[Mb-civic] What's Happening to Boys? - Leonard Sax - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

What's Happening to Boys?
Young Women These Days Are Driven -- but Guys Lack Direction
<>By Leonard Sax
The Washington Post
Friday, March 31, 2006; A19

The romantic comedy "Failure to Launch," which opened as the No. 1 movie 
in the nation this month, has substantially exceeded pre-launch 
predictions, taking in more than $64 million in its first three weeks.

Matthew McConaughey plays a young man who is affable, intelligent, 
good-looking -- and completely unmotivated. He's still living at home 
and seems to have no ambitions beyond playing video games, hanging out 
with his buddies (two young men who are also still living with their 
parents) and having sex. In desperation, his parents hire a professional 
motivation consultant, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who pretends to 
fall in love with McConaughey's character in the hope that a romantic 
relationship will motivate him to move out of his parents' home and get 
a life.

The movie has received mixed reviews, though The Post's Stephen Hunter 
praised it as "the best comedy since I don't know when." But putting 
aside the movie's artistic merits or lack thereof, I was struck by how 
well its central idea resonates with what I'm seeing in my office with 
greater and greater frequency. Justin goes off to college for a year or 
two, wastes thousands of dollars of his parents' money, then gets bored 
and comes home to take up residence in his old room, the same bedroom 
where he lived when he was in high school. Now he's working 16 hours a 
week at Kinko's or part time at Starbucks.

His parents are pulling their hair out. "For God's sake, Justin, you're 
26 years old. You're not in school. You don't have a career. You don't 
even have a girlfriend. What's the plan? When are you going to get a life?"

"What's the problem?" Justin asks. "I haven't gotten arrested for 
anything, I haven't asked you guys for money. Why can't you just chill?"

This phenomenon cuts across all demographics. You'll find it in families 
both rich and poor; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; urban, suburban 
and rural. According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men 
ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents -- a roughly 
100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred 
with regard to young women. Why?

My friend and colleague Judy Kleinfeld, a professor at the University of 
Alaska, has spent many years studying this growing phenomenon. She 
points out that many young women are living at home nowadays as well. 
But those young women usually have a definite plan. They're working 
toward a college degree, or they're saving money to open their own 
business. And when you come back three or four years later, you'll find 
that in most cases those young women have achieved their goal, or 
something like it. They've earned that degree. They've opened their 
business.

But not the boys. "The girls are driven; the boys have no direction," is 
the way Kleinfeld summarizes her findings. Kleinfeld is organizing a 
national Boys Project, with a board composed of leading researchers and 
writers such as Sandra Stotsky, Michael Thompson and Richard Whitmire, 
to figure out what's going wrong with boys. The project is only a few 
weeks old, it has called no news conferences and its Web site ( 
http://www.boysproject.net ) has just been launched.

So far we've just been asking one another the question: What's happening 
to boys? We've batted around lots of ideas. Maybe the problem has to do 
with the way the school curriculum has changed. Maybe it has to do with 
environmental toxins that affect boys differently than girls (not as 
crazy an idea as it sounds). Maybe it has to do with changes in the 
workforce, with fewer blue-collar jobs and more emphasis on the service 
industry. Maybe it's some combination of all of the above, or other 
factors we haven't yet identified.

In Ayn Rand's humorless apocalyptic novel "Atlas Shrugged," the central 
characters ask: What would happen if someone turned off the motor that 
drives the world? We may be living in such a time, a time when the motor 
that drives the world is running down or stuck in neutral -- but only 
for boys.

Leonard Sax, a family physician and psychologist in Montgomery County, 
is the author of "Boys Adrift: What's Really Behind the Growing Epidemic 
of Unmotivated Boys," to be published next year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001341.html
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