The Boy Crisis: A Sobering look at the State of our Boys | Warren Farrell Ph.D. | TEDxMarin

Transcriber: ... ... Reviewer: Queenie Lee Let me check with you first. Raise your hand, please, if you have a son, grandson or nephew. Please raise your hand? Alright. Keep your hand raised, please, if your son, grandson or nephew is having problems with motivation, grades, ADHD or video game addiction. Keep your hand up if one of your children, grandchildren or nephews fits into that category. Well. About 30 percent of the audience fits into that category. So the first question is why are we blind to something that is so around us that we would even have to ask ourselves: "Is there a

crisis

of children?" Secondly, is there a boy

crisis

?

Number three that I will discuss tonight are some causes and one or two solutions. Let me start with our blindness. Think about when we heard about a police officer shooting a black child. We rightly protest: "Black lives matter." But no one thinks of saying: "Children's lives matter." The “black boy” guy to whom we are invisible. The child part of the "black child" doesn't matter because historically we have depended on children dying in order to live. We bribe them with social bribes by calling them heroes and telling them that they will have glory if they die in our name.

So our first question is that if our survival has depended on our children's willingness to die, being sensitive to their death competes with our survival instinct. We can't get anywhere, in terms of seeing the evidence of the children's crisis, unless we first lift that curtain. If we did that, the kind of evidence we would see is that, for the first time in American history, our children will have less education than their parents. If we take this around the world, the UN found this year that

boys

have fallen behind girls in every one of the 70 developed nations.

So what do developed nations have in common? They have in common a much greater propensity for divorce, which often leaves children without their parents. So daddy-deprived children become the number one cause of the children's crisis. When there is less father involvement, what happens is that the boy ends up - and the girl, by the way - ends up being less likely to be empathetic, assertive, and much more likely to do poorly in all grades of school. be more likely to be suicidal, homicidal, shoot up schools, and be more likely to be in prison. When you

look

at prisons, prisons are basically centers for daddy-deprived children.

In California, since 1980, we have built 18 new prisons and one new university. There has been a 700 percent increase in the prison population in the United States since 1972. That's a 93 percent male population, mostly daddy-deprived

boys

. Here is the most frequent pattern. The boy listens to his parents in conflict, soon the father disappears. The child becomes depressed. Anthony Sims, here in Oakland, his last Facebook post of him was, "I wish I had a dad." Boys who hurt, hurt us. Anthony Sims soon became the Oakland killer earlier this year. But other children do not behave by killing alone like Anthony Sims, but rather they behave by carrying out school shootings.

Most people don't know that there has been one school shooting per week, on average, since Sandy Hook. And we often say that school shootings are a result of guns, they are a result of family values, they are a result of mental health issues. But the girls live in the same families, with the same family values, similar mental health problems, the same violence on television, but our daughters are not the ones doing the shooting. Our children are. So here we have an idea of ​​the location of those shootings two years after Sandy Hook. (Shooting) School shootings are primarily white children's method of expressing hopelessness and also white children's method of committing suicide.

My perspective is that I see suicide as a reflection in children of our inability to help them constructively track them toward maturity. And we also see that in the data. Thus, for example, before the age of nine, girls and boys alike committed suicide. From 10 to 14 years old, double that for children. From 15 to 19 years old, four times more than children. From 20 to 24 years old, six times more than children. So if dadless kids are the number one cause of the kids crisis, cause number two is closely related. Children go from father deprivation at home to teacher deprivation at school.

We didn't used to know the importance of that. We now know that, on average, children do better with male teachers. But we have also discovered this year, as a result of a UN study around the world, that the feminization of education is a contributing factor to children's problems. When the United Nations did a worldwide study, they found that children around the world are a third more likely to get higher scores on a reading test when the teacher does not know that the person who took the test is a boy. . This leads to cause three: lack of purpose.

When I was a kid, we basically had two senses of purpose. Either you were a warrior or you were the sole breadwinner of the family. But as divorces occurred, relationships between men and women were shaken, and the feminist movement came along and did something wonderful, which was to broaden girls' sense of purpose from just raising children to being able to raise children and raise money. money. or do some combination of both. But no one stepped in and helped expand the children's sense of purpose in an equivalent way. Instead, children were told to make money, to make money, to make money, or, alternatively, to be losers.

The women's movement and society helped create affirmative action to introduce women to professions they were not comfortable with, such as STEM professions: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But no one introduced children to the caring professions. So one possible solution to the purpose gap is to broaden children's sense of purpose, consider the option of being a full-time parent, primary school teacher, social worker, nurse. We even have to say words like "nurse." Or we can consider, more broadly, creating a broader White House Council on Boys and Men, just as we already have a White House Council on Women and Girls, to address the more than ten causes of the children's crisis.

A question someone once asked me was, "Well, won't kids think of themselves as losers when they go into caring professions full-time and there's pressure on them?" But already in 1976 I saw a clear example of why children do not consider themselves losers when they become more involved with their children. I was at a party in '76 and a guy came up to me and said, "Are you Warren Farrell?" And I say, "Yes." And he says, "You formed a men's group that I joined, and the group had more impact on my life than anything else." And I said, "Well, what created that?" He says, "The most important question the group asked me was an exercise in which they asked us, 'What is the biggest hole in your heart?' And I didn't know the answer, but I blurted out, without thinking, that I was actually so involved in my career - I told the Warren group - that I ended up neglecting my son, neglecting my wife, and that's the biggest hole in my heart.

And now it's really a deeper hole because I got divorced, I got remarried and the group of men knew at the time that my wife was pregnant with a child and the group said to me, 'Well, what would you like to do if. 'could you do whatever you wanted?' And I said, 'Well, actually it would be taking five years off and raising my son full time.' And the group encouraged me (and I should say pressured me) to ask my wife and talk to her about it. And my. "My wife said, 'Do it, John.' So I tried it and it's been two years." I said, "Good decision?" "No, the best decision of my life.

Until I took care of my son, my whole life revolved around me, me, me, me, me. Suddenly, it was about my son, my son. Every move he made, I considered it precious. Every day I wanted to wake up and support him. I certainly learned to love and be loved. While he was saying that, someone approached the table we were sitting at. I had just gotten back from my first promotional tour, I'd been on TV a lot, and this guy said, "Can I have your autograph?" And I say: "Sure", generous with me. And the other guy, the one asking for the autograph, says, "Actually, I mean the other guy." (Laughs) I was dying of embarrassment, superiority caught up with me and I said, "I guess you're famous.

So what's your last name, John? I haven't had a TV in about eight years." And John says, "Lennon." (Laughter) And I said, "Let's see," proud of myself, of course, "you're a member of a singing group. Aren't you?" (Laughs) He says, "Yes." And I say, "What's the name of that group?" He says, "The Beatles." And I say, "Oh," how ignorant I wasn't. What I took away from that experience with John was that John Lennon had basically told me that he had discovered another John Lennon. A John Lennon who did not depend on getting love by earning money as a human activity, but a John Lennon who could get love by being loved.

I believe he pointed out a way for us to achieve evolutionary change so that we can obtain love by being loved. I don't think anyone suggested we imagine that better than John when he said, "All you need is love." Thank you. (Applause)