The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (3 page)

A highly educated female colleague alerted us to another new phenomenon. It is the sense of total entitlement that some middle-aged guys feel within their relationships with marriage or live-in partners. Guys don’t want to work either at jobs that will bring in money or even at household chores that will keep their abode tidy. They are content to just hang around doing their thing but perform nothing that traditionally resembles “work.” They feel it is their right to absent themselves from having to make money or do drudgery around the pad. In a sense, they are like old-fashioned gigolos, attractive men who were taken care of by older women in return for being charming dates/mates/sexual adventurers. That description does not fit this new breed of guys who want it all in return for no giveback. Consider a couple of the vignettes she shared with us:

Why do women stick it out with such guys? Even their mothers might call them losers. The depressing alternative for these well-educated women is no guy at all, so they stick with their bad decision until it gets so unbearable that they decide to dump the dude.

Aside from not understanding that all relationships involve a negotiation of rights and obligations, what this entitlement suggests to us is the abandonment of a sense of having to work for anything. These men are acting as if one gets what one wants just by being at the head of the line when the doors open or the party starts.

A young British man told us this in his survey comments:

We could not agree more. But it seems to us that this new sense of male entitlement is different from what it may have been in the past. It is more generalized, spreading to more settings and activities that tend to undermine any meaningful social or romantic relationships. These men seem to be emulating successful media celebrities who appear to have it all, but they see and admire only the desirable outcomes and products. What is missing from the analysis is any appreciation of what goes into any kind of success: a lot of hard work, trial and tribulation, practice, failures that are part and parcel of the process of trying to attain a goal. The good things in life usually take a commitment to success, to delaying gratification, to putting work before play and to understanding the importance and vitality of the Social Contract — giving to others with the assumption of reciprocal giving back.

Throughout history the vast majority of humans lived in multigenerational, often multifamily, groups with an approximate ratio of four adults to every one child. Essentially there would have been two parents yet many other caregivers in the picture: siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins. Today, however, with classroom ratios at about one teacher per 30 students, with only one or two parents living at home and with great distances between extended family members, children have far fewer quality relationships with adults. Today the average household size is three or fewer.
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Furthermore, these ever-shrinking family units spend less time together, especially quality time like sharing a sit-down meal. Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, authors of
Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered
, suggest this lack of relational richness is having a negative effect on our culture’s capacity to care for others.

As infants we depend on our primary caregivers — first mom and then dad — to feed us when we’re hungry and protect us when we’re threatened. In other words, our parents regulate our stress until we are able to self-regulate, and how they respond to stress affects the way our stress response develops. Our earliest interactions with mom will serve as a kind of template for how we react to future human contact. But lately there has been a problem; mothers are under constant stress. And if a mother is under stress, if she’s not being nurtured, it’s far less likely she’s going to be able to provide consistent nurturing for her baby or youngster.

Furthermore, stress is regulated by social systems; the brain regions involved in social relationships are the same ones that control stress response. They develop together, and therefore development problems in the stress response can interfere with the development of social and emotional functioning and vice versa.
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With 40 percent of children born to single mothers today
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(more than 50 percent for children born to women under 30
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), who is nurturing the mothers who raise these children? How will these children deal with stress when they have their own children? Moreover, as human lifespan increases, there is an ever larger number of older relatives in elderly care facilities. Who is responsible for visiting them regularly and dealing with their survival issues, even their basic legal and accounting problems? Their daughters — the same overstressed moms — must deal with this new stress of caring for beloved parents who are feeble, suffering memory losses and are able to give back little affection to their grown girls.

One place where families used to talk, exchanging experiences, ideas, values and more, was around the dinner table. That is now an ancient tradition, honored more in the breach than in practice.
USA Today
newspaper did a survey 25 years ago on the “time crunch” that Americans increasingly felt. One alarming statistic uncovered was that only 60 percent — three in five — families said life was more hectic than five years ago and they were not able to do things like have regular sit-down family dinners.
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“Today less than 3 in 5 teens report having dinner with their parents. According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, compared with teens that have 5 to 7 family dinners a week, teens who have infrequent family dinners (fewer than 3 times a week) are almost four times more likely to use tobacco, twice as likely to use alcohol, two and a half times likelier to use marijuana, and nearly four times likelier to predict personal drug use in the future.”
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Divorce isn’t easy for anyone. But it’s not so much the divorce itself that affects young people’s perceptions of relationships as it is how the parents handle the situation. Many children lose faith in relationships because they watch their parents become emotionally unstable and react irrationally, sometimes violently.

This is the pattern many kids observe right now: Man and woman meet, fall in love and get married, make babies. Enter stress. Babies take over lives. Distance grows between man and woman; communication was never great to begin with but is now much worse. Enter stress-relieving but relationship-destroying behaviors, such as physical abuse, drug and alcohol use, and emotional and physical infidelities. Everyone is unhappy. Divorce follows. One or both parents now are struggling and are emotionally, mentally and/or financially broken.

Since we are brought up to think that conventional marriage is for everyone and that marriages last forever, the breakup is devastating to the entire family. As a kid you think, Is this what I have to look forward to? Then as an adult you think, Why bother? What's the point? The entire burden will fall on me in the end anyway.

It doesn’t have to be that way if the divorce is amicable and both parties communicate to their children their respect for the other parent and love for them, but that’s usually not what happens. Young people in America don’t grow up seeing great role models for trust and reliability, especially in intimate relationships. Monogamous relationships are now thought of in terms of what you lose rather than what you gain; they’re seen as a restriction on independence and freedom, and commitment is seen as sacrificing your own goals and passions for something that will most likely fail in 10 or 20 years, if not sooner. Young people are expected to still want these things yet are never taught how to talk about or handle the challenges that come with these commitments.

And if we can’t trust those closest to us, whom can we trust? If mom and dad can’t even keep it together, who can? Learning how to trust others starts with our primary relationships, so when our primary role models are unreliable and don’t deliver on their promises or aren’t there for one another, no doubt we will find it harder to trust others.

Something else worth noting is the overall decline of trust in the United States. The percentage of Americans who believe “most people can be trusted” plummeted from 58 percent in 1960 to 32 percent in 2008, meaning the majority of Americans now view other Americans as untrustworthy.
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One source of this downsizing of trust is the media’s highlighting instances of corruption, deception and deceit by politicians, celebrities and other public figures. Obviously, 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.

“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,” says Paul Zak, professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University, in his TEDTalk, “Trust, Morality — and Oxytocin.”
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Boys are not the only ones reluctant to grow up. Many parents are also reluctant to let go, to allow their sons to develop self-reliance and create solutions to their own problems. Lori Gottlieb, a clinical psychologist in New York, wrote in the
Atlantic
magazine about the role parents play in shaping their child’s sense of happiness: “Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?” The rise of so-called helicopter parents supports this idea. The University of Vermont has even hired “parent bouncers” to help these parents keep their distance.
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Helicopter parents hover over and around their children in school settings to be sure they are doing the right thing. Although their intentions may start out as good, their surveillance tactics not only undercut their kids’ independence, it prevents them from soaring on their own.

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 goings and comings 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 OK to fail. 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.”

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, social critic

If we do not initiate the boys, they will burn the village down.
— African proverb

As mentioned earlier, 40 percent of children in the United States are born to single mothers, and about a third of boys are raised in father-absent homes.
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Forty-four percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think that marriage is archaic,
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which begs the question: What will commitment look like in the 21
^st
century? And how will those attitudes affect future generations and how those children are raised?

America leads the industrialized world in fatherlessness.
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And among those who have fathers, the average school-age boy in the United States 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 44 hours a week in front of a television, video game screen, 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.”
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The effect of fatherlessness and the lack of rites of passage are underestimated. 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 guys find it in a gang, other guys find it in drugs, alcohol, playing video games and objectifying women. Another side effect of fatherlessness is increased incidence of attention and mood disturbances. A 2010 study of more than a million Swedish children age 6 to 19 found that kids raised by single parents were 54 percent more likely to be on ADHD medication.
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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.
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Craig McClain, co-founder of the Boys to Men Mentoring Network, offers an unfortunate view of why men do not really want to 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.”
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What are young guys to do? The 2007 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:

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.

After two years, Mike went from getting straight F’s to straight A’s, 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; one group of elementary school children surveyed who were living with their fathers scored better on 21 of 27 social competence measures.
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And perhaps as a result, they also have more playmates.
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They’re also more likely to do better and go further in school. Elementary school children raised with their fathers also do better on eight out of nine academic measures, and a father’s impact remains significant through high school.
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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.”
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Guys also need to learn that it’s OK to want to be in their son’s life. Warren Farrell suggests that a more balanced perspective about what is possible for young men will benefit everyone, not just young men:

Only a few decades ago, boys had not only dads but also uncles, granddads, 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. Facebook, Twitter, gaming forums and a host of other Internet social media sites now try to replace those functions — but they cannot do so. Guys need more than “contacts.” They need confidants. They need people who will be there when they are down in the dumps, who can sense their need because they interact with the boys and guys enough to recognize changes in their moods without them having to ask for help. It is hard and awkward to ask anyone for help; that is why guys 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 guys do good stuff, achieve goals — to offer praise and build up their sense of pride.