Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves has a new book titled Of Boys and Men, in which he helpfully documents all the ways men and boys are rapidly falling behind girls and women.
Girls perform better than boys in elementary and high school. They go to college at higher rates and graduate from college more often too. While men’s real wages have fallen since 1979, women’s wages have risen. And men have far higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide than women do.
Reeves blames the decline of men on equality of opportunity for women, an education system more friendly to female development, and a changing economy that increasingly values emotional intelligence over physical strength.
This is a decent explanation, but he leaves one big factor out we’ll come back to later.
To help men catch up with women, Reeves has some small-ball ideas, such as giving boys an extra year of government-run pre-K, so that they start Kindergarten a year later than girls. He also wants new government programs to help push men into more “HEAL” jobs (health, education, administration, and literacy).
Like most conservatives, I am skeptical of the value of government-run pre-K programs, and like Patrick Brown, I don’t see the point of pushing men into vocations to which, as Reeves readily admits, they are not predisposed.
But back to Reeves’s diagnosis of the problem. He left out one big factor in the decline of men: the decline of marriage.
Not only are married families better environments for all children, but having a married father in the house is particularly important for boys. As MIT economist David Autor and UCLA economist Melanie Wasserman recently noted:
“Although male and female children within a given household are theoretically exposed to the same environment — including schools, neighborhoods, and adult guardians — the increasing prevalence of female-headed households implies that the majority of girls continue to cohabit with their same-sex biological parent who will likely serve as a same-sex role model. By contrast, male children raised in female-headed households are less likely to have a positive male adult household member present that serves an analogous role. A growing body of evidence, summarized below, indicates that the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.”So, a big reason men are declining relative to women is that the growth of single-parent households headed by women is particularly harmful to boys. Reeves doesn’t address this at all.
In fact, Reeves is outright hostile to marriage. In a separate blog post, Reeves writes, “Marriage and motherhood are no longer virtually synonymous. About 40% of births in the U.S. now take place outside marriage, up from just 11% in 1970. (A particularly striking trend is the decline in “shotgun” marriages). From a feminist perspective, which to be clear is my perspective, these are marvelous developments.”
So the decline of marriage is a “marvelous development,” according to Reeves. In its place, Reeves wants to replace marriage with a focus on just fatherhood. “Pro-social masculinity no longer means having to get married or having to be the main breadwinner,” Reeves writes, “but it does mean stepping into the role of father.”
Mmmkay… but what happens when a man fathers a child with a woman and she doesn’t want to get married? Is he supposed to remain celibate for the rest of his life? Because here in the real world, that is not what is happening. In fact, almost 50% of men who father children outside of marriage go on to have at least one child with another woman. Will these fathers invest equal time and resources into their children equally? Of course not. No one with even a passing familiarity with human nature would say so.
Moreover, there is research that shows men invest more and spend more time with the biological children of the woman they are currently sleeping with than the children of women they used to sleep with. Also not a surprise.
How does Reeves propose we force these men to be good fathers to all the children they are having with all their different baby mommas? He’s got nothing.
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Thousands of years ago, Western civilization came up with a way to bind men and women into an exclusive cooperative relationship that has proven to be the best way to assure the development of children. It’s called monogamous marriage. Reeves and his feminist allies should look into it.
