Raising Parents with Emily Oster - Ep 5: Are Boys Being Left Behind?

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Across the board in most advanced countries, girls and women are outpacing boys and men. Nowhere is this more stark than in education. When Title IX was passed in the U.S., the share of students enrolled in a bachelor’s degree program was about two-thirds men and one-third women. Just 50 years later, the numbers have reversed: Bachelor’s enrollment is now 58 percent women and 42 percent men. So, not only is the gender inequality we see in college today wider than it was 50 years ago, it’s the other way around, with men on the bottom. The difference in master’s degrees is even more striking. In the 1970s, women earned only 11 percent of them. Today, women earn over 60 percent of master’s degrees. Women are awarded 53 percent of PhDs, and they make up the majority of law students. These disparities also continue after school ends. Young men are out of the labor force at an unprecedented rate. Nearly half (47 percent) of prime-age men not in the workforce cite obsolete skills, lack of education, or poor work history as barriers to employment. And most American men earn less today (adjusted for inflation) than most men did in 1979. Today: Are boys and men falling behind? Why are some experts so worried about this, and what is at stake for the economy, our society, our families, and the future of boys everywhere? *** Resources from the episode: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Amazon) by Richard Reeves Hanna Rosin The End of Men: And the Rise of Women (Amazon) by Hanna Rosin Erica Komisar “Men are lost. Here’s a map out of the wilderness” by Christine Emba American Institute for Boys and Men

Hi, everyone. Emily here, and you're listening to Raising Parents, my new podcast in partnership with the Free Press, where we interrogate all of the big and pressing and confusing questions facing parents today. Before we get to the show, I'm so excited to tell you that this season is in partnership with Airbnb. If you know anything about me, you know how much I love Airbnb.

I think I'm currently holding, like, six Airbnb reservations in my account. Airbnb has provided incredible experiences for me, my family and our friends across the country and the world time and time again. More on that and how you too can use Airbnb on your next family trip later in the episode.

For now, onto the show. Hi listeners, Candice here, the executive producer of the show. I hope you're enjoying the series so far, learning a lot and being introduced to ideas you haven't heard before. I hope it's sparking conversations with your friends. Maybe you're changing some things up in your own house and now introducing pureed leaks to the dinner table. And I'm sure you also have some outstanding questions. Good news.

Emily, she has answers. We want you to write to us at parentingatthefp.com. That's parenting at T-H-E-F-P.com with your most burning parenting questions. Maybe it's something we touched on in the show but didn't have a chance to fully flesh out. Maybe it's something we haven't covered entirely that you just have to know the answer to. Or maybe you just really, really need Emily to tell you why your kid is waking up at three in the morning. Whatever your question, we're going to do

our best to answer them on the free press over the next few weeks. Again, that's parenting at thefp.com. And also make sure to subscribe to the free press at the fp.com, that's T-H-E-F-P.com so you don't miss the answers. Okay, now onto the show. So my name's Rachel Gluck. I currently teach kindergarten. I have also taught first and second grade

in the 20 years that I've been teaching. So I'm Lauren Hanken and I have taught sixth, seventh, and eighth grade English. I've had specific parents choose to keep their boys back for another year of kindergarten or another year of pre-K. Sometimes it has to do with academics, but often it has to do with social emotional and how they handle their peers. Behaviorally, the boys tend to take up more space than the girls. Perhaps that's because teaching boys is different and the modalities and the energy and things like that,

but I think sometimes the girls get left behind because we spend so much focus trying to get the boys to focus. So at the age I work with them right now, from 18 months to four-year-olds, boys, they are pretty active. They do tend to need a little more physical outlet. They do need to move a little bit more.

And girls are a little more happy to sit in color or to read a book. So I think that there's a difference in the level of self-control or awareness impulsivity with boys than with girls. So oftentimes we'll have more blurting out with boys. When I taught fourth grade, they'd be great for a good 30 minutes. And then I would be like, okay, let's do jumping jacks.

Let's do this, let's do that. Because they just have this physical need really. to acts, let's do this, let's do that, because they just have this physical need really. We've all heard the old saying, boys will be boys. Boys need to run around. They have the attention span of a goldfish. They struggle to follow directions. And basically the old saying goes, you can't blame them when they misbehave or act rough or impulsive because they're just boys. It sounds like I'm talking to you from the 1950s, doesn't it? That's because in 2024, it's become controversial to say this out loud, even though we all, including those teachers you just heard, see it with our own eyes. The question is, if this is so clear, why are we reluctant to talk about it?

I think it's because people fear that our goal of equality, of treating boys and girls with equal worth, opportunity, and value, will somehow be undermined by admitting that there are differences on average between the sexes. We've made the mistake of thinking that difference somehow means better and worse, when really it just means different. And that denialism is helping no one, especially boys. Our schools today are becoming hostile environments for little boys.

I mean, as our classrooms become more risk averse, competition-free, feeling-centered, sedentary, they're moving away from the needs of boys. Boys are falling behind. Boys are being pulled out of classrooms. Their behavior is being medicalized. When does somebody, for want of a better term, have the balls to actually say there is a gender problem?

And it's not just in the classroom. It wasn't so long ago that men enjoyed a clear advantage in American society. But these days a different story is emerging. Men and boys falling behind and sometimes into despair. There's a growing but silent epidemic affecting middle-aged adults that has debilitating mental

and physical effects. And that's emotional isolation. And those effects are being felt by men most of all. Men are three and a half times more likely to commit suicide than women. 60% of the homeless are men. The prison population is 96. We're facing an automization which is going to sweep away millions of jobs. That's not going to be pretty.

Although the formal unemployment rate for prime-age men was a mere 3%, there's another 11% who are nilfs. Not in the labor force is what it stands for. Dropouts who are neither working nor looking for work. We are seeing a rise in lonely single men, dating opportunities for straight men or diminishing. This might seem surprising to some, men outright ridiculous to others, considering the popular narrative on the challenges faced by girls and women, and the fight for gender equality rather than the plight of boys and men.

But the problem is, the data doesn't lie. Across the board, and in most advanced countries, girls and women are actually outpacing boys and men. In the U.S., girls are nearly a grade level ahead in English and have caught up in math. Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. Girls dominate the top GPA scores while boys are overrepresented at the bottom. Nowhere is this more stark than in college enrollment. When Title IX was passed in 1972, ensuring that any educational program receiving federal funding can't discriminate based on sex, the share of girls enrolled in a bachelor's degree was about one-third. At present, just 50 years later, the numbers have reversed. Bachelor enrollment is now

58% women and 42% men. The difference between the sexes is almost equal to what it was in 1972, but in the opposite direction, with men on the bottom. This goes for graduate degrees as well. When it comes to men in the workforce, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data reveals a noticeable decline in participation rates.

Back in September of 1954, nearly all men between 20 and 54 labor statistics data reveals a noticeable decline in participation rates. Back in September 1954, nearly all men between 20 and 54, about 98% of them, were part of the workforce. Fast forward to January 2024, and that number has dropped to 89%. Nearly half of prime-age men not in the workforce cite obsolete skills, lack of education, or poor work history as barriers to employment. The average male wage today is lower, adjusted for inflation, than it was in 1979. It can feel a bit odd to talk about these issues.

After all, globally, women are still disadvantaged. Women still earn less than men on average, and especially so at the top of the distribution. And this is to say nothing of the many countries where women are still, in 2024, considered property or married off as children or unable to achieve an education. However, this isn't a zero-sum game. It's crucial to understand

that there are no sides to take here. The notion of helping boys at the expense of girls is a misconception. Both genders can be supported simultaneously. So for today, we're going to talk to people who are really, really worried about the fate of boys and men. And I'm going to push them on why they're so worried about that and figure out what we can do to turn things around for boys. Because if we don't, the stakes for the economy, our society, our families,

and the future of boys everywhere are dire. I'm Emily Oster, and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents. Emily Oster, and from the Free Press, this is Raising Parents. Emily Oster, an economist by trade, has gathered the data, crunched the numbers, and is now debunking some of the most controversial myths about parenthood. I think what everyone is most interested in, like pregnant women, they're like, can I drink? You know, you shouldn't have like a lot.

Where is this data coming from? The fundamental answer is we get data on people by asking people about their behaviors and what they do and by collecting information on how their kids do. Oster doesn't shy away from other charged topics. People are using your database as an example as to why schools should reopen. What kind of reaction did you get to that?

I imagine that was a little controversial. It was a little controversial, yes. You're an economist, You're not a doctor. I mean, what do you think people are going to take away from what you've written in this book? All that I'm trying to do here is really show women, here is what the evidence is, and why don't you think about some of these decisions for yourself. Episode 5, Are Boys Being Left Behind? Well, my name is Asa, and I live in Cleveland, Ohio and I'm nine.

Meet Asa. He's spending part of his summer at an all-boys camp and was nice enough to chat with one of our producers, Tamar, about what it's like for boys these days. How long have you been going to this camp? Um, about two weeks, three weeks? What is it like to be around just boys? Is it different than when you were in school? Yeah, well, boys do stuff that they can't do when girls are there.

Like what? Like do funny stuff that only boys will get. Girls don't really like boys, boys don't really like girls. Girls like doing like painting and drawing and dancing and drama and boys like more of like sports and like wood shop and like engineering. Does it ever seem like the teacher treats boys and girls differently in your class? Maybe. Like, the boys are acting bad, then the teachers will get mad.

But then when the girls act bad and do something, the teachers won't get as mad. Because, yeah. As I was reading about some of these difficulties that boys have, on average much more than girls, and just sitting still and paying attention for long periods of time, especially to abstract concepts, I suddenly remembered my own elementary school years. And I can remember sitting on this incredibly uncomfortable plastic chair looking out the window. And I actually remember making up stories in my head and colors in my head to get through

because I found it agonizing. I found it literally physically painful to sit. This is Richard Reeves. He's a writer and scholar and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, where he focuses on the gender gap between boys and girls in school. He's also a dad to three boys. And I found strategies for kind of getting around it, but I suddenly was taken back to that sort of six-year-old,

that seven-year-old, and I couldn't read. And I just found it incredibly difficult just physically. I felt trapped in my body. I felt like my body was my enemy when I was in school. And I don't think that's uncommon, actually, among a lot of young boys. In his research, Richard distinguishes between three areas in which boys and men are struggling,

the first area being boys and men in education. There are big gender gaps in high school GPA. There's now a very big gap in colleges. In fact, there's a bigger gap on college campuses today in terms of gender than there was in the 70s, but it's the other way around. So women are further ahead of men today than men were ahead of women when we passed Title IX.

But if you just look at that top 10% of high school students, for example, ranked by GPA, two-thirds of them are girls, one-third of them are boys. The bottom decile is the other way around. There was one, it's a little bit of a dated fact, but it's the most recent I could find is that 23% of boys of K-12 age had been diagnosed with some kind of developmental disability. 23 is almost one in four. And so it seems clear that in various ways, the education system is just not quite working as well for boys.

I'm quite concerned about it. The idea that we also are creating a crisis for little boys by trying to make them learn like little girls. This is Erica Komisar. She's a psychoanalyst and a social worker specializing in parent guidance. She is also an author of several books on raising children and is a mother of three.

Little boys have a tremendous need to move their bodies under the age of five. They're meant to learn experientially. They're meant to learn physically, actually, not just in theory, but actually to learn physically. We make children sit in circle time as early as two years old, sit quietly. It's not natural to children.

Children are meant to play. The word kindergarten actually means garden of children. And in my day, kindergarten was free play, total free play. You could say a little bit of chaos, but it was free play. And so what we're doing is we're stressing out boys because girls have more of an ability to conform to this educational model we have for them now, which is to treat them like little adults,

sitting in circle time, sitting quietly, sitting at desks. And for boys, they're stressed out. And then they're labeled, the little boys are labeled as having ADHD. Let's just say it's not natural for half of the population of children to have ADHD. Why we're even accepting this as being a truth is beyond me. Yeah, we're trying to educate little boys in this way where we hold them tightly and contain them, and they're busting out,

and then they're labeled as having behavioral problems in ADHD. So the way that you teach really little boys is first of all, play-based, but you get them to focus for 20 minutes or a half an hour, and then you get them to run around and play physically. Maybe you get them to sit down again for 20 minutes, get them to play for another half an hour, and then you get them to run around and play physically. Maybe you get them to sit down again for 20 minutes, get them to play for another half an hour.

That's the way you educate boys. So we're really doing it badly. We've seen plenty of evidence that what Erica describes is spot on for young boys in school. The shift from play-based learning to focusing on executive function in early childhood education took off in the 1990s, driven by research on the importance of early brain development,

particularly for skills like problem-solving and self-regulation, which are crucial for school success. As a result, more structured activities were introduced, which tend to align better with traits often associated with girls. Meanwhile, play, which as Erica argues, boys especially need, was reduced in the curriculum. If we're just thinking in broad terms, I would think that we want to put off some of the cognitive development and focus on experiential and play-based learning,

more nature-based learning, more physical activity for children, both boys and girls, and then incrementally introduce cognitive learning. I mean, I didn't start my cognitive learning until I was in first grade. Didn't learn to read, didn't learn math, maybe learn my colors, but that was bad. It was all play-based. And so what happened is when I got to first grade, I actually loved learning and didn't see it as something that was forced at me or in me. So yeah, we really have to think about why are we in such a rush? What's the rush? What's the rush with young children? What's the rush? What's the rush with young children?

What's the rush with middle school children to make them have to think about what career they're going to go into, what college they're going to go to? What the hell is the rush about? What's happened to society that we need to rush children through their development? That's the question we need to be asking. Beyond education, a second area where boys and men are struggling is in the workforce. So you then see that playing out into the labor market where, to be clear, there's a big class and race dimension here where kind of working class men's wages and lower income men's wages have actually stagnated

and from very little growth in black men's wages. And the third area in which men are struggling is within the family unit itself. And then of course in family life you're just seeing a massive change in the role of fathers and many fathers actually struggling to be in their kids' lives in the way that they were before. So why are boys doing so much worse than girls if they're in the same schooling system? With the caveat that everything's on the average, boys' brains develop a little bit later than girls. If you look at all the sort of evidence around school readiness, pretty much however you define With the caveat that everything's on the average, boys' brains develop a little bit later than girls. If you look at all the sort of evidence around school readiness, pretty much however you define it, especially if you introduce like behavioral issues, there's a pretty big gender gap.

And the boys are just not quite as ready for school. So we know that five year olds on the average girls are a little bit more advanced in terms of their skills. But I find a more interesting gap that comes a bit later actually in adolescence, which is triggered by the difference in puberty. Girls hit puberty earlier, that seems to trigger other things, including the frontal cortex. And so 15 year old girls are older than 15 year old boys. And there's almost no doubt about that, at the average. If you have a system that treats two groups of people who actually are developmentally a little bit different in their trajectories as the same, then it shouldn't be a surprise if one group does a little bit better than the other.

So there's a whole argument about male and female brains, which is really boring and inconsequential, I think, when it comes to adults. But I think that what's being missed in that debate is, yeah, even if male and female brains end up being pretty similar at the end, that doesn't mean they get there at the same pace. And so if they get there at a different pace, that's something we should probably think about in our education policy, and we typically don't. I just want to pause here to reiterate what Richard just said. On average, boys' brains develop a little bit later than girls. This isn't an opinion. This is the scientific consensus.

As one example, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health published a study back in 1999 that used MRI scans to track brain development in kids over time. Based on their actual brain imaging, boys develop later than girls. This is a well-cited study, but it echoes many others. later than girls. This is a well-cited study, but it echoes many others.

I have three children and I worry my boys live in a world that is very hostile towards boys. Erica Comisar again. So you could say that we had to compensate with the feminist movement for a lack of consideration for girls. And we needed to do that. And we've done that. But in a way, I worry that the pendulum may have swung too far, where now we feel hostile towards boys. And that includes also adolescent boys that I treat are almost afraid of girls. They're afraid of being accused by girls. They're afraid of getting close to girls. What are we doing?

We needed to balance, we needed to even the odds, as they say. But have we gone too far so now we are calling every boy toxically masculine, that we're, you know, feminizing our boys, that we're not leaving space in universities and graduate schools for boys. I mean, are we getting to a point where we need to create quotas for boys in college and graduate school? So I think the system's all off. The balance is off. And I do

worry about my boys in terms of a world that is more hostile towards boys and men. Erica isn't the only parent who worries about raising boys today. We heard from many other parents who called in to share their concerns. I'm a mom of two little boys and the thing I'm most concerned about is that there really concerns. is something that's toxic or wrong. I want them to kind of grow up in a place where they're taught how wonderful it is that they have these masculine qualities. And this is how we appropriately operate in a world with those qualities and not just like suppressing them.

When I found out my first son was going to be a boy, I was thrilled, but I was very nervous. I've felt my whole life that I don't quite know what it means to be a boy and what I should do and subsequently what it means to be a man. I'm still kind of figuring this out with a lot of guesswork and best efforts. I'm the mom of a young boy and I'm concerned that he's going to grow up in a world that views masculine traits as something negative,

and eventually that's going to cause him to be uncomfortable in his own skin, just because he's being a boy. I'm a dad of two boys, and what concerns me about raising boys today is over-policing what they can say to each other, even if it's just, you know, boys being boys. Because of policies at school, for instance, my son has to be very guarded about what he says in public, even if he's just joking around.

In some ways it's good. It forces the boys to think before they speak, but could also be too strict and force an environment where they're not comfortable even speaking at all. So I'm curious when we think about the impacts on the societal scale, the extent to which you think these issues for boys in the education system and men in the workforce and men and their families are a kind of linked line or whether they are different manifestations of the same general issue about society. And the reason I ask is because if I think about the timing

of these things, they're pretty overlapped. So the version of like, we're not serving boys well in school and then they're not doing well in the workforce and then I do, it doesn't really fit with the data because the kids that were not serving well in school are not all, are on average not old enough to be having these problems. So it somehow seems like there's a sort of cultural, societal issue that's driving all of these things as opposed to there's a pipeline problem. Yeah, that's incredibly well put.

And I've really struggled with this question about how far these different trends you see in the labor market in family and in education are connected. Because you think about the different kind of cohort effects too and if so, what's the connective tissue? It would be much easier to just think about them as just separate issues that have happened at different times, different. So there's been a labor market shock, obviously around working class men. There's been this whole separate thing where the education system has become inadvertently more female friendly and there's this whole separate thing where the education system has become inadvertently

more female friendly. And there's this whole separate thing over here that with the economic rise of women, we've reconfigured family life. And like, that would be much neater and much more amenable to policy. But I suspect that there is something deeper going on here. I don't know how to dive into this conversation

about boys and education because it is incontrovertibly true that we've built a schooling system that is more amenable to the way girls develop than the way boys develop. It's probably incontrovertibly true that a lot of boys are suffering in that system and getting kind of turned off to school entirely. But it doesn't entirely lead me to feel like we have to help men, category capital M, men. It doesn't. This is Hannah Rosen. Hannah is a journalist and currently the host of Radio Atlantic. Back in 2012, she wrote a book called The End of Men.

Sometime in the 90s over a series of recessions, it became clear that the economy was moving in a different direction, and that a lot of the jobs that had allowed men to enter the middle class were fading. So these are working class jobs, jobs that you didn't necessarily need a college degree for. And other jobs were requiring college degrees that didn't use to before, like a police officer. And so it was becoming harder and harder for a certain class of men to enter the middle

class. So they were becoming sort of detached from economic success. And we've seen a lot of those problems down the road. Hanna wrote her book over a decade ago during a time of change. And now looking back, she realized that some of those changes haven't had the impact she had hoped for. When I wrote my book in 2012, a lot of these statistics and shift

in the broad economy were new. And it was so interesting. Like it was so exciting to see this sort of undercurrent of these shifts happening in dating and sex, in labor force participation and types of professions. Like it really was becoming obvious at that time. Now, as time has gone on, I marvel at how like stubborn, like how shut the ceiling is, like how how the culture is so stubbornly stuck that these changes don't get to flower and take root and go in different directions. They just

feel a little stuck. So we're talking about the beginning of this in kind of the 1990s. Is that where you would date? The sort of end of manufacturing into the sort of rise in the value of human capital, maybe of computer skills. I mean, sometimes economists will talk about skill bias, technical change, that as we introduced computers, the value to those sort of, those skills go up

relative to the value of the physical skills, which were more dominated by men. Is that part of the story? Yeah, I mean, people know in abstraction what happened to our economy. People abstractly know that we don't really build things anymore, that there were all these international trade agreements and that a lot of manufacturing went overseas and there's a million parts to that story. But it's like the factories closed down. That's like an American story

of the sort of 80s, 90s, 2000s and on beyond. It first affected black men in cities when the factories moved out of cities. Then it started to affect more rural white working class men in America when the factories moved out of towns and overseas. And it just continued to affect men because the only way you could adjust was to get a different set of skills. And for whatever reason, that's been harder for a certain class of men. For whatever reason,

it's been hard for men of a certain class to like make that adjustment and get those particular skills that would allow you to thrive. Like in all these small towns where there are no factories, there are hospitals, there are other jobs you can do. There's a lot of government jobs, but that transition has not been easy. It's not gone easily. I think it's an unfortunate historic coincidence that as women were rising economically through education into the labor market, at the same time,

a lot of male jobs were being hit by trends towards more globalization and the round of automation that we saw, particularly during the kind of post-war years. And that was clearly affecting male working class jobs more than anybody else's jobs. And that happened at about in the same decades that we saw this economic rise of women into other kinds of jobs into some of the new jobs we were creating, especially in the

caring professions and in offices and the professions and so on too. But one didn't cause the other. One of the dangers here is that people see the trend line for kind of women going into the labor market and doing better. And they see the trend line for men not being in the labor market, especially working class men. And they go, oh, well, they fall into a lump of labor fallacy that there's only so many jobs to go around and the women came and took them all.

That's not what happened. What happened was male jobs got hit hard at the same time, but they're not causally related. After the break, how should we practically go about changing things for boys and men? And what's at stake if we don't turn things around? We'll be right back. This show is supported by Airbnb. Every year, I meet a group of friends for a weekend to reconnect. Over time, the group has grown, more spouses, more children, but we still wanna stay in a single house so that we can make the most of our time together. Enter Airbnb. Every year, we've managed to find a new hidden gem

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Again, thanks so much to Airbnb for supporting Raising Parents. And now, back to the show. Airbnb for supporting raising parents. And now, back to the show. So where do we start if we want to change some of the trends we just talked about? So I actually think we need a massive cultural effort around fatherhood. Richard Reeves says that crafting a better future for boys begins with providing them with stronger male role models. And that means redefining fatherhood.

And I will say that I think the women's movement has been a bit ambivalent on this. I think that the women's movement stopped short of some of its own radicalism in some ways because when you talk about paid leave for dads, when you talk about fathers and so on, a lot of people in the women's movement will get understandably a little bit uncertain about that because, well, hold on, you're going to give dads more rights? You're going to give more paid leave to fathers rather than to mothers? Isn't he going to waste that? You know, so there's a tension at the heart, I think, of the women's movement here, which needs to be resolved in favor of fathers and gender equality on the home front as well as the work front. Beyond father figures, boys and young

men also need to see more positive male role models, in general, everywhere. I interviewed a young guy at the University of Florida, and he was telling me, he first gave sort of like his progressive bona fides. He's in a frat that he has lots of female friends and LGBT friends, and he was like, but, you know, I sometimes feel like there aren't role models for men anymore in the same way that there are for women. There are all these women in STEM programs

and like women doing this and that, and there's not the same thing for men. And it feels like I'm not allowed to almost be proudly masculine or to talk about liking being a guy because it's seen as anti-feminist in some sense. This is Christine Emba. She's the author of Rethinking Sex

and a staff writer at the Atlantic. Before that, when she was at the Washington Post, she wrote a viral opinion piece called Men Are Lost. Here's a map out of the wilderness that discussed the challenges modern men face in finding their identity amid changing societal norms. She then invited male readers to share positive examples of modern masculinity. You know, one of the points I made in the piece was that instead of saying masculinity is toxic and giving all these examples of what not to do,

how men are bad, what a lot of men and especially young men were looking for, it's like a positive example. Like, okay, what is good masculinity? If I have to be a man, like, what does a good man look like? And so I asked readers and commenters to just send in their examples. And the examples were wide and varied. Like anything from Mr. Rogers to LeBron James to Barack Obama to Jesus. I think Aristotle turned up once or twice too.

But they all had a couple of things in common actually, or most of them had a few things in common. One was that there was a focus on like self mastery and strength, but strength that was sort of channeled and contained. So men should be improving themselves and learning how to use their strength well. And the idea was that they should use their strength, whatever it was, it didn't have to be physical, like it could be mental,

it can be anything, but to help other people, their communities, and especially people who were less strong than they were. So there was a kind of like protector helper ideal. Another one was that men should just be trustworthy. You should be able to rely on a man's word that men shouldn't lie, that they should be kind of ethically strong and upright, not just physically strong and upright. And that was something that was shared

between all sorts of different examples. That was kind of a thing that came up again and again. And another one that came up was actually that men should lead younger men actually. Mentorship was a good thing for men to do, to teach men younger than them, to bring them up behind them. And a lot of people I talked to also mentioned, especially young men, wished that they had more role models and more men to learn from. Richard Reeves agrees with Christine and thinks that schools, who are largely staffed by women, should recruit more male teachers who could serve as those positive role models for young

boys. I think we need a mass recruitment drive of male teachers. The fact that we're now down to 23% share male in K-12, it was 33% when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980 and is going down and down and down. I find it extraordinary that we're just allowing education to become a female profession. I think we'd be freaking out if it was going the other way. Another way to encourage boys to find positive male role models is by getting them involved in an all-boys group. These are groups where boys have space to talk about their feelings, connect with other boys and male teachers, and explore what masculinity really means.

These groups have proven to lead to better grades and smoother social interactions. There's also evidence, recognized by the CDC, that after joining an all-boys group, boys are more likely to feel that adults at the school care about me and understand what it means to be in a healthy relationship. Additionally, sports. Almost everyone I talk to agrees.

Put your boy in sports. Not only do sports help boys learn essential skills, like teamwork and sportsmanship, but they can also provide really great opportunities for male mentorship, both from coaches and also from older teammates. And of course, children and especially boys need to run and move and be physical.

Next, a lot of people ask me about all boys' schools and colleges. There's mixed evidence that sending your child to an all boys' school helps with academic or behavioral development. The effectiveness of an all boys' school seems to really depend on the individual student, the quality of the school,

and the broader educational and cultural context. But where there is really strong evidence for helping boys and young men is by rethinking what constitutes a worthwhile education. I think we need scholarships for men into education, plus the mental health professions, a massive investment in vocational training, and technical high schools and apprenticeships, not despite the fact that they seem to really help boys and men, but because they really help boys and men. The second thing Richard really advocates for,

other than offering better role models for boys, is more male-friendly forms of education. What does that mean? They are male-friendly forms of education, but we have 2.4 million more women in college now than men. And so like a few more male apprentices isn't necessarily a terrible thing given all of that. So we should definitely do more around that too. And getting more and more generally men into those kind of healed professions would be helpful, like health education, administration,

and literacy are some of the job areas. In short, Richard argues that a worthwhile education shouldn't only mean a traditional four-year college degree. Boys should also be given the opportunity to pursue trade or technical school. Today, if you show an interest in woodworking or fixing cars in high school, chances are you're

going to be encouraged to study engineering. We should change that, especially because trade school can actually be a better choice for boys, lower student debt, higher earning potential, and more job security. And it's being with education commissioners who are now going to change that. It's really hard to get the data by gender.

And so it's a bit of a vicious circle here in the sense that when people don't know how big these gaps are on some of these fronts, we haven't talked about mental health, but male suicide rates are rapidly rising and are four times higher. If they don't know, it's really hard to motivate them to either do the research or the policy that would allow us to know what might help. We are still, I think, in the stage of just allowing ourselves to confront the scale of the problem and to confront the scale of the problem

and to get the hard data. And so actually just understanding what's going on is a really big part of the story, I think, right now. Finally, there's one last thing that Richard says the evidence is very clear about if we want to improve things for boys. And that's something called redshirting. Given what I think are pretty clear signs

for those differences in readiness for school and just development generally, we should start boys in kindergarten a year later than girls. All of them. By default, I'd like the default to be that boys start school a year later than girls, whatever the kind of starting age is, to give them an extra year to develop and kind of catch up.

And crucially, I would want them to do another year of pre-K. So you want effectively three years of pre-K and kindergarten for boys as the default and two years for girls. Yeah. The default would be a double dose of pre-K for boys, which would mean that they would be a year older chronologically than the girls, but I would say closer developmentally. So I think it would be a more level playing field. The term red-shirting comes from college sports.

And it's the idea of having a college athlete accept attendance to college, but wait a year to start playing on the team, wearing a, quote, red shirt on the bench, in the hopes that they'll be able to play on their team for longer and at an older and physically bigger age. You know, to increase their chances of going to the NFL and all that.

The same goes for your kindergartner. Red-shirting allows your kid a competitive edge. I know, I know, your kid is both brilliant and extremely good at baseball at age five, but since the chances of your kid getting to play baseball at a professional level by the time he gets to college are very, very, really, very small, the more relevant consideration is really about maturity and school readiness.

There was a study which looked at school readiness using a series of measures around literacy, math, but also some social skills, some behavioral skills, the ability to pay attention and stay on task, soft skills. That actually the gender gap was the biggest between the groups going into kindergarten. The girls were just further ahead of boys. What do you think is delivered by that additional year? Like how is the kind of classroom going to look different in the kind of Richard Reibs world? Well, the boys will be more ready to learn. I think both in terms of the learning environment,

I think that would be improved by the boys, just having had an extra year of absolute growth. I think partly that's just about being that year older, just purely absolutely. But the other thing is that if they've had an extra year, a whole extra year of working, especially on those literacy skills, that they'll just be in a better position to actually stay with the curriculum and develop. So I just think that overall, you'd see a stronger learning environment, and maybe girls would benefit from that too,

because of a general improvement in the learning climate. I believe the evidence Richard presents is pretty clear and worth considering. Boys generally, on average, develop slower than girls in literacy, social and behavioral skills, and the ability to pay attention and sit still. The data supports that. So if you have a kid, especially a boy,

who was born in the summer, and particularly if you have a kid who you think will struggle to sit still and focus, there is a good case for holding him out a year. There is also clear evidence that ADHD diagnoses are higher for kids who enter school when they're younger relative to their peers, especially for boys. And then as we know, in some cases,

those behavioral diagnoses follow kids basically indefinitely. It is clear that slowly and inevitably over the past decades, boys have fallen behind girls on many of the meaningful outcomes that we measure. And in our very, very important and ongoing pursuit of success for women, we have failed to also think about the other side of the coin. I mean, at kind of the very basic level, what's at stake is sort of a lost sex, right? This is Christine Emba again.

Women may be succeeding, but if men are dying, as they are at, you know, four times the rate of women of deaths of despair, if men are leaving the workforce and ending up sort of depressed and unable to support themselves, If boys don't succeed educationally from kindergarten forward, which then tends to lead to lower college enrollment, tends to lead to potential addiction or even criminality in their adult years, then that's bad for society at large.

That's bad for women, that's bad for men, that's bad for family formation in the future, that will be bad for our economy too. Girls have got a very strong script now which has become economically powerful, become autonomous, you go girl, girls on the run, girls in code, black girl magic etc. Amazing. A very strong message of economic independence and empowerment. There is a script I think for women, it's a new script and a much better one, of course. But it's a sort of scriptlessness in a way, to men, there's a certain haphazardness and improvisation now, where it's just not kind of clear,

there aren't strong norms. And so lacking a clear sort of script, I do think a lot of boys and men are just retreating a little bit, they're just pulling back, they're not, they're not leaning into their own lives as strongly as I think we'd like them to. And then that shows up in education data. That shows up in employment data. That shows up in college and ROM.

It shows up in a whole bunch of other things. But underneath it all, I do think there's a slight sense of uncertainty about one's own position. The often forgotten through line in addressing the crisis faced by boys and men is that it isn't a zero sum game. Men should be successful while women are successful. Women should be successful while men are successful.

And recognizing that is probably the first key to seeing what kinds of solutions, individual or policy, we can put in place to improve outcomes for boys and men alongside those for girls and women. And I do think this is already getting some traction. When Melinda Gates gave out her $20 million grants to organizations to work for gender equity earlier this year,

one of those grants went to Richard Reeves at the American Institute for Boys and Men. From the perspective of individual parents, I think this conversation reveals something much deeper about what we want for our children. Yes, we're talking about boys and their differential needs. But really, what we're talking about is heterogeneity. We're talking about differences in what kids need to thrive.

And that, of course, starts in school. Over the past decades, school has moved to be more structured. It's more well-suited to kids like me, a kid who couldn't get enough workbooks. I was able to sit still when I was very small. It was easy to focus. But not every kid loves workbooks as much as I did. And as our schools have moved to requiring more sitting still, to more homework early on, to more worksheets and workbooks,

and to intense periods of executive function, that serves some kids better than others. And on average, it serves girls better than boys. And as parents, there are some levers that we can pull based on our kids' needs, but much of it remains out of our control. We should work to change that, so every kid can be set up for success. Thanks for listening. Raising Parents is a production in partnership with the Free Press. It was produced by Liz Smith and Sabine Jansen.

Thanks as well to producer Tamar Avishai. The executive producer is Candice Kahn. Last, thanks to my guests today, Richard Reeves, Hannah Rosen, Erica Komisar, and Christine Emba. I'm Emily Oster. See you next time on Raising Parents.