BOYS AND YOUNG MEN ARE IN CRISIS -- BUT IT´S ADULTS WHO NEED EDUCATING / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

Boys and young men are in crisis — but it’s adults who need educating

The real problem is one that hand-wringing over ‘toxic masculinity’ won’t solve

Camilla Cavendish

© Jonathan McHugh

Young men are in trouble. 

But even as this finally starts to be recognised, I worry we will get nowhere if legitimate concerns about knife crime and toxic influencers are turned into just another attack on masculinity.

In recent weeks parents have been rocked by the Netflix drama Adolescence, in which a 13-year-old boy is accused of murdering a girl, after being sucked into a dark world online. 

Sir Gareth Southgate, the former England football manager, has spoken passionately about the need for better role models. 

And a parliamentary committee — uniquely made up of teenagers — this week called for more action against violence on social media.

To our shame, many of us adults are only just waking up to the full horror of the online world, and how it is warping a whole generation’s understanding of sex. 

A review of the impact of online pornography by Baroness Gabrielle Bertin reports that 13 is now the average age at which children first see porn, and that “choking” sex has been normalised. 

The organisation Everyone’s Invited has documented increasing instances of male pupils using misogynistic language against female teachers and harassing girls even at primary school.

Is the answer to show Adolescence in the classroom, as the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has suggested? 

I’m not sure that children need even more exposure to such horrors. 

It’s we adults who need educating. 

It’s schools that should stop insisting that every child has a tablet and that homework is done online. 

It’s ministers who ought to ban smartphones from secondary schools — and implement Bertin’s recommendation to make online videos subject to the same classification as offline. 

It’s absent fathers who need to step up. According to the Centre for Social Justice, British boys are more likely to own a smartphone than live with their biological father. 

The “manosphere” fills the void.

The TV drama is a useful starting point for parents to talk to their children. 

But we need to remember that boys are victims too. 

Men are far more likely than women to kill themselves, to be homeless, to drop out of university. 

Academically, boys lag behind girls from the age of five. 

Since the pandemic, the number of 16 to 24-year-old men not in education, employment or training in the UK has risen by 40 per cent — with only a 7 per cent increase among women.

This is a crisis. 

What do we do about it? 

We have spent years encouraging girls to fulfil their potential. 

Now, we may need to look in the other direction. 

Richard Reeves, author of the book Of Boys and Men and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has documented the many ways in which low-income boys are falling behind, and the tragic loneliness and purposeless that afflicts them as adults. 

Working-class men in America are the least likely of any group to be married, or to have a close friend.

One of Reeves’ suggestions is that boys should start kindergarten a year later than girls and give them an extra year of preparation in pre-school, since they mature later. 

This simple idea makes a lot of sense — especially with research now showing that boys lag behind girls substantially in social development. 

But I haven’t seen any serious discussion about making it happen. 

While I’ve spoken to some teachers who are sympathetic, others say it is antifeminist. 

That is unhelpful. 

Women, especially mothers, are still disadvantaged in some ways. 

But we should be able to care about both female disadvantage and male underachievement.

In his recent lecture, Southgate described modern young men as “feeling isolated . . . grappling with their masculinity and with their broader place in society”. 

I suspect we don’t fix that by the routine juxtaposition of the words “toxic” and “masculinity”.

With schools and universities now giving young people mandatory consent lessons, there is a sense that every man is only one step away from becoming an “incel”. 

Recently, doing interviews with young men on both sides of the Atlantic, I was saddened to find that some only discovered Andrew Tate because young women kept mentioning him — and saying things like “all men are scum”. 

So, they googled.  

The majority of young men who have heard of Tate disapprove of him, according to polls. 

What they want, perhaps, is a more positive narrative about masculinity. 

Helping boys to be resilient and empathetic may mean sport, youth clubs, stronger families and risk-taking. 

Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Anxious Generation, argues that children are being hit by a double whammy of exposure to social media and parental reluctance to let them take even the most basic risks. 

Erica Komisar, a New York psychoanalyst, says that young adults are suffering because parents expect too much too early — leaving them for hours in day care — and then overprotect them as teenagers, obsessing over grades.

One striking finding is the extent to which women have overtaken men in higher education and in the workplace in the past 30 years. 

Women in the UK are now 35 per cent more likely to go to university than their male peers. 

Yet while there are many programmes encouraging more girls to study Stem subjects, there doesn’t seem to be much equivalent encouraging boys to take English or nursing.

I raised this with a friend who mentors female students in Stem. 

She said that a lot of male students had asked if she could mentor them too. 

And that is surely how it should be. 

To care about boys and men doesn’t mean we have turned against women. 

If we don’t care, the vacuum will be filled by the wrong voices.