The Crisis of Boys and Young Men

By Student Mastery

Richard Reeves, from The Brookings Institute, a think tank where I had a brief stint, has written a seminal work Of Boys and Men.

Some nuggets from his book:

If you are a parent of a boy…

They are struggling in the classroom. American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be “school ready” than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10% of the class, ranked by GPA, are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys.

If you are parent of a young man or soon to be young man….

Men are also struggling in the workplace. One in three American men with only a high school diploma — 5 million men — is now out of the labor force. The biggest drop in employment is among young men ages 25 to 34. Men who entered the workforce in 1983 will earn about 10% less in real terms in their lifetimes than those who started a generation earlier. Over the same period, women’s lifetime earnings have increased 33%. Pretty much all of the income gains that middle-class American families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women’s earnings.

I have worked with teens and young adults for the last 20 years.  Anecdotally, I have mounds of stories (that amount to evidence) related to the same.

Given that my client base consists of Shoreline, CT high school students primarily, one would think that students in Guilford, Madison, Old Saybrook, Old Lyme, Essex, East Lyme etc. are not suffering similar fates.  But that’s not true.

When I first started the work, boys and girls/men and women were achieving at the same rate.  I then started noticing that boys were getting less motivated.  I wrote my first book – Motivate Your Son based on my work.  This was 10 years ago. Since then, the problem has only accelerated.

We can help.

Here’s an article that fully discusses