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

by Philip G. Zimbardo

  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.26 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.”27

  Helicopter parents

  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.28

  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.”

  Where’s Dad?

  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.29 Forty-four percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think that marriage is archaic,30 which begs the question: What will commitment look like in the 21st century? And how will those attitudes affect future generations and how those children are raised?

  America leads the industrialized world in fatherlessness.31 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.”32

  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.33 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.34

  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.”35

  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:

  At first I was like, “I don’t know if I want to be a mentor.”
I had some issues then that I didn’t know I had with adolescent boys, particularly in groups. I had this fear thing. A lot of times, we’d just sit in the car and we’d stare, and [I’d get] almost no response back from [him]. After about six months I thought, “Am I doing this right? I’m not noticing anything. We’re not feeling like good friends, I’m just somebody who picks him up because he’s bored sometimes.” So I called Charlie. I said, “I think I’m failing at this mentor thing. He doesn’t like me, we don’t talk about anything. … Maybe there’s somebody out there better to be a mentor here.” And Charlie said, “Dennis, you’re doing … exactly what you need to be doing.” He was right. It passed. … In another three months he started opening up.

  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.36 And perhaps as a result, they also have more playmates.37 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.38

  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.”39

  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:

  Prior to the women’s movement, girls learned to row the family boat only from the right side (raise children); boys, only from the left (raise money). The women’s movement helped girls become women who could row from both sides; but without a parallel force for boys, boys became men who had still learned to row only from the left — to only raise money. The problem? If our daughters try to exercise their newfound ability to row from the left, and our sons also row only from the left, the boat goes in circles. A family boat that goes only in circles is more likely to be sunk by the rocks of recessions. In the past, a man was a family’s breadwinner and he might be with one company for life. In the future, advanced technologies make economic change the only constant, increasing the need for a family boat with flexibility — with our sons eventually able to raise children as comfortably as our daughters now raise money.40

  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.

  The media isn’t doing you any favors

  What does it mean to be a man? And where do guys get their information about what it means to be a manly? Many men we 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 risk takers and explorers, they like to master things. Knowing that they’re needed motivates them, and they want respect from their peers, specifically from other guys.

  But that respect needs to come from doing pro-social things that make life better in some way, not from outdrinking their buddies or doing some stupid shit better than them. Popular films and television shows, unfortunately, present few alternatives to this latter image of guys.

  Programs on TV could use more men with triple-digit IQs. Why the overwhelming majority of men’s characters are testosterone-driven meatheads, FBI agents, obsessed chefs, vampires, womanizers or overweight men with really hot wives is perhaps not such a mystery. A recent University of Maryland study concluded that unhappy people watch significantly more TV.41 That makes sense — TV is passive, provides an escape and is an easy way to tune out. 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.” Watch one show about happy people and you’ve seen them all?

  The problem is, without better role models in real life, guys become confused about what acceptable male behavior is. 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.42

  Farrell elaborated on this point 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 TV or change the channel when there’s nudity or sex. At age 13 or 14, 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. Sex on TV and porn reduce that fear of rejection. If a guy 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.43

  One young man from our survey noted:

  In a postfeminism generation, gender roles are unclear. Men in their late 20s to early 30s today were raised to be sensitive and caring, and to hide any aggressive impulses, but find this gets them nowhere. Women in their 20s to early 30s talk about feminine empowerment but are still only sexually attracted to overt displays of strength and aggression. Sensitivity, politeness and asking what a woman wants are extreme turnoffs because they are perceived as weakness. Not only
is being a new kind of man a turnoff, it also keeps me from making the first move because I learned to worry about forcing myself onto the object of my desire, to not be crass or slimy, to not use pickup lines, etc. But there are no clearly defined rules for what I should be doing, just a set of things that I shouldn’t do — all the things that would elicit results. … I’ll just go play video games, thanks.”

  The truth shall bite thee in the ass

  A hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach. So he gave up trying and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, “I thought those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”

  — Aesop, “The Fox and the Grapes”

  In stressful situations, many of us adjust our understanding of what’s going on to preserve our sense of self. The core message of “The Fox and the Grapes” tale is not in the fox’s failure to get the grapes but in his reaction to that failure. He maintains his pride by a wee bit of self-deception. “And therein lies the appeal,” says D.L. Ashliman, professor emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. “Each individual reader can respond to the fox’s self-deception according to his or her own expectations and needs. We can criticize the fox for his dishonesty and inconsistency, or we can congratulate him for his pragmatism and positive self-image.”44

  The fox’s response preserved the integrity of his self-image. Stanford University social psychologist Claude Steele was the first to describe the theory of self-affirmation, in 1988. Psychologists David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen described it in their own research nearly two decades later: