Something ominous is happening to young men today; it’s a crisis…and strangely, we are not talking about it.
A recent USA Today article captured the essence of the crisis with the article “Boy Crisis Threatens America’s Future with Economic, Health and Suicide Risks.” It was written by Warren Farrell, co-author of the important book, The Boy Crisis. In the article Farrell quoted Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell who described the issue as both “a future national economic problem” and “a national security problem.”
Why would he say that? What is the crisis?
Consider the following statistics:
- The male suicide rate is 4.5 times higher than women
- 93% of prisoners are men.
- Males are two times as likely as women to become addicted to drugs and alcohol.
- The number of young adult men saying that ‘having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in life’ has decreased to less than 30%. The majority of all children are now born outside of wedlock in the USA.
- Males are not seeking to date woman as they did in the past. Twelfth graders saying they have never dated increased from 15% forty years ago to nearly 50% recently.
- 76% of young men are now regularly using pornography.
- 20% of young men are now living at home with their parents into their 30s.
What is happening to young men?
The last 50 years has shown a decline in male representation in higher learning as well. Consider how men compare to their female counterparts:
- Fewer males are graduating from high school than women.
- Fewer males are graduating from college than women. In the 25-34 age group, 37.5 percent of women have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 29.5 percent of men. (This from 47% of women and 57% of men in 1967.)
Women now outnumber men seeking master’s degrees, law degrees, medical degrees, and PhDs. All while men are spending inordinate amounts of time focused on video games, pornography, and other activities best described as ‘fantasy.’
A recent article in Healthy Living, entitled “The Decline of Men,” (click here https://www.lakehealthyliving.com/the-decline-of-men/) summarized the state of manhood this way:
After decades and decades of social dominance, men are now entering adulthood with less education, less money, less ambition, and fewer achievements than their female counterparts.
Join Bobby Harrington and Robert Lewis for an important conversation on these and other facts about manhood today … and how the church needs to do something about it.
