The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
In his landmark 2022 book “Of Boys and Men,” Richard Reeves chronicled the falling fortunes of America’s young men. He found that men aren’t attending college at the same rate as women — higher ed is now about 60% female. In elementary and high school, boys make up two-thirds of the worst-performing students. And we know that 1 in 4 men without college degrees are not employed full-time.
Most importantly, men are between two and three times as likely as women to suffer “deaths of despair” — death by alcohol, drug use or suicide. Hundreds of thousands of men have died from deaths of despair in the past two decades.
Half a century ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead memorably argued that a healthy nation must have a place for its men. “The recurrent problem of civilization,” Mead wrote, “is to define the male role satisfactorily enough.” Men need a mission. When they can’t find it in family life, societies flounder.
This couldn’t be more visible for our kids. Our research at the Institute for Family Studies has demonstrated the catastrophic social consequences of absentee fatherhood and family breakdown. When children are raised outside of an intact family, those children are markedly more likely to struggle in school, to tangle with the law and to struggle in the workforce. The data show a clear “two-parent advantage” for kids, especially boys. Our most striking finding is that boys raised outside of an intact family with two biological parents are more likely to go to prison or jail than they are to graduate from college. By contrast, boys raised by their two married, biological parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college as they are to land in prison.
But there’s another surprising discovery in the data. Stable marriages don’t just benefit kids. Married fatherhood greatly benefits the men in those marriages, too.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
