Boys will always have professional athletes and musicians to look up to, but as the New York Times’s Claire Cain Miller correctly notes, it is the adults that children “personally know” and see on a daily basis who have the most positive effect on children.
And for boys, those role models are disappearing.
Miller pieces together data from the Census Bureau, the Pew Research Center, and many other sources to show that pretty much every source of authority in a boy’s life is dominated by women.
Just 3% of preschool teachers are men, according to Miller’s data, while women make up 94% of child care workers, 79% of guidance counselors, and 57% of high school teachers. Just “coaches” (74% male) and “scout leaders” (67% male) stand out as islands of male authority, and even then, with “Boy Scouts of America” recently becoming “Scouts of America,” forcing more girls into what had previously been an all-boy space, even the percentage of male scout leaders is set to decline.
Miller notes that many of these professions that have become almost completely dominated by women had more male representation decades ago. As recently as 1980, men made up 40% of elementary school teachers, a percentage that has fallen to just over 20% today.
And the loss of male role models has not been good for boys. Girls now score better on reading tests than boys, they get better grades, are more likely to graduate from high school, are more likely to go to college, and are more likely to graduate from college. Boys, meanwhile, are more likely to get suspended from school and more likely to end up living with their parents.
To her credit, Miller does admit that while men have been exiting child-focused professions such as elementary school teachers, “over roughly the same period, single-mother households became more common.”
But then when it comes time to look for solutions to the problem, Miller has nothing to say about helping young men and women get and stay married. Instead, she suggests “there needs to be more of a focus on recruiting and training men to work with children,” perhaps including “formal recruiting initiatives” for jobs that involve “work with young children, like teaching.”
But as great as having slightly more male elementary school teachers would be, would that really solve the problem? As Miller notes, “black boys do better in neighborhoods where there are more fathers around, even if not their own.”
Having more male teachers in school won’t increase the number of fathers in a neighborhood. But you know what will? Marriage. Miller never mentions this little fact.
THERE IS NO FEMINIST SOLUTION TO THE FERTILITY CRISIS
The reality is that boys are suffering because marriage is suffering. In the 1960s, just over 10% of all children did not live with both married parents. Today, almost 40% do. And the results, particularly for boys, for children raised without a married father in the home are not good.
The most important role model in any boy’s life is his father. And without marriage, there are simply a lot fewer fathers around for boys to learn from.