Boys, even more than girls, are in serious trouble today. A chorus of social scientists is warning now of a crisis among males like nothing we have seen before. While many kids are coping adequately, a sizable minority is struggling with perplexing social pressures and forces that yesterday’s kids didn’t have to face. For some, just trying to survive emotionally can best be described as overwhelming. Many males are foundering today—and the vast majority of them are being negatively influenced by the culture.

Boys, when compared to girls, are times more likely to have learning disabilities, more likely to be registered drug addicts, and more likely to be diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. They are at greater risk for schizophrenia, autism, sexual addiction, alcoholism, bed wetting, and all forms of antisocial and criminal behavior. They are more likely to murder someone, and their rate of death in car accidents is greater by 50 percent. Seventy-seven percent of delinquency-related court cases involve males.* There is much more.

Now, more than ever, boys are experiencing a crisis of confidence that reaches deep within the soul. Many of them are growing up believing they are unloved by their parents and are hated or disrespected by their peers. This results in a form of self-loathing that often serves as a prelude to violence, drug abuse, promiscuity, and suicide. It helps explain why both boys and girls do things that would otherwise make no sense, such as cutting their flesh, piercing sensitive body parts, tattooing themselves from head to toe, taking dangerous drugs, and/or identifying themselves with death, perversion, and satanic ritual. Some of them, it has been said, “cry with bullets.”

From Dr. James Dobson’s book, Bringing Up Boys.

*Michael Gurian, A Fine Young Man (New York: Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam, 1998), 12-15.