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Nov. 18, 2024 - Epoch Times
23:11
Our Boys Are Falling Behind. Why? Asks Warren Farrell
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Boys are far more likely to drop out of high school, far less likely to go to college.
The school shootings in particular were very likely to be done not only by boys, but boys whose family had been through divorce and who were in very high conflict situations and often boys that did not have father involvement.
It's been six years since Warren Farrell published his groundbreaking book, The Boy Crisis, Why Our Boys Are Struggling, and What We Can Do About It.
I wanted to get an update on where things are now.
There's a reason that men are killing themselves much more frequently.
We're not asking why.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kellek.
Warren Farrell, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
It's my pleasure also.
You're such a good question asker and you really listen so well.
I love that about you.
Well, thank you very much.
And I'm actually very curious.
When we first interviewed, back in 2019, we interviewed about your book, The Boy Crisis.
Where have things come with The Boy Crisis?
And maybe before even that, tell me what it is.
The boy crisis is boys falling behind in more than 70 different measurable metrics, basically.
Everything from being far more likely than girls to commit suicide, about four times as likely when they're between 15 and 19, five times as likely from age 20 to 24.
They're far more likely to be addicted to drugs, to die of drug overdoses, to be addicted to video games.
Playing a certain amount of video games is fine, but addiction to video games, 15 hours or more per week, is typical for the average boy playing video games and that begins to get into the addiction mode.
Boys are far more likely to drop out of high school, far less likely to go to college, and when they go to college, they're 10% more likely to drop out of college than girls are.
And so when I submitted my research for the boy crisis, my proposal to the publisher, I had 10 causes of the boy crisis outlined that I was going to have a chapter for each.
And I kept finding that most of those causes were correlations, but the only one that sort of met the standard of a cause was I found that the boy crisis, to a larger degree than any other single reason, the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside.
I saw this enormous power of lack of father involvement.
So there's no greater correlation between suicide and any other thing than lack of father involvement.
When we have mass shootings, it's not about girls and it's not about guns and not about family values predominantly.
They're all players.
But I saw that to a large degree, the school shootings in particular, We're very likely to be done not only by boys, but boys whose family had been through divorce and were in very high conflict situations and often boys that did not have father involvement.
And so I began to see this enormous Amount of dad deprivation, and this has not changed the amount of people dropping out of high school who are boys, the amount of them graduating from college who are boys, the amount of drug overdoses.
The life expectancy between males and females has increased in the last couple of years.
It's now to 5.9.
It was down about 5.2 some years ago, about the time that the Boy Crisis book came out.
This also complements the research that shows that children that come out of nuclear families, complete nuclear families, whether they come from affluent families or poorer families, left or right, are set up for success.
Their likelihood of being successful in life and changing their economic realities and life realities in a positive way, that's the single best predictor of that.
Yes.
Actually happening.
So that's interesting that this is very complementary.
Absolutely.
And what I saw was also that there was, so the lack of father involvement was the deepest cause that I sort of had articulated when the Boy Crisis book came out.
Now I've seen, for the last 30 years, I've been conducting these couples communication workshops that I call role mate to soul mate workshops.
And I saw that there was one deeper prediction.
That is, I saw that the Achilles' heel of all human beings is our inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.
I'll advise people in my workshop to not become defensive when they hear criticism.
And everybody agreed, but they got home in their real life, and the moment that that criticism appeared, the wisdom disappeared.
And so I realized that I really had to develop a method that people practiced over and over again so their brain changed until they could associate criticism with an opportunity to feel more deeply loved.
And the question was how to do that.
But the value of how to do that, and I can get to that in a little while, but the value of how to do that in relation to the boy crisis was the real One way to prevent the boy crisis is to have good parental communication so the children see good parental communication and mother and father knowing how to resolve differences constructively and be able to hear each other and move closer together in their love than they were before.
And when children see that, they know how to communicate with their friends and they will know how to communicate with their children.
And there will be fewer divorces.
And when there are fewer divorces, there are fewer children raised predominantly by mother and with what I call dad deprivation.
Well, this is, I think, particularly relevant in these fraught times that we're in, because it strikes me that the ability to take criticism without feeling defensive or worse, which I think is, I frankly see that a lot, would play a very valuable role in society writ large, not even just in these intimate relationships, which of course your new book, Rolemate to Soulmate, is all about.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
I wanted to talk about how things have shifted.
There's this recent Wall Street Journal piece, America's young men are falling even further behind.
It made me think of you as part of the reason we're here today.
Pandemic policy resulted in all these scenarios being exacerbated.
Do I understand that correctly?
Can you kind of flesh that out for me a bit?
One of the reasons is that girls are very good.
You get a Zoom course and girls are very good at taking information down, absorbing it, remembering it, and feeding it back on a test.
Boys, for the most part, have to do things physically or they have to be engaged in projects.
And when they're engaged in a project, boys do very well.
When they have to do something physically especially, boys do very well.
But when they have to sit at home and listen to something over Zoom, they tend to be distracted and bored and they become passive-aggressive in terms of going back and learning more and they basically tend to fail to a much greater degree.
Women are very good about reaching out to women friends and sharing what's Their feelings and their fears.
And the women friends are very good about supporting them.
Boys are not as good about expressing their feelings and their fears to their men friends or to women.
And the reason for that is when boys express their feelings to women, especially if they're involved romantically with those women, women often lose respect for men who are complaining or who are, you know, sort of vulnerable in that way.
And when men express those feelings of vulnerability to other men, men tend to give the men about a one-minute sort of like, okay, yes, yes, yes.
And then if the man keeps going on, the other men lose respect for men.
So you better keep your feelings to yourself.
And if you have a lot of feelings, you start drinking.
Or the feelings pile up and pile up and you come out with this volcano of anger that's been pent up.
And so it's a very dangerous period for men to be isolated during the pandemic and in general.
Well, and it's very interesting because everything you're talking about, you know, go back a few generations and just kind of much less of an issue, right?
Like men weren't thinking about things like their vulnerabilities so much.
I mean, do I have that right?
Yes, but this doesn't mean the process it took to make a man a hero is the exact opposite of the process it takes to make a man healthy.
That is, the process it took to make a man a hero meant repress your feelings because if you expressed your feelings to your sergeant in the army, you were a squeaky wheel.
And the war machine does not run well considering everybody's feelings and fears.
So the way we created men to be our protectors and be willing to kill and be killed Was to make them feel like they were more of a man when they didn't express their feelings of vulnerabilities, when they didn't say to their sergeant, oh, officer, that comment was anti-Semitic and I'm Jewish.
Could you please refrain from making anti-Semitic comments?
The response of the sergeant would be, do 30 push-ups and shut your mouth.
Warren, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Dr.
Warren Farrell, author of Rolemate to Soulmate.
So basically there's kind of two elements.
There's a change in the male role, and that itself needs some kind of mitigation.
And the other thing is this fatherlessness crisis.
Absolutely.
And the combination of these things is the boy crisis.
Do I have that right?
That's very right on.
In the old days, men had two senses of purpose.
You were willing to be disposable in war, or you were willing to be disposable in the workplace.
To this day, 93% of the deaths in the workplace are deaths to men.
And so that still is pretty much an important variable.
But so, to a large degree, men's most traditional sense of purpose has experienced, because of the need for fewer men to fight in war, men have experienced a purpose void.
And so that purpose void has left men feeling like, what do I do?
What's my role?
And that leaves a lot of men not knowing the answer to that.
Now, there is potentially good answers to that.
So, for example, high schools could have a lot more vocational training so that boys would have an alternative role.
But in fact, what schools have done is cut back on vocational training, not increased it.
Second, there is a need for more recess.
The CDC finds that once you do a certain amount of homework, the amount of time that you're physically active, each minute spent being physically active, once you've done a certain amount of homework, is more productive.
to doing homework better than time spent focused just on the homework.
This isn't true for girls and boys, but it's especially true for boys.
All these things are not being considered by schools.
When it used to be that most school teachers were female, What I found when I did the research for the boy crisis is that if a boy grows up with an involved father and an involved mother and goes to a school with mostly female teachers, not a big problem.
But if a boy grows up without dad involvement or what I call dad-deprived and goes from a dad-deprived home environment Into a male-deprived school, then he oftentimes feels like there's no male role model for him.
And so the male role models become a gang that invites him to be part of their family.
Without the dad involvement, he doesn't have the boundary enforcement, he doesn't have the postponed gratification, the single biggest predictor of success.
And so he's oftentimes a failure to launch.
Well, he's flipping hamburgers at McDonald's or someplace, not making much money, and some other guy is out there with a brand new car picking up the girls.
And so he says, well, if I had more money, I could do that.
So he's offered an opportunity to deal drugs.
And this becomes extremely tempting because without dealing drugs, he doesn't get the money.
Without the money, he doesn't get the car.
Without the car, he doesn't get the girl.
So he feels.
And so that's an example of what's been happening lately for many boys who are dad-deprived at home.
Of course, there's this other dimension, which is the movement for equality of women.
You yourself have described yourself as a feminist, and then also the movement to equality, possibly turning into something else.
How does that fit in?
Yes, so at the beginning of my career, I was on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City.
I suppose I was the world's leading male feminist, spoke all around the world on the importance of feminist issues.
And that was the period of time when there was a lot of anger toward men, even among the early feminists.
And there was a lot of put down of the nuclear family, even among the early feminists.
But by and large, I felt the positive part of feminism at the beginning was saying something like, I am woman, I am strong, and trying to empower women.
Today, a lot of feminism has moved increasingly from, I am woman, I am strong, to, I am woman, I've been wronged.
Hashtag me too.
Here's a thousand ways that I've been wronged.
And I'm actually a supporter of Hashtag Me Too, but I want Hashtag Me Too not to be a monologue.
I want it to be a dialogue.
Both girls and boys, women and men have had tough experiences.
There are many, many fathers that have lost their children.
in court battles that were very much oriented toward the tender years doctrine and if other things are at all equal and a woman says something, she's more likely to be believed.
We're in a situation where the woman has the right to the children and the man has to fight for children.
And that's part of the hashtag MeToo for fathers, for men.
There's a reason that men are killing themselves much more frequently.
We're not asking why.
We say it's mental health in a sort of broad sense, but it's something much more specific than mental health in a broad sense.
It's something that happens with men oftentimes when they get married.
And especially when they have their first child.
When a man has his first child, what he often realizes is, you know, being an elementary school teacher was very fulfilling.
It was exactly what he loved.
He loved kids, but it didn't pay a lot.
So he has to become a principal or a superintendent of schools.
And he hates administration.
So he gives up love oftentimes, what he loves to do, for what he feels he needs to do so he can give his children opportunities that he never had.
But then he's more likely to be the principal or the superintendent of schools.
And what did we as feminists say?
We said that it's male privilege.
Well, it's not male privilege to give up doing what you love to do, to earn more money so somebody else can benefit, so you can die earlier.
That's not power.
That's not privilege.
And as I started forming men's groups, I started hearing these stories from man after man.
I was a musician.
I wanted to be the next John Lennon.
I had a wonderful small amount of gigs coming on, but they weren't enough to support me and children.
They were just barely enough to support myself.
Artist, writer, actor, the same stories.
So I started seeing in my men's groups, man after man who had this fulfilling job until the first child came.
And then he felt he needed to give up the luxury occupation, the high fulfillment occupations, because It's just a pure economics basis.
The more fulfilling your occupation is, the more people want to have it.
The more people that want to have it, the more the demand is in relation to the supply.
What strikes me with all of this, ultimately, we're talking about a shift in the social structure, really, that's creating this I don't know, problem or lack of clarity, lack of sense of purpose, which is exactly what happened during the pandemic.
Whatever changes in social structure existed were, you know, kind of put into overdrive in a sense as people, you know, as we had these shelter in place policies and, you know, different all sorts of businesses dying out and everything else.
Today, some significant portion of kids I know in the San Francisco area and in the LA area haven't even come back to school since the school closures.
In LA, it's an astronomical amount, right?
This is a dramatic shift.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
And to a large degree, this is not the only answer, to a large degree the ones that don't come back are either the ones that are dad-deprived, usually dad-deprived, or dads that start parenting the way mom's parents.
So normally speaking, when you have both parents involved, On average, and there's some people that are the reverse of this, on average, moms will say, you know, sweetie, get to bed at a certain time.
But the studies show us that moms set earlier bedtimes when they're the primary caretaker.
Dads set later bedtimes.
So that would sound on the surface that dads are more lenient.
But when the measurements occur as to when children actually get to bed, they find that children being supervised by dads get to bed sooner than children being supervised by moms.
Why?
Because moms will tend to set bedtimes a little bit earlier, like 8.30, let's say.
And then the child comes at 8.30 and says, Oh, Mom, you know, I didn't do my homework.
And Mom says, well, you could have done your homework before.
You had plenty of time to do it.
You were playing that video game instead.
But, okay, I definitely don't want you to go into school without having done your homework.
Whereas the dad is more likely to say the first time.
He'll say a lot of what Mom just did, you know.
He'll give a warning.
But Dad is likely to enforce that when the child...
It procrastinates.
It doesn't do the homework.
And Dad is much more likely to say, on average, that, you know, I gave you the warning before.
Now you've done it again.
So you're going to have to go into school tomorrow without doing your homework or get up earlier and do your homework.
Mommy doesn't make me do that.
Sorry, I'm not mommy.
Get to bed.
So the end result is the studies show that the children being supervised by the dad actually get to bed earlier.
Also what happens is the child ends up experiencing postponed gratification when the dad is involved in a typical traditional dad mode.
That is, the child realizes it wants to play that video game, but if it plays that video game, it won't get to be able to do the homework, it will fail in school, or it'll be deprived of something else, and Dad's going to enforce that.
When boundaries are enforced, it requires the child to postpone gratification from doing what she or he wants to do and do instead what needs to be done.
Postponed gratification is the single biggest predictor of success or failure in life.
And postponed gratification comes from a parent who's good not at boundary setting, but at boundary enforcement.
I mean, absolutely fascinating because when I think about our society writ large, I see a lot of lack of boundary enforcement, let's say.
I don't think it's just around boys.
I'll have to say this, absolutely fascinating.
A final thought as we finish?
Yes, I think the final thought that as we finish is that what intrigued me about Rollemate to Soulmate was that there is even something more at the root of being able to help boys and men than dad involvement which is having dad and mom being able to communicate in such a way that no matter what their issue is that they each felt heard and
seen by the other one and that the children could pick up the fact that there was a disagreement and dad and mom did this for each other And there was a way of solving the problem and both hearing and seeing each other, even if they still disagreed on what the outcome is.
Yes, Dad said it was okay to climb the tree.
Mom said it wasn't.
But Dad heard the reasons Mom didn't want me to do it.
Mom heard the reasons that Dad did, and together they came to a compromise that I could climb the tree to a certain degree.
Dad had to be underneath the tree to protect me.
But Dad's point that when you climb that tree, your IQ actually increases as you learn how to negotiate the difference between what's safe and what's risk-taking.
And so knowing what the value of Dad parenting is and the value of Mom parenting is And then being able to negotiate, it's about the best role model you can ever give your children.
Well, Warren Farrell, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again.
It's a pleasure to be interviewed and talk with you again.
As I said before, you just ask wonderful questions and you listen so caringly.
Thank you all for joining Warren Farrell and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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