higher in math and science even when they come from academically weaker schools.7 Could America’s decline in math and science have more to do with the decline

Of course, dad deprivation hurts our daughters as well. For example, in a study of inner-city Baltimore women who had been teenage mothers, one-third of their daughters also became teenage mothers. But not one daughter who had a good relationship with her biological father had a baby before the age of nineteen.9 Note this is not just simple correlation: the study controlled for geography (Baltimore), economic variables (inner city), social behavior (parental history of teenage pregnancy), and mother’s age.

But it is crucial to let your son know that when unmarried couples live together when their child is born, by the child’s third birthday, 40 percent of those children will have no regular contact with their dad for the next two years—between ages three and five.11 Ask your son if he is willing to put his child at a 40 percent risk of having no regular contact with him prior to the age of nine, when the impact of that is not only a shorter life expectancy (as predicted by shrinking telomeres), but also those other 70+ risks to his well-being.12 For the first time in US history, more than half of children born to mothers under thirty were born outside marriage.

We got our first information a half century ago about the impact on children of their parents not being married from The Moynihan Report, directed by sociologist Daniel Moynihan, who also served under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. The Moynihan Report concluded that in a majority-black community the main predictor of growing up poor was not race but being born to parents who are not married. Why? A predictable outcome of no marriage was no father involvement.

Notes: Prior to 1969, Black denotes all nonwhites, including Asians and Native americans; beginning in 1969, these data include blacks only. Respondents who indicated more than one race are not included in these data. Respondents of Hispanic origin are included in both racial categories and are identified separately beginning in 1989.

Why did we fail to identify dad deprivation as a crisis in the white community in 1965? Perhaps it was because in 1965 the percentage of white children born outside marriage was only 3.1 percent.21 The 36 percent rate today represents a nearly twelvefold increase.22 Among non-college-educated white women under thirty who have children without marrying, the current 51 percent figure23 is double what it was among blacks when the Moynihan Report alerted us to the crisis.

The more interaction a boy has with his dad before six months, the higher his mental competence.27 By first grade, boys and girls raised in families with fathers present had significantly higher IQ scores than those with absent fathers.

From infant boys’ first breath through six months, they have more problems adjusting emotionally—being angrier, and more likely to fuss and cry—and are in need of more calming.38 Our cultural norms—that lead to less touching, cuddling, and speaking with male infants is, sadly, exactly the opposite of what is needed in a male child’s very early years.

High-quality childcare for children from eight weeks to five years helps both girls and boys, but quality has a much greater impact on boys.39 This is true not just in the short term. Boys with the high-quality care were making $19,800 more per year by age thirty, versus $2,500 more for the girls.

Some 86 percent of families with a stepparent consist of a stepdad and a biological mom.42 And stepparent homes aren’t rare: an estimated one-third of children will live in a stepparent home before the age of eighteen.

Children living with their married biological father do significantly better academically than those living with a stepdad.49 They have fewer discipline problems, and are more likely to stay in school, attend college, and graduate from college.50

Adolescents raised in stepfamilies face even higher incarceration rates than those raised in single-mom families.