Outline · Anthony Nuñez

What is the boy crisis?
1. Ask Questions to illuminate
The state of boys
1. Mental
  1. Murder
    1. Mass Shootings
      1. “The rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011.” Rate of Mass Shootings Has Tripled Since 2011, Harvard Research Shows – Mother Jones
  2. Suicide
    1. The National Academy of Sciences reports that the increase in suicide among white males led to as many white males’ lives lost to suicide as have been lost to AIDS. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife Among White NonHispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no 49 (201): 1078, doi:10.1073/pnas.118393112.
    2. Only Native Americans commit suicide at rates similar to whites; Hispanics and Asian Americans commit suicide at about one-third the rate of whites—about the same rate as the African American population. Suicide Prevention Resource Center, “Rate of Suicide by Race/Ethnicity, United States 20002014,” in “Racial and Ethnic Disparities” (summarized from WISQARS Fatal Injury Reports, 1999–2014), http://www.sprc.org/racial-ethnic-disparities.
    3. at the height of the Depression, 14 men committed suicide for each 100 women. 8 Yet by 201, in good economic times, boys and men were committing suicide three and a half times more often than women.
    4. Men “faking” suicide so insurance pays out. Numbers underreported
    5. Is this because females are inherently better at handling stress? Perhaps not. When men and women are exposed to similar pressures to perform, as among men and women in the military, the female suicide rate soars almost as high as the male rate. Alan Zarembo, “Suicide Rate of Female Military Veterans Is Called ‘Staggering,’” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 201, http://latimes.com/nation/la-na-female-veteran-suicide2010608-story.html. Female veterans commit 28.7 suicides for each 32.1 committed by male veterans.
    6. Suicide now takes “more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined, stealing more than 36 million years oI healthy liIe” around the world.
    7. the rate oI increase in male suicide in India is growing at more than nine times that of female suicide (37 percent versus 4 percent since 2000).
    8. 9x boys compared to girls in India
    9. 2015: More men died by suicide in the United Kingdom than all British soldiers died in war since 1945
  3. Prison
    1. 93 percent are male and are disproportionately young
    2. We are percent of the world’s population with almost 2 percent of the world’s prisoners. 16 The APA estimates half of those prisoners have mental health problems.
    3. Cost
      1. Prison spending has increased at Iive times the rate oI spending per grade school student. Saki Knafo. “Prison-Industrial Complex? Maybe It’s Time for a Schools-Industrial Complex,” Huffington Post, August 31, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/californiaprisons-schools_n_3839190.html.
      2. twenty-three new prisons have been built for every one new college since 1980 Knafo, “Prison-Industrial Complex?”
    4. the gap in sentencing is six times greater Ior men versus women than it is for blacks versus whites.
2. Physical
  1. Health
    1. 150 workers die from hazardous working conditions. And 92 percent of them are male.
    2. The less formal education and more children your son has, the more likely he is to feel he’ll help his family live a better life by risking his own life working in what might be called “the death professions.”
    3. Few parents realize, as they proudly watch their son don a firefighter’s uniform, that in hazardous professions, death after the job takes twelve times as many of our sons’ lives as death on the job.
    4. The US has the highest rate of overweight males among all major countries.
    5. When evolutionary biologist Randolph Nesse looked at the results of the twenty-country study of premature deaths among men referenced earlier, he concluded, “If you could make male mortality rates the same as female rates, you would do more good than curing cancer.”
      1. The average global life expectancy for girls is about 7 percent greater than for boys.
    6. In 1920 American boys and men lived just one year less than women; 3 today, American boys and men live almost five fewer years (females, 81.6; males 76.9). 4 Yet the male-female liIe expectancy gap has grown almost 400 percent.
3. Economic
  1. Stability
    1. Your daughter is more likely to hold jobs in stable sectors that are more recession proof, like health and education, both of which are 7percent women.
    2. your son will enter an economy that has made a transition Irom muscle to mental—or Irom muscle to microchip.
  2. Support family
  3. Need two incomes
    1. Over the last Iorty years, the median annual earnings oI a boy with Must a high school diploma dropped 26 percent.
  4. Provider attraction
    1. If your son plans to live in an urban area, he’ll likely live in one of the 147 US cities in which young women under thirty haven’t just caught up to their male peers, but now outearn them (by an average of 8 percent). In only three cities do young men earn as much or more. Belinda Luscombe. “Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top,” Time, September 1, 2010, http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,899,201274,00.html. And single women are now buying their own homes at two and a half times the rate of single men. National Association of Realtors, “First-Time Buyers, Single Women Gain Traction in NAR’s 2016 Buyer and Seller Survey,” National Association of Realtors, October 31, 2016, http://www.realtor.org/news-releases/2016/10/first-time-buyers-single-women-gain-traction-innar-s-2016-buyer-and-seller-survey. Single women represented 17 percent of home purchases, single males 7 percent.
    2. And if your son is unemployed? Three out of four women say they would not date an unemployed man. 11 In contrast, for two-thirds of men, dating an unemployed woman is a nonissue.
4. Education
  1. Deficit
    1. In the United States, by eighth grade, 41 percent oI girls are at least “proficient” in writing, while only 20 percent oI boys are. D. Salahu-Din, H. Persky, and J. Miller, The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2007, NCES 2008468, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, (Washington, DC, and Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), table A-9. Average scores and achievement-level results in NAEP writing for eighth-grade public school students, by gender and state. 2007.
    2. In one generation, young men have gone from 61 percent of college degree recipients to a projected 39 percent; young women, from 39 percent to a projected 61 percent.
    3. The number of boys who said they didn’t like school has increased by 71 percent since 1980. In 1980 only 14 percent of boys said they did not like school very much at all; by 2001 that figure had increased to 24 percent. See University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, Monitoring the Future (study), 1980–2001; cited in NCES, “How Do You Feel About School?” Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women: 2004, fig. 13, p. 4.
    4. In a study of boys and girls in the United States at the primary level, when it comes to standardized tests versus grades, “Boys who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math, and science tests are graded less favorably by their teachers.” C. Cornwell et al., “Non-cognitive Skills and the Gender Disparities in Test Scores and Teacher Assessments: Evidence from Primary School,” Journal of Human Resources 48 (Winter 2013): 236–64.
    5. Original chart developed by Thomas G. Mortenson, Senior Scholar, Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, Washington, DC. Digest of Education Statistics, 2016, Table 318.10, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_318.10.asp.
    6. The Drop-Out, Left-Out Cycle
      1. In neighborhoods where marriage is scarce, fathers are scarce, and more than half of boys don’t finish high school. 8 The boy drops out.
      2. The less education a young man has, the more likely he is to be unemployed or underemployed. He’s left out of the workplace.
      3. Women who desire children think of an uneducated young man as undesirable, and an unemployed man as “another child”—hardly marriage material. He’s left out of marriage and fathering.
      4. Some of the women with whom he nonetheless has sex become pregnant, and raise children without him. Thus, we’re back to step one: the left-out dad and the drop-out son.
    7. nationwide girls make up 70 percent of valedictorians, 14 while boys get 70 percent of Ds and Fs.
  2. Our schools are perpetuating the boy crisis in a second way. Girls learn emotional intelligence as part of the socialization to be female. For boys there is an ever-widening gap between the heroic intelligence that it took our sons to be respected as men in the past and the emotional intelligence needed for your son’s future. Yet few schools are teaching communication skills and empathy training to help boys make that transition.
  3. boys’ IQs have dropped about 15 points since the 1980s.
    1. 12 year old boys IQ same as 9 year old in 1970s
  4. 70 Largest Developed Nations: Boys have fallen behind girls in reading and writing
  5. Dropped out 10% more
  6. Open: degrees-1.png 7e5f403d0b52c14b0bdc928b5e67f85e_MD5.jpeg
Consequences to boys, society and women
1. Crime
  1. Vulnerable to gangs
  2. Mass shooters
  3. Hitler youth
  4. ISIS
  5. Juvenile detention centers are filled with dad-deprived boys.
  6. Every 1 percent increase in fatherlessness in a neighborhood predicts a 3 percent increase in adolescent violence. Study employed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health; see Chris Knoester and Dana L Haynie, “Community Context, Social Integration into Family, and Youth Violence,” Journal of Marriage and Family 67, no. 3 (200): 767–80, doi:10.1111/j.17413737.200.00168.x.
  7. prisons are centers fdor dad-deprived males 24 —boys who never became men.
2. Purpose Void
  1. ikigai
    1. Less likely to die of heart disease. Kozo Tanno et al., “Associations of Ikigai as a Positive Psychological Factor with All-Cause Mortality and Cause-Specific Mortality Among Middle-Aged and Elderly Japanese People,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research 67, no. 1 (2009): 67–7, doi:10.1016/j.jpsychores.2008.10.018.
  2. Fathers help sons find their purpose
  3. He’ll hear phrases like “male power” and “male privilege,” and while he may get that when he looks at all the presidents and CEOs, your son may simultaneously Ieel that the male role is pressuring him to Ieel obligated to earn money someone else spends while he dies sooner. That may feel to him like neither power nor privilege. Here is some of what he may be absorbing that can contribute to his purpose void, for which he will need your help to create constructive alternatives …
  4. In essence, the Japanese boys’ unconscious wisdom is: their dad as winner is really their dad as loser. He “wins” the game of life—gaining money and power—by losing in the reality of life. And often losing his life. To what end? Japanese boys become clear, too, that marriage is not about intimacy as they hear common Japanese sayings such as “a good husband is healthy but absent.” McCargo, Contemporary Japan, 80.
  5. When our sons worldwide see senses of purpose that end in suicide, or pathways to a sense of purpose disappearing and creating a “purpose void,” their unconscious wisdom tells them there must be something more than climbing a ladder to nowhere.
  6. Then and now, the good news is that fewer boys define their purpose as a man as becoming heroes in war or at work—and risking their health and lives to do so. The bad news is that no one is filling boys’ purpose void with viable alternatives.
  7. The women’s movement warned every girl how marriage can seduce her to make a sacrifice of her career. But no one warned every boy how marriage can seduce him to make a sacrifice in his career.
  8. Lack of Motivation
    1. Gaming
    2. Seclusion
    3. Porn addiction
3. Hero Paradox
  1. Value YourselI by Not Valuing Yourself
  2. The message? The more survival is at stake, the more boys are valued to risk death so others might live.
  3. Social Bribes
    1. Females
      1. The roots of female social bribes for males to risk their lives to receive female love run as deep as the roots of warfare. It is part of our genetic heritage.
    2. Dad
    3. Mom, Men, the Media, the Military
    4. The catch-22 of your son as hero is that the more he becomes a hero as killer, the less likely he is to become a hero as husband. As we’ll see in the chapter on heroic intelligence versus health intelligence, many of the qualities your son develops to kill in war—or be a hero at work undermine the qualities it takes to love at home. In brief, what he does to be loved often divorces him from love.
    5. WWI: White feathers given to men that didn’t serve. Done publicly. (Coward)
    6. Brotherhood
    7. All societies have prepared their boys to be dispensable
4. Marriage
  1. Family
    1. loving his family by being away from the love oI his family.
5. Father-less families
  1. Births to unmarried women U.S. percentage 1980-2022 | Statista
  2. Damage to daughters
  1. Sexual to keep men
  2. Teenage Pregnancy
  3. Don’t know how to trust males
  1. Scared men will reject them
  3. Damage to sons
  1. Economic
  1. Unemployment
  2. Succeeded up the ladder
  3. Children who were born poor and raised by both married parents had an 80 percent chance of moving to the middle class or above; conversely, children who were born into the middle class and raised without a married dad were almost four times as likely to end up considerably poorer. Richard V. Reeves, “Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and the American Dream,” Brookings Institution, Brookings Essay, August 20, 2014. See video: http://www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2014/saving-horatio-alger.
  4. The Moynihan Report concluded that in a majority-black community the main predictor oI growing up poor was not race but being born to parents who are not married. Why? A predictable outcome oI no marriage was no father involvement.
  1. While the Moynihan Report identified the quarter oI black children born outside marriage as a crisis with a solution in 1965, today the percentage oI white children born outside marriage is 36 percent
  2. Perhaps it was because in 196 the percentage of white children born outside marriage was only 3.1 percent. The 36 percent rate today represents a nearly twelvefold increase. Among non-college-educated white women under thirty who have children without marrying, the current 51 percent figure is double what it was among blacks when the Moynihan Report alerted us to the crisis. Unfortunately, moms of Hispanic origin have followed the same pattern.
  2. Emotional intelligence
  3. Intelligence
  1. 71 percent of high school dropouts have minimal or no father involvement.
  2. doubled a child’s chance oI dropping out of high school.
  4. Marital potential
  5. Slower maturation
  6. Poorer social skills
  7. Targeted by sexual predators
  1. The film Spotlight helped the world see how the 6 percent of Catholic priests who molested children homed in on dad-deprived boys.
  2. Children between ten and seventeen living without their biological dad were more likely to be victims of child abuse, major violence, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Heather A. Turner, “The Effect of Lifetime Victimization on the Mental Health of Children and Adolescents,” Social Science & Medicine 62, no. 1 (January 2006): 13–27.
  8. Suicide
  1. Living in a home without a dad is more highly correlated with suicide among children and teenagers than any other factor.
  9. Drugs
  1. Father involvement is at least five times more important in preventing drug use than closeness to parent, parental rules, parent trust or strictness, and is a stronger determining factor than the child’s gender, ethnicity, or social class.
  10. Homelessness
  1. Around 90 percent of runaway and homeless youths are from fatherless homes.
  11. Bullying
  1. The American Psychological Association found in its review of 13 studies that father absence predicts the profile of both the bully and the bullied: poor self-esteem, poor grades, and poor social skills.
  12. Post-posed gratification
  13. lack of empathy
  14. Lack motivation
  15. Depressed
  16. ADHD
  17. Obese
  18. Addictions
  4. In modern nations, idea that marriage isn’t necessary for survival
6. Health
  1. How much damage to life expectancy is created by dad-deprivation? Children with father loss already have by age nine telomeres that are 14 percent shorter. 3 However, when compared to girls, the telomere damage from father loss is “40% greater for boys.”
7. Cost on the nation
  1. Beyond homeland security, though, father-absent households also receive most of the $100 billion dollars per year spent on welfare programs. 12 Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) distributes 87. percent of funds—or $1 billion—to father-absent families. Medicaid spending on father-absent families is another $23 billion. 13 Head Start and school lunch programs follow the same pattern.
  2. That $100 billion spent on welfare doesn’t include the $39 billion spent annually on prisons.
8. Women can’t find men
  1. 2.8 million more women with post-secondary degrees—looking for men who didn’t drop out, not enough supply.
9. Patriarchy Propaganda
  1. Causes men to be ignored
  2. Male Privilege
10. Men are seen as: Human doing > Human being
Blindness, ignorance or apathy?
1. Men are made to die
  1. When our very survival is dependent on our sons’ willingness to die, sensitivity to the death and suffering of boys and men is in competition with our survival instinct.
  2. To win wars, we had to train our sons to be disposable. We honored boys if they died so we could live. We called them heroes.
  3. Gender empathy gap
    1. But while this gender empathy gap is part of what enables our blindness to the boy crisis, we have been blind to that sexism throughout human history, and there has not previously been a boy crisis.
2. There are few professional and corporate conferences focused on boys’ and men’s issues. There is no White House Council on Men and Boys, and no federal offices of boys or men’s health.
3. Professional bias
  1. A 2016 study of social workers documented a key obstacle to custody that dads encounter worldwide: “Social workers tend to consider the children’s wishes as long as their preference is for maternal custody. When children express a paternal preference, their wishes carry no weight.”
4. Deadbeat Dad Image
  1. 70 percent oI child support debt is owed by parents with incomes oI less than $10,000 per year (parents almost always means “dads”). 7 Many of these dads are then imprisoned because of owed child support, deepening their arrears and undermining their ability, when they do get out, to hold a job and pay child support!
  2. Three-quarters oI dads who were in South Carolina Mails for being behind in child support payments suffer from extreme poverty. And one-eighth oI all South Carolina inmates are in Mail for being behind in child support payments.
5. Media
  1. 2016 Super Bowl Doritos Ad
  2. 2013 Clorox ad
  3. Domestic Violence ads
  4. Toxic Masculinity
  5. “Future is Female”
  6. “Boys are Stupid” book
  7. Men vs Women Communication Styles
    1. HR - HER Resources
6. Success Object (Steps)
  1. Women that want successful men
  2. Lack of social skills due to success focus
  3. Divorce woman happy with money, say guy was a jerk because he lacks social skills
7. Success-Love Conflict
  1. Self-Listening: Inner convos solve problems and planning
  2. Terrible for love, wants to be listened to — not solutions. Have to figure out their own solutions.
8. People don’t care to hear when men share their emotions causing men to internalize these emotions and difficulties
Solutions
1. Importance of Dad
  1. Boundary Enforcement (Versus Boundary Setting)
    1. Teaching a child to treat boundaries seriously teaches him or her to respect the needs of others.
    2. What moms are more likely to bring to the family table is a deep-seated understanding that children need empathy (as does everyone). Dad’s contributions are more counterintuitive: first, that empathy is a virtue which, when it only goes from parent to child, and is not required oI the child, becomes a vice. And second, that empathy for a child’s desires does not imply being controlled by the child’s desires.
  2. Exploring Nature, Taking Risks
  3. Roughhousing
    1. Researchers consistently find that fathers who spend time with their children give their children the gifts of self-control and social skills. 18 Might the roughhousing component contribute to this? Studies of baby rats that engaged in rough-and-tumble activity find they become less aggressive and have more social skills as adults.
    2. Post-poned Gratification
    3. Empathy
    4. Increases Bond
      1. Learn to “win” from father
    5. Assertive vs. Aggressive
      1. Social Skills
        
        Better friends = More Success
  4. Teachable Moments
  5. Challenging the Kid’s Limits
  6. Hangout Time
    1. When two researchers examined the many possible reasons why children do so well psychologically when they either have about equal parent time or live primarily with dad, high on the list for boys was hangout time with dad. 23 Hangout time with dad, though, was number one on the list for girls. Although girls express their feelings more easily, what they receive most often from girlfriends and mom is reassurance. Unlike boys, who are frequently challenged by their friends (as we’ll see below), girls are less likely to have anyone besides dad to go to with the anticipation of being challenged by someone who has her best interest at heart.
  7. Teasing
    1. provide practice with interpreting the nuances of a yellow light.
    2. Teasing is a core component of teaching emotional intelligence, dad-style.
    3. Teasing in moderation doesn’t just inoculate us against criticism. It is also male-style bonding. The commerce of masculinity is the trading of wit covered put-downs.
      1. The exchange oI wit-covered put-downs is boys’ and men’s unconscious way oI training each other to handle the criticism it takes to become successful.
  8. Mom’s provide encouragement, dad’s teach the obstacles, discipline, sacrifice.
2. Boy only support groups
3. Boy only activities like Boy Scouts
4. Time
  1. We have seen the conclusion from sixty-three studies that children benefit more from quality of time with dad than the quantity of money from dad.
5. Heroic Intelligence vs. Health Intelligence
  1. Since training to become a hero is socialization for a short life, and “health intelligence” is socialization for a long life, heroic intelligence is in tension with health intelligence.
  2. Hollywood
    1. Man has to risk his life for her love
    2. if the life of a beloved woman—whether romantic partner or mother—is at risk, his liIe is at risk. His first job is to save her life. He is born male. That’s what he signs—or rather, is signed—up for.
    3. iI a good woman is killed, a man is to blame.
  3. Had your son heard “a man’s body, a man’s choice,” your daughter might not have had a body about which she could make a choice. That is, our daughters’ lives—all of our lives—were dependent on our sons’ requirement to risk theirs.
6. Emotional Intelligence
  1. Most boys experience a “compassion void.” Why? For starters, boys’ peers rarely listen; boys resist church, its fellowship, and the faith that someone will always hear him and love him; they resist therapy and its confidential disclosure that reduces isolation and alienation; and a boy senses that revealing insecurities to a potential girlfriend is only appealing if his Lois Lane first sees him as Superman, not as Clark Kent. And yes, that’s just for starters.
  2. when a potential girlfriend hears a guy complain, it violates her instinct to be protected; but when a mom hears her son complain, it triggers her instinct to protect.
7. Vocational Education in schools
8. Recessed in Schools
Conclusion
1. Reveal Question
2. Restate argument