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We’re Losing Our Boys
The latest tragedies, raw and painful, seem to be reflecting a similar thread: young men. Look at the age of the recent shooter at a Walmart in Texas (21 years old,) the killer in Dayton (24), the age of the boy being accused of the murder of the young co-ed at Ole Miss. Look at the ages of the boys on a murderous rampage across Canada, the Florida school shooting, the recent California shooting at the Garlic Festival, the Synagogue in Pittsburgh. They are all young men consumed with hate and vengeance, and armed to do as much damage as possible. They leave “manifestos,” they shout, “I’m angry!”, they cease to think and feel, or see their fellow human beings as part of their world.
The struggle to find blame is next. Social media, politics, violent video games, rampant porn and the new virile push of social engineering are playing a role. Young men begin as young boys, innocent, but are being influenced by all of these things, and their core personalities, their sense of self, is being corrupted, at younger and younger ages. I am not sympathizing with the killers, these acts are beyond despicable, but the patterns are showing these similarities.
The radical group Antifa, whose network now stretches across the continent to Europe, is composed of young men mostly, very angry, courting physical confrontation, and at the very least, intimidation and control. Young women have become more fearful and maybe rightly so. I have to think that the removal of boundaries, lack of consequences for actions, monitoring what is being taught in schools, what is accessible on the Internet, the decline of the family and faith, are now all bearing rotten fruit. The family and the Church have always been the armor before sending young people into the world to live their dream and find their purpose, and to sustain them going forward.
Now social engineering is producing rampant gender confusion, separation of families, labeling any word spoken as questionable, even the words “male and female.” A baby boy is born with more testosterone, more aggression than baby girls. This is natural and trying to re-direct this physical difference (among others) into some sort of “neutral,” neutered safe expression isn’t working. Neither is labeling people as racist, sexist, homophobic, at every turn.
A mind and soul that is influenced only by a cell phone or computer screen will eventually cease to look up and see the natural world and their place in it, will not feel and relate to actual people or care. They eventually believe the simulated world is what’s real and has all the answers, and become cut off from meaningful life that brings balance and forms healthy people. They eventually become cut off from themselves, unable to think rationally and are easily manipulated. We’re losing our youth – our boys to rage and hate more each day because of this separation from real life.
The state can’t solve this, or hardening more “soft targets,” or ignoring laws, screening more social media, and expecting those things to produce more stable and balanced human beings. The human person is both body and soul – there isn’t one without the other. The fact that some “men’s hearts have grown cold,” indifferent and lifeless, is going to keep happening unless we get back to the basics. I recently read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Men – a classic. It’s simple, heartfelt, beautiful – a tiny manual in the formation of youth, the recognition that boys are boys and need guidance and love to become solid, stable, strong and hopeful adults. It’s a sort of God’s blueprint in miniature. There is no better Architect.
Boys haven’t changed, but society has. I hope we can find a way to save our boys. What can we do now?
Published in General
FSC,
Yes, FSC, yes you are right.
Regards,
Jim
There are many causes for why we are “losing” our young men, but front and center should be the dissolution of our families and the lack of fatherhood.
Reports indicate that 29% of White Children, 56% of Latino Children and 74% of Black Children are born to households without a father. Of those children born to a family with a father, roughly 50% of those children will see their parents divorce and roughly 40% of the time the father in the divorce will not get child visitation.
Finally after lo these many years of wreckage of the American family, some social and psychological researches have come to what should have been an obvious conclusion: that boys are more affected girls by the loss of the father in the home. Since I work with construction crews often, I cannot tell you how many gut wrenching stories I hear of a young man who is now divorced and has lost visitation of his children. Too much of the time I hear a tale of young divorced mothers who vindictively turn their children against their father after she has successfully pushed him out of the picture. The “system” of children support, divorce payments, and welfare support fully encourages this kind of divorce situation.. One should not be surprised by the psychological toll that takes on children.
The lack of a father in a home, for whatever the cause, is a devastating one psychologically for most children. These children after often emotionally wounded by the experience , often unable to fully develop their lives to their potential because of insecurities brought on by the trauma of being raised only by one parent and or divorce. One should expect a significant rise in mental illness in a society where children are raised by dysfunctional one parent families.
Men and Women generally come to the family situation with different abilities and fulfill the range of family responsibilities of financial support, nurturing, defining of boundaries etc with different and generally complementary points of view. Current educational notwithstanding, Men and Women are different and nature used that difference as a benefit to the raising of a family.
So one should not be surprised by the millions of young men we have “lost”.
This is the common denominator. It’s what surfaces every time we look at one of these. It’s the virtually 100% common thread among gang members and everything that goes with that. It’s the thread that links the overwhelming majority of men in prison.
It’s the lack of fathers above all else.
Nope. The lack of a second nurturing parent is devastating. The loss of a sick, vindictive, abusing one? Not so much.
Being raised by one parent isn’t the trauma. The divorce isn’t the trauma. The trauma is the sick relationships that cause divorce and cause the trauma. Children raised by widows don’t have these problems.
We talk about one-parent homes and talk about single mothers, as if they’re somehow defective and deficient. They’re not. There have been one parent homes since the beginning. It is homes that lack a duality and lack an interest in duality. Homes that have no father role, have no male role, no female role, no gendered roles at all, have problems. These problems are from a lack of understanding that one parent cannot do it all. In working single parent homes, there is an understanding of a parent that is away (not missing!). The parent that is away, is away for a reason, but always present in some form. The role is still filled by an uncle or aunt or other family member. There is still a gendered role model.
We need to understand where the break down is. It is before marriage. Marriage does not solve it, nor does having a family.
The break down is sooner than that. It is in the understanding of complimentary systems and how relationships work together to create a home.
Don’t forget the tales of young divorced fathers who want nothing to do with their children until their mothers are done raising them for them.
Then in their 50’s walk her down the aisle as if they had something to do with it.
And it’s the one thing the government cannot admit.
Communities need a critical mass of fathers. A neighborhood is better, if there are multiple dads out doing lawn work and giving strangers the once-over and chatting about the health of the block.
Is part of the problem considering males in their early 20s boys?
I call them boys because it seems there’s a lack of maturity among that age group today as compared to the past. I’m amazed how how many young guys I see, with beards on skateboards! I wonder why aren’t they working?
My sister works in child support – she has a lot of stories about young men who have abandoned their kids as you say, and its across the board. The one with financial means hide it, scream at her, they give their mother’s address, then there are the abusers and there is discretion as to protect the mother, then the ones on drugs who come to court in their pajamas unbathed – it’s a mess. She has to stay neutral (and pleasant), offer job services, and at the end of the day its about how the numbers look – how many cases and how much money was collected – it affects federal funding, but the system is broken and overwhelmed. The breakdown is the family unit.
I would encourage you to boost your co-workers to seek visitation rights – they just give up too easily. At the end of the day, the kids just want a relationship with their parents – especially boys with their dads, even dysfunctional dads. Helping both would go a long way.
Nailed it.
Not “considering.” Being raised without a healthy adult male role model and guide, too many never become adults at all. They remain children in adult bodies. And that is very dangerous.
Years ago I heard Paul Harvey, on one of his “Rest of the Story” programs, talk about the differences in how boys and girls, and eventually men and women, fight. He said that as boys grow to men, they (normally, healthily) come to realize that they are big and strong enough to kill a person fairly easily. But they also realize that even if they’re mad enough to fight somebody, they don’t want that outcome. So the manner in which we fight, if we fight at all, changes. This transition doesn’t always happen in the absence of an adult male to model what an adult male is supposed to be.
@therightnurse, above, and I, hardly disagree, I should mention. It’s true that many or most children raised in a single parent household turn out okay. But widows, for instance, are in a very different category than the other types of absent fathers. There’s little difference between a completely absent father and an abusive one. And to add to that, the question of whether the “father figure” is the biological father, or something else, also becomes significant. Based on my experience, in most cases, an abusive “father figure” in a house with growing children is usually boyfriend #X – a “father figure” in the eyes of the mother only.
Which brings to mind a movie: “Second Hand Lions.”
I read a while back that although the general statistical outcomes for boys raised by single mothers is much worse than the outcomes for boys raised by married parents, the statistical outcomes for boys raised by single mothers living in areas in which married parenting is the norm are almost the same as the outcomes for the boys raised by married parents. So, I agree that the problem is a lack of husbands and fathers in the neighborhood in general, not necessarily in any specific family.
Yep, excellent summation.
Regards,
Jim
Depends on the father too. Not all fathers are a good role model.
Of course there have always been bad fathers. Both my grandfathers, whom I never met, abandoned their families.
That said, the high incidence of fatherless homes has to be a major cause of mental problems in our children, particularly our boys. Remember, we are several generations downstream from the beginning of a torrent of fatherless families. In some ways it just becomes a numbers game of percentages. The incidence of dysfunctional children raises dramatically with the loss of a parent and builds generation after generation. It then becomes a much higher probability in that situation where you will have many young men ( and young women as well) who are not good parents and so the dysfunction multiplies.
And yes, a single mother can raise good children but it is much more difficult. Some studies suggest that single parent households run by the mother are seven times more likely to live in poverty over a two parent household. That is a one hell of a obstacle to overcome despite the best intentions. People living in poverty are surrounded by bad influences and bad situations that can be overwhelming for a single poor parent.
Last week, I ran into a Security supervisor at a local mall in a depressed California desert town that had become a magnet for the down and out. His stories were horrific. Many of the young men in this town had no functioning families, and grew up wanting to be in a gang which has come to substitute for the family they never had. As a result communities like this have become breeding grounds for the Cartel and the Mexican Mafia, which then begin to exert control of these communities in ways that we will come to greatly regret.
I agree that the problem is the breakdown of marriage and family.
I do not agree that it is fair to blame “young men who have abandoned their kids.” The goal, I think, should be to promote healthy and stable married families. Current law has the effect of encouraging young women to have children out of wedlock, generally gives them near-total control over the child’s life, but requires the young man to pay. The young man does not get the benefit of being a respected husband and father. He is essentially relegated to the role of being the mother’s ATM.
I actually place more of the blame on young women, as they are the goalkeepers in the system, biologically speaking. I certainly acknowledge that they are taught by the culture, and particularly by feminist ideology, to behave irresponsibly.
Feminism seems to be the principal root of the problem. Welfare is probably a secondary, but still important, root cause.
Very good points – we know of quite a few circumstances where young women play the system, have multiple fathers to their children, and bounce from one bad situation to another. Welfare reform could help, but no one will turn down the needs of a mother.
Excellent OP and comments. I don’t agree, however, that fatherless boys suffer more than fatherless girls. The latter are too often ripe pickings for being trafficked, for falling for the wrong men, for using and abusing men. Fatherless boys simply express their rootlessness in a different, and sometimes more violent way, a way that gets a lot more press.
As for abusive fathers, of course divorce is better than being subjected to abuse, but I think that even so, in most cases the divorce is in itself a painful abuse from the child’s point of view.
I think it is worth pointing out, too, that, in this as in many other instances, the educated classes have promoted unhealthy choices and ideologies that affect themselves much less than they do the less well off.
Mothers bear some responsibility for this. Coupling with a guy who would make a [redacted] father is irresponsible, even if they aren’t setting out to reproduce.
That should enter the equation before hooking up.
Good points and here’s a question – Feminism took a firm hold back in the 60’s and forward, started to gain equal access to pay, promotions, respect in the workplace etc. Those things were achieved for the most part. So why is there a #MeToo movement, why human trafficking and the exploitation of young girls in this day and age after all these years? Read any fashion magazine – look at the ads. The pressure to look and be perfect, airbrushed, the Botox, breast implants, rear end “enhancement”? I don’t think there is any more respect between the sexes today at all, maybe less. Is there still a disconnect between expectations and reality in relationships and a breakdown of actual communication? So much anger, depression and suicide among the young – why?
They are two sides to the same coin and both are seeing a rise in our culture, however, the consequences of the boys seems to cast a far wider net whose effect we have seen 3 incidents of in 1 week.
There also seems in spite of social media, actual talking. Who is communicating about feeling overwhelmed or threatened? How can we expect to see something, say something if people are holding it all in?
Men and their natural aggressiveness seem to make them more apt to to commit these crimes than women.
“The latter are too often ripe pickings for being trafficked, for falling for the wrong men, for using and abusing men.”
All children from dysfunctional families are much more likely to be abused by strangers, kidnapped etc. The abusing sickos seem to sense kids from those situations and prey on them.
The growing sex trafficking problem is a big problem for young girls and there are many bad situational problems for young teenage girls in this culture that boys don’t face.
All that said, the deck is often stacked against young boys from fatherless families.
• These boys don’t have a role model of their gender to emulate, and far too often the mother denigrates men because of her situation. Those are early childhood problems the girls won’t face.
• Our schools too often treat young boys as toxic. The curriculum and school atmosphere has been purposely developed to develop young girls at the expense of young boys. Again these fatherless boys in their early school days will be confronted far too often with politically correct female teachers that have been taught to hate men, and these young boys will often have no strong male role model in the school setting to emulate. Women teachers often don’t have empathy for young boys, but do for girls. As a result, these days, girls are more often likely to go to college by a 58 to 42 margin, and have higher starting salaries in the workforce. Our economic policies have also developed female friendly work settings over male friendly ones like manufacturing. It should not be a surprise that 25% of young black adults are in prison. The “system” was designed to encourage that.
Feminism, of course, is only about respect for women, so no surprise that relations between the sexes have declined. I suppose the #MeToo movement deserves its own OP but the short answer is that feminism included an insistence that women be free from being seen or treated as an object. Uh-huh, right. I think the movement produced some hard-as-nails types and certainly some ambitious women who accepted some nasty ways to rise in their professions, and some who were naive enough to be surprised when they ran up against the Harvey Weinsteins. (Where were their fathers?) As for the ads, when moral standards fall—which occurred concomitant with the feminist movement—the trash piles up.
Yes, and more journalistically shocking and more consequential politically for the time being, but I don’t know that the net is really wider. If I may suggest women are meant to be a civilizing influence, which includes supporting traditional marriage, throttling their ability to civilize is disastrous.
I really don’t want to take away, though, from the point of the OP. Boys and men in America are not doing well.
Ahem.
Losing our youth to me is more than painful. What do we as the older generations, have to hand off to the future generations? They will be in charge, including in charge of us as we age. What kind of world will that be? I have a major issue with the sort of indoctrination of children that we’ve witnessed over the last few years – it’s unprecedented. The role of parents is being diminished, the teaching of how to parent is being diminished, and the family is everything. It’s the pillar of civilization, so what we are witnessing is the crumbling of the pillar – after that, the world will not be fit to live in.
I hope that the talking points that Washington embraces time after time when these kinds of tragedies occur, the candidates running for president, the social media stars, all of them, can see this. Hitting a re-set button, and reinvigorating what has been cast aside including American history, morality, values, consequences for actions, rule of law, respect for differences, I think is the only way to try to stem the toxic wave that seeks to drown our youth.