Men and boys are struggling socially and mentally. Photo / 123RF
Herald columnist and Radio Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath is taking on a new role as Happiness Editor for our Great Minds mental health project. He will share his own insights in his search for wellbeing as well as interviews with international experts in the field.
Boys and men are struggling in every advanced economy in the world. Recent figures show the percentage of domestic university students in New Zealand who are men has reached an all-time low of 39 per cent. There are concerns that men will find themselves shut out of highly skilled jobs.
Men are also struggling socially and mentally. They are dislocated, isolated, disoriented and lacking a script to follow, which isn’t good for anyone. As Professor Scott Galloway said on Real Time with Bill Mayer this week: “The most unstable nations in the world have one thing in common, they have too many lonely, broke men.”
Richard Reeves is a social scientist at the Brookings Institution, working on issues of economic inequality. His new book is Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about it. This is part two of our two-part interview in which we look at his solutions. Read part one if you get a chance. It’s fascinating, although I did get a bit bogged down in how much Reeve looks like Christian Bale playing Bruce Wayne in the Dark Knight. I won’t be making that mistake this week.
Q. Richard, women might ask why the hell they should care that men are doing poorly. What is the downside for them?
Well, on a personal level. I know a lot of moms are really worried about their sons and spending a lot of time having to look after them and help them launch into society. I think that if we had education systems that were more boy-friendly, that would take some pressure and stress off parents, including a lot of moms. It doesn’t help family finances if the men struggle to find work with decent pay. Also, I talk to a lot of young women who can see their male peers struggling. I sense that women want flourishing men. They want men with purpose and strength. Very few people are excited by the idea of having a partner that’s failing. That doesn’t mean we don’t help our partners and support them, but a flourishing world for men is a better one for women too.
Q. Do you see any practical solutions out there?
I think we need to invest more in apprenticeships and vocational training, which research suggests is better for boys and men. I think we need more male teachers. I don’t know what it’s like in New Zealand, but In the US now, only 24 per cent of our school teachers are male. I think more men in the classroom is hugely important. Only one in 10 elementary school teachers are male, and there are no men, essentially in early years education. In the US, a woman is twice as likely to be flying a military jet as a man is to be teaching kindergarten. Many of the growing sectors of the economy are in areas that are traditionally seen as female. Like nursing, social work and mental health care. Those are massively female-dominated professions and becoming more so over time. So I think subsidising and incentivising men into those professions is hugely important, for the professions themselves, the people who use them and for the men because that’s where a lot of jobs of the future are coming from. Then, in terms of fatherhood. I think we need to promote the institution of fatherhood as valuable in and of itself, independent of marriage, based on equal rights to paid leave and a fairer system of custody and care after separation or divorce. I think a cultural rethinking of fatherhood is important. Husband and father have been a one-stop shop, a bundle if you like, but that’s not true anymore. I think we need to send a message to fathers through policy and rhetoric that they matter as fathers, not just as breadwinners, not just as husbands, as fathers, period. I think the future is fatherhood, out of marriage and in.
Q. Regarding education, the problem for boys seems to be across the board. Is there something fundamental in males preventing us from succeeding compared to females?
There’s this huge gender gap in education at pretty much every level in every advanced economy. It’s not just math in New Zealand and English in Finland. It’s every subject at every level. So you would have to say something deeper is going on here. I think it’s actually very simple. Boys mature more slowly than girls; boys' brain development, on average, lags behind girls, especially in adolescence, by somewhere between one and two years. So if you have an education system that treats a 15-year-old girl and 15-year-old boys as if they’re the same, it’s no surprise that the 15-year-old girl is doing better. And so I propose to start boys in school a year later. So they’ll be chronologically a year older than the girls in their class, which means that developmentally they’ll be a little bit closer. Wait till their prefrontal cortex has gotten bigger so that they can actually do their homework.
Q. If this is related to prefrontal cortex development, why are we only seeing it manifest in bad outcomes for boys now? It can’t be a new situation.
It is a really interesting example of an institutional disadvantage that boys face, which has been revealed by the success of the women’s movement. We didn’t know that the education system was structured in favour of girls when girls didn’t go to college and into careers, but now that they are, this inequality has been revealed. So it’s a real test of our ability to go, oh wait, hang on, what’s happening here? And to restructure the education system in a way that is more equal for boys.
With that, I let Richard go, resisting the temptation to mention how much he looks like Bruce Wayne. One last thing word on the struggles of men, as Prof Galloway pointed out.
“Only one in three men under the age of 30 in America have had sex in the last year. There’s a key step to the elemental foundation of any society, and that is relationships. Young men aren’t attaching to work. They aren’t attaching to women; they aren’t attaching to schools. We have a crisis among young men. We are producing too many of the most dangerous person in the world. In my view, it’s one of the most dangerous things in our society.”
From what I can tell, Richard Reeves has some of the best solutions.
• Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It by Richard V Reeves.
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