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| Mahan Erdos, thanks to you and the board for the magnificent leadership. | ||
| My words to you this evening are thank God for a beautiful evening. | ||
| Thank you for your generosity. | ||
| Be careful going home. | ||
| Good night and God bless and we will see you next year. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
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This was the best. | |
| This was the best. | ||
| All of them were tremendous. | ||
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| Joining us now to discuss concerns over the current state of young men and boys in the United States is Richard Reeves. | ||
| He is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. | ||
| Richard, welcome back to the program. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| We'll start by having you explain the mission of your organization. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's the first think tank to focus on the issues of boys and men. | ||
| And this is probably one of the shows where I can actually talk proudly about a think tank. | ||
| I was at the Brookings Institution for many years. | ||
| And there are lots of organizations that do a great job drawing attention to the challenges of women and girls in various ways. | ||
| And I really applaud and support their work. | ||
| But there wasn't really anybody that was saying, hold on, what's happening to boys and men in school, in the labor market, in terms of health. | ||
| And I see that as complementary to the efforts of the various groups and institutions that are working on women and girls issues. | ||
| So I see them as our sister institutions, if you like. | ||
| But that lack of an institution that was just every day waking up and saying, how are our boys and men doing? created something of a vacuum in our policymaking and in our understanding. | ||
| So let's start with that question. | ||
| How would you characterize the current state of young men and boys? | ||
| Well, particularly if they're from a low-income background or if they're young men or boys of colour, the answer is on average maybe not so great. | ||
| So we're seeing flatlining wages for men without a college degree. | ||
| We're seeing a huge gap now opening up in universities and colleges. | ||
| There's actually a bigger gender gap today on college campuses than there was in the 70s. | ||
| It's just flipped. | ||
| And so women are further ahead of men today on college campuses than men were ahead of women back in the 70s. | ||
| And we've also seen, perhaps most distressingly, the rise of various mental health challenges. | ||
| And to be clear, there are lots of mental health challenges facing women and girls as well. | ||
| But we've seen a rise in the loss of life from suicide among young men of a third just since 2010. | ||
| We're losing 40,000 men a year right now to suicide in the US. | ||
| And I think that's the tip of the iceberg, which is a real mental health challenge that a lot of boys and young men are struggling with. | ||
| A piece that you wrote recently, the alarm bells are sounding for young men. | ||
| That's exactly what you're talking about, these issues, these alarm bells going off. | ||
| When did they start going off? | ||
| What is at the core of them? | ||
| Well, it depends which metric we're looking at, but educationally, this has been going on for some decades now. | ||
| And what's interesting about the education gap is that's true internationally. | ||
| As you can probably tell, I'm originally from the UK. | ||
| I'm working there too, working a lot in Europe. | ||
| And you see these education gaps have been opening up over the last few decades. | ||
| The wage trends for the last couple of decades. | ||
| I think the new development really has been this increase in the mental health challenges, particularly of young men. | ||
| So I think we're used to thinking of what social scientists call deaths of despair from suicide, alcohol, drug overdoses. | ||
| They really hit working class men through the Great Recession, but we're really seeing those rising now among younger men and especially, as I said, these deaths from suicide. | ||
| So these have been, this has not happened in the last few years. | ||
| This has been building now over at least the last few decades. | ||
| But I think we're now seeing enough people noticing this combination of economic issues, social issues, family issues, forming families, struggling at school, to really, I think, as I said in that piece, to say, okay, the alarm bells really are now ringing much more loudly. | ||
| Something you point out in the post is that some men and boys are feeling lost. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I think the old days, so I'm in my late 50s now. | ||
| And so my parents were in their 80s. | ||
| And I think for a lot of people, they just knew what the script was, right? | ||
| There was a certainty to the old world where men's job was to be the protector and the provider, especially the economic provider, the breadwinner. | ||
| And women's job was to largely be the family maker, the homemaker. | ||
| We've torn those old ideas up. | ||
| We've torn up those old scripts for women, thank God. | ||
| And we've said to women, you can be whatever you want. | ||
| And we've got a lot more to do on that front, by the way. | ||
| This is not mission accomplished for women and girls, but it is a different world. | ||
| And 40% of breadwinners now are women in the US. | ||
| And so that's a completely different world. | ||
| And so what I think we've done is we've replaced the old restrictive script for girls and women and we've replaced it with quite an empowering one. | ||
| You go, girl, you can be whatever you want. | ||
| The future's female. | ||
| And look at us here. | ||
| This is real advance. | ||
| We tore up the old script for men, which is you're going to be the provider, the protector. | ||
| We tore that up as well. | ||
| But we didn't replace it with anything. | ||
| And so what that's meant, I think, is that we have a generation of men coming up now who are genuinely asking the question of like, what am I supposed to do? | ||
| Who am I supposed to be? | ||
| How do I rewrite the script? | ||
| What does it mean to be a good man today as opposed to 50 years ago? | ||
| And we really haven't taken that question seriously enough. | ||
| That's created a vacuum, which I'm sorry to say is being filled by quite a lot of reactionary voices, especially online. | ||
| But that's our fault for not engaging with this question and these struggles that many young men and boys are having with empathy and understanding and curiosity. | ||
| And I realize that can be difficult to do, but if we don't do it, somebody will. | ||
| Richard Reeves is president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. | ||
| He is joining us for a discussion over the concern about the state of young men and boys in the United States. | ||
| If you have a question or comment for him, you can start calling in now. | ||
| The lines for this segment are broken down regionally. | ||
| If you are in the Eastern or Central time zone, your line is 202-748-8000. | ||
| If you are in the Mountain or Pacific, the line for you is 202-748-8001. | ||
| Richard, you are also the author of a book. | ||
| It's titled A Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. | ||
| One of the issues that you've already brought up, you already mentioned was suicide and mental health. | ||
| How would you describe the outlook when it comes to that particular problem? | ||
| What we're seeing is a growing number of men, and especially young men, being more isolated. | ||
| So isolation and loneliness are an issue. | ||
| And obviously the former Surgeon General has drawn attention to this issue. | ||
| There are big class gaps here again. | ||
| I think it's worth pointing out that it is those from lower income backgrounds who are struggling most. | ||
| But young men are actually the most socially isolated and on some measures the loneliest group in American society now. | ||
| And that isolation, particularly for young men, I think can lead to some of these mental health challenges and not really feeling known. | ||
| One of the surveys I looked at recently from Equamundo, which works on men's issues, found that two-thirds of men under the age of 30 said they felt no one really knowed them well, knew them well. | ||
| Imagine that, like not knowing them well. | ||
| And so there's this sense of disconnection. | ||
| And what I think has happened is that the structures that used to make it easier, particularly for men, to feel bound into society, into family, et cetera, we're obviously marrying much later if we do or forming families much later, fewer men in work, fewer men in the labor market. | ||
| One in 10 men in their early 20s are neither in college or in work. |