Friday, November 18, 2022

The Crisis of Men and Boys

 If you're the parent or grandparent of a boy, you better listen up.  Boys and men are struggling across the U.S. and the globe.  Take a look at these statistics.  American girls are 14%more likely to be school ready than boys.  By high school 2/3 of the students in the top 10% are girls, while 2/3 of the students at the lowest part of the class are boys.  In 2020, at the top 16 law schools in America, not a single one had a man as editor of law review.

The biggest drop in employment is among  young me aged 25-34.  Pretty much all of the income gains that middle-class Americans have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women's earnings.  Men are struggling with drugs and suicide at a far greater rate than women.  For every 100 middle-aged women who died of Covid up to mid-September 2021, there were 184 middle-aged men who died.  

Boys are more hindered by challenging environments than girls.  Girls in poor neighborhoods are more likely to climb out of the situation than boys.  Boys raised by single mothers are less likely to enroll in college than women.  Programs designed to promote social mobility often work for women, but not for men.  One policy to help men have a better chance for success, is to hold them back in school for a year.  Girls are able to start school successfully than boys.  The prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum mature much earlier in girls.

Many men just seem less ambitious.  They don't seem to be the go getters they once were.  Richard V. Reeves's book "Of Boys and Men" is a place to start to learn more about this issue, and what you can do about it.  Men and women are different, and those differences seem to be in all phases of development today:  education, work, social life, health, etc.  I have tried to summarize some of the salient points made by Richard Reeves in his book, but for more information, I suggest reading his book.

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