Solving the ‘Boy Crisis’ in America

In 1984, women began asking the questions: “Where have all the good men gone, / And where are all the gods? / Where’s the streetwise Hercules / To fight the rising odds?”

Thank you, chart-topping singer Bonnie Tyler, in your musical inspiration!

Tyler’s track “Holding Out for a Hero” first hit a nerve again in 1984 in the film “Footloose.” And it continues to hit a nerve at the moment as we discover ourselves in what many name “a boy crisis.”

Brenda Hafera, a frequent visitor on the “Problematic Women” podcast, says this disaster manifests as males and boys are “struggling mentally, physically, academically, economically, and spiritually because of the absence of fathers, the failures of our education system and policies, and changes in both the job market and our culture.” 

As employment and IQ charges for males fell in current years, suicide rates elevated. 

The disaster being skilled by males “is the result of decades of harmful ideas, policies, and even technologies,” Hafera, assistant director and senior coverage analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Simon Center for American Studies, writes in a current report. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s information and commentary outlet.)

“These elements have often exacerbated each other,” Hafera writes, including that “because the state of men helps to shape the state of society, the boy crisis is at once a driver and symptom of fundamental societal ills.” 

the floor, the resolution to the downside is straightforward: good fathers!

Hafera is amongst many students who argue {that a} direct correlation exists between boys and males who’ve a gift, loving father in their lives and charges of success and achievement. Hafera factors to analysis on the significance of fathers, citing the guide “The Boy Crisis” by Warren Farrell and John Gray. 

“Whether or not dad is present impacts school achievement, verbal intelligence and quantitative abilities, school dropouts, employment, suicide, drugs, homelessness, bullying, victimization, violent crime, rape, poverty and mobility, hypertension, trust, and empathy,” Hafera writes. 

Of course, establishing loving fathers in houses throughout America is tougher in follow. So how can this be executed? What are the actual options to the modern-day disaster of males?

“The solutions to the boy crisis will be far-reaching and multitudinous,” Hafera says, “including policies that may not immediately seem obviously relevant to the boy crisis.”

Among them:

• Promoting faculty alternative and classical and civic schooling.
• Disrupting the accreditation monopoly.
• Reforming schools and universities.
• Increasing vocational and apprenticeship applications.
• Invigorating mentorship and single-sex actions and areas.
• Renewing optimistic media portrayals and societal respect for males and fatherhood.
• Establishing and revisiting age-appropriate curtailments on applied sciences, drug insurance policies, welfare and incapacity laws, and household regulation.

Hafera joins the “Problematic Women” podcast to debate how these options can start to deal with the “boy crisis” and what position we as ladies should play. 

Listen to the podcast beneath:

Read Hafera’s full report on “the boy crisis” here.