'Boy crisis' threatens America's future with economic, health and suicide risks

None of the money being demanded in order to improve public education is going to make a damn bit of difference until fathers stick around to raise their children. As much as I rant about the need for reading to be taught phonetically, there is another reason for the steep decline of public schools and for the general lack of academic skills in today's children and young adults - missing fathers. And this tragedy of absent dads is not confined to inner city United States schools.

Boys are falling behind girls in the 63 largest developed nations. As developed nations developed solutions to surviving, they allowed more permission for divorce and for children to be raised with minimal or no father involvement. A great solution — less fear of starvation — created a new problem: dad-deprivation.

I discovered that the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside. For example, The American Psychological Association found that father absence predicts the profile of both the bully and the bullied’s poor social skills, and the bully’s poor grades and self-esteem. According to a study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, every 1% increase in fatherlessness in a neighborhood predicts a  3% increase in adolescent violence. 

It starts early. Before six months of age, the less interaction a boy has with his dad, the lower his mental competence. 

And dad-deprivation is a significant predictor of the increasing rate of male suicide, drug overdose, obesity and withdrawal into video game addiction. It even predicts by age 9 a shorter life expectancy as determined by shorter telomeres, protective end caps of chromosomes. Aggregately, this leads to my predicting that the biggest gap between boys who are successful and unsuccessful in the future will be the gap between those who are dad-enriched versus dad-deprived.

As Powell points out, America exacerbates this problem by falling behind every developed nation in preparing our sons for the changes in technology. In contrast, Japan has extensive vocational education programs, with 99.6% of their graduates receiving jobs after graduation. A boy who is not academically inclined may be bored by physics and chemistry until he learns that to be a highly paid welder, he needs them. Then he sees purpose, and his motivation changes.

The important role of fathers in their children's lives is being ignored or downplayed by a huge number of public policy and citizen organizations from the public schools to Black Lives Matter. They will pull every reason imaginable out of their collective asses for children's failure to thrive except for the most important reason - no dad.

I lived that reality for the 29 years of my teaching career. I spoke to mothers constantly and fathers occasionally. Too many children had that hole in their lives. Nothing will change until policy makers become brave enough to stop subsidizing and encouraging fatherlessness. Currently, and to no one's surprise, the communities in which fatherlessness is normal and accepted are also the ones having the worst schools.

Guess what - there is a connection.