Family breakdown disproportionately harms young males
by When I started
following the research on child well-being about two decades ago, the focus was
almost always girls’ problems—their low self-esteem, lax ambitions, eating
disorders, and, most alarming, high rates of teen pregnancy. Now, though, with
teen births down more than 50 percent from their 1991 peak and girls dominating
classrooms and graduation ceremonies, boys and men are increasingly the ones
under examination. Their high school grades and college attendance rates have
remained stalled for decades. Among poor and working-class boys, the chances of
climbing out of the low-end labor market—and of becoming reliable husbands and
fathers—are looking worse and worse.
Economists have scratched their heads. “The greatest, most astonishing fact
that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to
hear the labor market screaming out ‘You need more education’ and have been
able to respond to that, and men have not,” MIT’s Michael Greenstone told theNew
York Times. If boys were as rational as their sisters, he implied, they
would be staying in school, getting degrees, and going on to buff their
Florsheim shoes on weekdays at 7:30 AM.
Instead, the rational sex, the proto-homo economicus, is shrugging off
school and resigning itself to a life of shelf stocking. Why would that be?
This spring, another MIT economist, David Autor, and coauthor Melanie
Wasserman, proposed an answer. The reason for boys’ dismal school performance,
they argued, was the growing number of fatherless homes. Boys and young men
weren’t behaving rationally, the theory suggested, because their family
background left them without the necessary attitudes and skills to adapt to
changing social and economic conditions. The paper generated a brief buzz but
then vanished. That’s too bad, for the claim that family breakdown has had an
especially harsh impact on boys, and therefore men, has considerable
psychological and biological research behind it. Anyone interested in the
plight of poor and working-class men—and, more broadly, mobility and the
American dream—should keep it front and center in public debate.
In fact, signs that
the nuclear-family meltdown of the past half-century has been particularly
toxic to boys’ well-being are not new. By the 1970s and eighties, family researchers
following the children of the divorce revolution noticed that, while both girls
and boys showed distress when their parents split up, they had different ways
of showing it. Girls tended to “internalize” their unhappiness: they became
depressed and anxious, and many cut themselves, or got into drugs or alcohol.
Boys, on the other hand, “externalized” or “acted out”: they became more
impulsive, aggressive, and “antisocial.” Both reactions were worrisome, but
boys’ behavior had the disadvantage of annoying and even frightening
classmates, teachers, and neighbors. Boys from broken homes were more likely
than their peers to get suspended and arrested. Girls’ unhappiness also seemed
to ease within a year or two after their parents’ divorce; boys’ didn’t.
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