The Daily Signal - #516: What's Driving America's 'Boy Crisis'

Episode Date: August 1, 2019

Mass shootings like the one in California last weekend have caused many to wonder what’s going wrong with our young men. Dr. Warren Farrell has a book out on this. He calls it “the boy crisis.” Today, Farrell joins the podcast to explain what's driving young men toward despair—and to outline a path to recovery.We also cover the following stories:-HUD Secretary Ben Carson speaks out on the Baltimore controversy. -Federal Reserve cuts interest rates for the first time since 2008 amid trade war.-Osama bin Laden's son and heir is reportedly dead.The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, and Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, August 1st. I'm Rachel Delgudis. And I'm Daniel Davis. Mass shootings like the one in California last weekend have caused many to wonder what's going wrong with our young men. Well, Dr. Warren Farrell has a book out on this. He calls it The Boy Crisis. Today, I'll sit down with him for an exclusive interview. By the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Well, Baltimore is still very much in the limelight after the president's harsh words toward the city's leaders, including Congressman Elijah Cummings. Well, on Wednesday, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson traveled to Baltimore and defended the president, saying, quote, there are problems in Baltimore and you can't sweep them under the rug, end quote. Here's part of what he said at a press conference.

Well, just in the last year, when you look at all the federal money that has come to Baltimore, it's been in excess of $16 billion. I don't think there's been a lack of investment. I think perhaps we need to look at how that investment is utilized. President Trump on Wednesday praised the decision by a Manhattan judge to throw out a lawsuit from the Democratic Party. He tweeted, quote, such a great victory in court yesterday on the Russian hoax, the greatest political scam in the history of our country. Treason. Hopefully the Attorney General of the United States and all those working with him will find out in great detail what happened. Never again. End quote. On Tuesday, the judge threw out a lawsuit from the DNC

alleging that President Trump and the Russians worked with WikiLeaks to influence the 2016 presidential election. U.S. District Judge John Codle said that he doesn't have the jurisdiction to hear the case because its main focus involves Russia, a foreign country. Codle said, quote, the remedies for hostile actions by foreign governments are state actions, including sanctions imposed by the executive and legislative branches of government, end quote. Well, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Wednesday for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis. A divisive. Federal Reserve Board voted to cut rates by one quarter of a percentage point, a move they said would be an insurance policy designed to protect the economy from global developments,

a.k.a. the trade war. President Trump has for months openly criticized the Fed for raising rates repeatedly amid the strong economy. Well, in announcing the decision, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday that the Fed would never cut rates because of political factors or to prove its own independence. The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it will likely give a green light to allow prescription drugs from Canada into the U.S. In a statement, Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, praised the development. Today's announcement outlines the pathways the administration intends to explore to allow safe importation of certain prescription drugs to lower prices and reduce out-of-pocket costs for American patients. He added,

this is the next important step in the administration's work to end foreign free loading and put American patients first. The announcement from HHS said the agency would be working with the Food and Drug Administration to harness the power of current laws to test certain arrangements, and that they would be, quote, outlining how they would import certain drugs from Canada that are versions of FDA-approved drugs that are manufactured consistent with the FDA approval. Well, NBC News is reporting that the sun and air of Osama bin Laden is dead. NBC cites three unnamed U.S. officials who say the U.S. has obtained intelligence that Hamza bin Laden was dead, though they wouldn't comment on whether the U.S. was involved. When asked about the report on Wednesday, President Trump said he didn't want to comment. Back in February, the State Department announced that it would pay up to a million dollars for information leading to Hamza bin Laden's whereabouts.

AMSA was expected to play a top role in al-Qaeda. The U.S. and China didn't get very far in trade talks this week. The Shanghai negotiations, which finished Wednesday, did little to quell the ongoing trade war between the two countries. Both Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin and Robert Lighthizer, who leads to the Trump administration's trade negotiations, attended the talks. CCTV, China's state broadcaster, reported that both China and the U.S. quote, conducted frank, efficient, and constructive in-depth exchanges on major issues of common interest in the economic and trade field, the New York Times reported. Topics of discussion, according to the White House, included, quote, forced technology transfer intellectual property rights, services, non-tariff barriers in agriculture, as well as China's resolve to buy more of the U.S.'s agricultural exports. Negotiations are set to resume in September.

Well, up next, I'll sit down with Dr. Warren Farrell to discuss the boy crisis. If you're tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger and bigger government, it's time to partner with the most impactful conservative organization in America. We're the Heritage Foundation, and we're committed to solving the issues America faces. Together, we'll fight back against the rising tide of homegrown socialism, and we'll fight for conservative solutions that are making. families more free and more prosperous, but we can't do it without you. Please join us at heritage.org.

Well, I'm joined now in studio by Dr. Warren Farrell. He is co-author of the book The Boy Crisis, Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About Dr. Farrell, thanks for being here. I'm looking forward to talking with you. So we're recording this interview after a shooting in California, and it's the kind of shooting that's caused a lot of people to wonder, what is wrong with our young men? What's going wrong with our boys? They often seem angry. They lack purpose. And it shows up in things like this. You write about what you call the boy crisis in your book. If you could encapsulate that in a nutshell, how would you describe it?

The boy crisis is very much connected to the mass shootings. And to back up and explain that, I looked at all 56 of the largest developing. nations. And in all 56 of the largest developed nations, there is a boy crisis. And so when I started examining more carefully, what did developed nations have in common that lead to that boy crisis, I found that they had two major things. One is as nations developed and there was more survival, the nations were able to give more permission for divorce. And they were also able to give more permission for families to, for women to have children without being married. And so I started looking more carefully in those two groups because I saw that the boy crisis seemed to be dominant in those two groups. But as I looked more carefully, it was especially dominant among divorced families where the children saw very little of their father.

And then between the sister and the brother, both girls and boys where there was no father in divorced families suffered, but the boys suffered much more than the girls. I'll explain why in a moment. But then to go over to the single mother's families, in the United States today, 53% of women who are under 30 who have children, have children without being married. So then the children then either don't know who their father is or they know their father very minimally or the mother and father live together when they've been married, even though they're not, when they were, had the child, even though they're not married. but on average, within four years, those children don't see their father at all or they see their father very minimally. And it was in those two groups, dad-deprived children where the children did especially badly, but the boys did considerably worse than the girls did. So I came to understand that the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside. Very interesting.

So this boy crisis, what kind of... activity behavior is resulting? What is it that actually constitutes this crisis, boy crisis? The boys are suffering in more than 70 different areas. They're far more likely to commit suicide. So they're far more likely to do badly in school in every single one of their academic subjects, especially reading and writing, which are the biggest predictors of success or failure. They do very badly in mental health. Not only the suicide is an example, but they tend to be much more likely to be depressed, to take drugs, to do things that are symptoms of very bad mental health. They're far more likely to be the mass shooters.

About 90% of the mass shooters that I've studied since Post-Columbine have been boys brought up in homes that have minimal or no father involvement or products of divorce or so on. And so that really shocked me to see that common denominator. I then looked beyond that and went to ISIS recruits. And there was a big study of ISIS recruits that were done, finding that the common denominator among ISIS recruits was dead deprivation. But not only among the boys, but also the female ISIS recruits as well, which of course are in much smaller number.

Then I started looking at the prisoners, the prison population. We all know that 93% of the prisoners are male. but what very few people know is that about 90% of those 93% are dad-deprived boys. And so I started beginning to see, ask myself, you know, why is dad deprivation so powerful and why even more so to boys than girls? And part of it is somewhat understandable, you know, at least children growing up with their mothers who are girls, at least those girls have a same gender role model. and whereas the boys do not.

And especially boys of divorce often feel that their father has abandoned them even when the father might be fighting in court to be more involved with the children. They don't necessarily know that. And so, and they don't see the father. And so they don't, but I'm still asking myself the question as I was doing the research for the boy crisis,

which is, what is, you know, what is, is there something different that dads do than moms do that is, that's making this difference? And I found that there, about nine different ways that I would call dad-style parenting that is very different from mom-style parenting. Now, I want to make it clear that mom-style parenting is also important, but the children that do the best have what I call checks and balance parenting. There's a tension between the mother and a father that's actually a positive tension. So the father says, the child says,

yeah, mom, can I climb the tree? And mom goes, well, I'll tell you what, sweetie, maybe in a couple of years you can climb the tree, but not now. And dad says, ah, he's old. enough to climb the tree. And mom goes, well, if he, you know, after a little bit of a fight, they go, all right, if he's going to climb the tree, make sure you're out there under the tree. And they can climb above these branches and out of these thin branches are much too thin. And give me your cell phone. So you don't get preoccupied with the call and not protect the child by, you know, being under the tree. There's this type of negotiation with boundaries too. So the moms and dads set boundaries very similarly.

They both say you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas. The children, of course, test boundaries. I try to find out how few peas can I have before I get my ice cream. The difference is in the enforcement of boundaries. Moms will tend to say, okay, sweetie, I know you don't want to have your peas and you want to finish the ice cream, but I'll tell you what, you've got to have this many more peas until you finish the ice cream. Then the child realizes, ah, I don't have to finish the piece. I just negotiated a better deal here to have half the peas.

I'll tell you, I'm going to now try to have a quarter of those peas and then get the ice cream. And then mom goes, all right, am I going to get into, he did try to have a few more peas or she did. But, you know, so I'm not going to get into a big argument over a few peas. That's insensitive. You know, especially if there's a divorce. You know, there's a divorce.

The child's feeling like he or she doesn't have a dad. They know this tension. They don't have another, you know, something like that, finds excuses to let the child get away with less. The dad is much more likely to go, excuse me, we have a deal here. The deal here is no ice cream until you finish your peas. You know I have the deal. I know I have the deal.

And you know I know I know you have the deal. And so, oh, dad, you're so mean. Well, then there's no ice cream tomorrow night if you want to keep whining like that. Yeah. That's so interesting that in some ways the dad can be more permissive when it comes to, you know, outdoor stuff. But in other ways, he can be more strict on the rule. that's something that I can certainly relate to in my own upbringing. Tell me more about that.

Well, I mean, it's, you know, growing up, I feel like you're almost describing my dad. You know, he was kind of if my mom was being really overcautious, but I wanted to have fun. My dad, I think, saw that it was important to let me go out and do a boy thing. You know, buy me the big rocket and go out and shoot rockets together. And, I mean, that's just not something that my mom would have been eager to do. Yes. But I can see that being a healthy balance because. because the mom also is considering other factors.

Exactly. Exactly. So I can experientially relate to that, but you're saying the data actually show that this is something that statistically is true? A, this is statistically true, but what I didn't even have a clue about before I did the research for the boy crisis was that the rough housing, for example, is highly correlated with empathy.

So can you imagine a father saying to a mom, oh, I want a roughhouse with my child because it'll make them more empathetic. It's like, you must be kidding. You know, it doesn't seem to be connected at all. It's also more likely to be connected to the child being able to make a distinction between being assertive versus aggressive. And so I'll put all those together in the rough housing example. So dad will sort of throw three kids on the couch and say, okay, your job is to jump on my back and pin me down before I pin you down. All right? All right, dad.

And so they, you know, and mom's looking on and saying, oh, my God, I have like one more child to monitor. called the dad. And so, and mom is going, but the children are having fun. I don't want to interfere, you know, but I just fear,

intuition-wise, I think that sooner or later they're going to end up, something that end up getting hurt. And she's only about, but however, she's only about 99.9% likely to be right.

So sooner or later, you know, one of the children get hurt, starts crying. And dad goes, you know, okay, what happened there

is that Jimmy, you stuck your elbow in Jane's eye. So you can't do that anymore if you want to continue roughhousing. Okay, okay, Dad, let's go back to rough housing. But then they experience what the psychologists call emotional intelligence under fire. And so the children, when they're really excited, they forget about their agreement to not hurt the other child or push the other child aside. And so then the father then says, okay, you did that. So there's no more rough housing tonight.

You can't rough. We won't rough house until tomorrow night. And mom goes, haven't you learned your lesson? You're going back to the rough housing? And now she's really feeling guilty. But the purpose of all this without the dad even knowing it, and the dad doesn't say anything, he doesn't understand what he's doing.

He just does it intuitively. And I don't want to blame moms here because moms can't hear what dads don't say. And so the dad, the following night, though, goes, so Jimmy pushes Jane aside again, and dad goes the following night, okay, no more rough housing. or Jimmy realizes that when dad says there'll be no more roughhousing, if I push my sister aside, I'd rather not push my sister aside and have more rough housing.

Now Jimmy is learning to think of his sister or be empathetic to his sister's needs, not because he's being really inherently empathetic because he knows that he gets what he wants when he thinks about somebody other than himself. And that's the empathy case. connection. But the child also somewhere during that process will maybe push aside too hard, and the boy might say, well, you didn't say I can't push this hard. Well, this is too hard.

This isn't. Now the child's beginning to learn what's assertive versus what's aggressive. Now when a child has empathy and assertiveness and not aggressiveness, and he has that, and she has that because they've learned boundary enforcement from the dad because when the dad says there will be no more roughhousing, the dad, and you violate it, there is no more rough housing. So the children with boundary enforcement are also learning postponed gratification. And postpone gratification is the single biggest predictor of success or failure or success if they have it. And so those children, and here's the slippery slope to the boy crisis, the children with postponed

gratification, who know, have social skills and have empathy skills, they're far more likely to have friends and they're far more likely to feel less depressed and positive about themselves. But with the postponed gratification, they're much more likely to be able to know how to finish their homework, not get sidetracked by an offer to play, and they're more likely to be able to, you know, rehearse for the basketball team or whatever. And so those children are more successful. So therefore, they're more respected by their teachers, their peers, and they get more comments of positive comments at home. And when it comes to boy girl time, girls don't want to go out with losers. They go out with the winners, which means performers. And so the guys who are

the losers, or they become depressed that they're constantly being rejected by the girls, they turn to pornography, get addicted to pornography. And then the girls feel, when they do get interested in possibly being with the boy, they see that the boy is treating them like somebody in a porn movie. They feel objectified because they're being objectified. And so they withdraw, which only proves to the boy that he's no good and is not going to be able to be accepted, which turns him back to pornography, back to depression, often to drugs, off into video game addiction.

And in the worst case scenario, it's become so angry because he's often brought up by mom who says you have special sensitivities and you're wonderful this way and that way. So he's very sensitive to all this rejection. But then he sometimes becomes as a result of that extremely depressed and angry. Because anger is vulnerability's mask. And so beneath his feelings of vulnerability, he's angry that the kids don't pay attention to him, that the girls aren't paying attention to him, that the teachers aren't appreciating special sensitivity,

that mom and dad are talking about the other children, not him. And that's what can lead in worst-case scenarios to mass shootings or school shootings. Wow. So that gets to what you describe in the book as something you call the purpose void. Explain what you mean by that. Historically speaking, every generation of boys had purpose. Because every generation had its war. And parents and the society said, if you participate in this war and you're a Marine or whatever, or especially like a Navy SEAL and elite person, you will be a hero. And so the boy learned that he had purpose. He could be a hero by participating in war. He could be a hero as a sole breadwinner because the moms didn't participate nearly as much in the breadwinning process. Or he could be a sole breadwinner in a hazardous job or he could be a sole breadwinner in an executive position

and maybe die of a heart attack in an early age because he's overworking. And so he learned to feel obligated to earn money that often somebody else spent while he died sooner. And he learned to call that power, but he also learned that if he thought about this process, which he never did in these terms, he learned to be disposable. Disposable in war, disposable in the hazardous jobs in the workplace and so on, or overworking at work. But he had purpose. The good news today is the same as the bad news.

The good news and the bad news is that we need fewer men and males for war. Males are not the sole breadwinner in most cases anymore. and they don't have as much pressure to go to the top of a ladder and die sooner as a result of that pressure. And so we have, but the bad news is that they don't have purpose. So the purpose void is actually a wonderful opportunity if a boy has a mother and father that are helping him discover his own unique self and the purpose that might emanate from the unique self.

but when he doesn't have a mother and father, he oftentimes, the mother will be very supportive of him discovering his purpose. But then he doesn't have the discipline and the postpone gratification to achieve his purpose. So he becomes disappointed in himself that his special gifts that are recognized at home are not being achieved by being an actor because he doesn't have the discipline to rehearse all his lines. And so he starts to be afraid to dream. and when he's afraid to dream he becomes depressed. When that boy has not only a purpose void,

so when a boy has a purpose void and a dad void, those are the ingredients of the boy crisis. When dad is saying it's not good enough to have a dream to be a musician, you've got to practice six or seven hours a day. You want to be in the Olympics? I'm sorry, that's a trade-off. You can't go out with Joe and Jane and go out at night and get drunk and whatever.

you're not going to be an Olympic star if you do that. And so don't give me this stuff about wanting to be in the Olympics if you're not willing to do what it takes to be there. And the mom feels, you know, oh my goodness, you're really being mean to him. And, you know, why are you putting the rules down? Because if he wants a new sense of purpose, something different that is fulfilling, the more fulfilling an occupation is the less it pays. Hence we call starving artists.

Right, right. You know, or, you know, radio broadcaster. You know what I mean? You know, this is why they don't have here in the studio, you know, 70-year-old men or 50-year-old men that have earning $300,000 a year, you know, as a radio broadcaster because it's fulfilling to be, to do what we're doing here. And therefore, there's lots of people who want to do it, therefore it doesn't have to pay as much. Yeah. No, it sort of reminds me of Socrates walking around in poverty, but, you know, he had wisdom. So what else does one need?

Yes. Socrates, Jesus, you know, they were all people who didn't live in mansions. You're right. So, you know, you talk about a lot of the healthy norms that parents can enforce to help their kids become disciplined and to succeed in the world to fulfill their dreams. But it's a painful topic for a lot of people

because they haven't had that in their lives. I think this conversation probably evokes pain for a lot of people who are listening or reading. and for those who've grown up in a broken household or lacked one of their parent figures, what hope would you hold out for them to overcome and break the cycle and to provide for their kids what they didn't receive? That's such an important question. So for every single mom who's listening here, step one is take a careful look in the boy crisis at the differences between dad's style, and mom-style parenting, and all the things that dads do that seem to have no purpose whatsoever,

see if there's any possibility that appreciating your ex-husband for doing that, when men are appreciated, they do what they're appreciated for. When we were appreciated for being, we were called a hero for being in war, we were willing to die, so others would live. That's what's inside of men. that's the core of masculinity. And so you start understanding what your ex does or what the dad does, and you start saying, I really need somebody to enforce those boundaries. I need somebody to go out camping with him.

I need somebody to encourage him to climb the tree when I would not be naturally encouraging to do that. And you understand that all the connections to a healthy upbringing. So that's number one. But let's say this is outside of the realm of possibility because he's not either a lot. or he's just not a constructive person at all. Then the best data is available showing that helping your son get involved in Cub Scouts is very positive about developing character,

helping him become involved in Boy Scouts. In the Boy Crisis book, I talk about, I deconstruct the whole process that the Boy Scouts have created over centuries, and it's an amazing process to bring out the best of masculine, without getting the worst of masculinity. And so very often, Eagle Scouts are very productive in the world.

Third, it's very important to get your son and daughter involved in a faith-based community, but particularly a faith-based community where two things exist. If you have a son, get him involved with a leader in that faith-based community that you trust and sense that is a strong but gentle leader. but also that's the less important thing. The most important thing is that the boy gets together like weekly with a group of other boys about his age and talks what's going on inside of him. Because if he doesn't have a father around, there's a lot going on inside of him.

And when he keeps it to himself and he learns to repress his feelings rather than express his feelings, that's when he starts turning on himself. And boys who hurt hurt us. I gave examples before of the mass shooters. Those are boys who hurt. Dad-deprived boys who hurt from dad deprivation who hurt us mass shootings. Prisoners are all boys willing to hurt us. When boys go from mother-only homes to female-only schools,

and then we wonder why they are attracted to gang leaders, why they're attracted to drug dealers. Historically speaking, when boys were without dads, Hitler recognized that that's where they were vulnerable to join Hitler youth. We have known for a long time that dad-deprived boys, Moynihan in 1965, discovered that the problem in the inner cities was not African-Americans per se. It was only those portions of African-American families where there was dad deprivation. At that point in history, 25% of our African-American boys grew up without dads. Today, 33% of Caucasians grow up.

up with minimal or no father involvement. And 74, 75% of African Americans grow up with minimal or no father involvement. The issue isn't race. The issue is the dad deprivation. And this, again, I started out with 10 causes of the boy crisis. I did not expect to be focused on dad deprivation as being as important as it is. Well, toward the end of the book, you write about the importance of what you call extending gender liberation to dads. And that's a really interesting way to put it. Explain what you mean by that. Yes, I was on the board of directors of the national organization for women in New York City for a number of years. And now has, and the feminist movement has been very disappointing to me because the way Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and I used to talk about it was there was Gloria Steinem used to say there's a need for more women in the workplace and for more men at home.

And Betty Friedan said that, you know, the women's movement would plateau if we didn't start understanding that boys and men's all, boys and men also have issues that we need to deal with. And the way I used to put it was I said, I'm not in favor of a woman's movement saying men are the oppressors. I'm not afraid, I'm not in favor of a men's movement saying that we're, you know, we're oppressed by women or women have more advantages than we have. I don't want that fight. What I'm in favor of, and the reason I'm involved in this,

is because I want a gender liberation movement, where both sexes can be free from the rigid, roles of the past and have more flexible roles for our future, where we value men who are our heroes, who are our firefighters, who are doing the construction for every building that we're living in. Those are men that are contributing an enormous amount to society, but not every man is that way, and every young man is that way. He should also be valued if he can contribute something as a writer, a thinker, a, you know, a teacher, or as a father. And that we have to, because we had a purpose void in the past of warriors, we no longer need as many warriors to kill and be killed

in the fields outside the home. What we need is more fathers to love and be loved inside the home. And so we need to start training father warriors. So when women want to be successful at work, they don't have to say, I can't have it all. I'm so angry that I can't have it all. I want to be a woman who succeeds, but I want to have children that are successful also, and I want to have a husband and a happy marriage. Well, that's possible. And one of the ways it's possible is to choose a man who is interested in being a father warrior, to overcome all the discrimination against fathers being fully involved with the children, and because we know that when children are involved with their fathers full time, and they also have a mother, mothers do not tend to neglect children,

even if they're climbing up the corporate ladder, they make sure they get the home for the children's birthdays and special events, whereas fathers sometimes get carried away with feeling that, okay, I have to travel across the country to do this. I'm so sorry, I'm going to miss your birthday and so on. And without recognizing the toll, feeling that the father, who is only a corporate person and identifies that, oftentimes it doesn't understand how much the children need his set of parenting style as well.

Well, it's a fascinating discussion and I really encourage our listeners to check out the book. It is so important for our culture and society moving forward. The book is called The Boy Crisis, Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About it. It's available on Amazon, also on Audible. Dr. Farrell, thanks for joining us. It's really been a pleasure. You asked very good questions and listen very well. And that'll do it for us today.

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