#326： Why Boys Are Struggling & What We Can Do To Help Them
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Summary
In his new book, Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys, Michael Gurian provides insights on why America s boy problem is ignored, as well as concrete steps that parents and teachers can take to help these young men grow up well.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode of the Art of Manliness podcast. While there's
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been a big push in recent decades to help girls thrive in school and in the workplace,
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boys in America have been quietly struggling. For example, boys are more likely to have learning
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discipline issues in school and are less likely to graduate high school than girls. More women are
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now attending college than men and are earning more bachelor's and master's degrees than men.
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The incarceration rate for boys has increased in the past few decades and the suicide rates have
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also increased among teenage boys. What's more, teachers and therapists have reported that boys
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seem increasingly disengaged from school and alive. They have some sort of malaise going on.
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Anyways, if boys are having so much trouble, why don't we hear more about it? And more importantly,
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what can we do as parents, teachers and mentors to help them? Well, my guest today has spent his
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career researching childhood development and helping boys become fulfilled men. His name
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is Michael Gurian. We've had him on the podcast before. It's episode number 87. You can check
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that out. And in his latest book, Saving Our Sons, A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys,
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he provides insights on why America's boy problem is ignored, as well as concrete steps that parents
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and mentors can take to help these young men grow up well. Today on the show, Michael explains what the
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dominant gender paradigm is and why it causes institutions to ignore the problems of boys
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and young men, what people get wrong about male violence, and what male anhedonia is. It's kind
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of a low-grade depression. He then argues that if you want to help boys and girls, we need to
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approach things from what he calls a nature-based theory that recognizes that while boys and girls
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have a lot in common, there are biological differences that influence the way boys learn,
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socialize, and behave. Michael then provides concrete things parents and schools can do to cater
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to those differences in boys, help them thrive and become resilient men. If you're the parent of a boy,
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or if you teach or mentor young boys, you don't want to miss this episode. After the show's over,
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check out the show notes at aom.is slash savingoursons.
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Oh, thank you. Thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me.
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So we had you on the show, I think almost two years ago, to talk about your book,
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The Wonder of Boys. For those who aren't familiar with your work, you've specialized in sort of the
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development of boys. That's what your career has been focused on, counseling boys, troubled boys,
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but also boys who aren't troubled, just helping them thrive. In your latest book, Saving Our Sons,
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A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys, a really good book. Can you tell us, like,
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how does this book pick up from your other books about boys? Is this sort of like the capstone of
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Well, yeah, you know, it might be. I mean, I'm, my area is, is really gender, you know,
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sex and gender on the brain, male, female. So I've written books on both boys and girls,
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men and women. I think because of The Wonder of Boys, when it came out, there wasn't another book
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like it, you know, in 1996. And so, so then there were a lot more that I did with boys. And I think
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you're potentially correct that, that if I'm remembered later, it's going to be around this
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male development. So I've written 12 books on boys, all from different angles, but none of them,
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well, two things. The last one was about eight years ago. So a lot of new research has happened
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in the last eight years. So I really wanted to write something that caught everyone up on the
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new research that helped parents help teachers based on the best new brain research, etc. Then the
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second thing was that it, the politics. I've been doing this now for 30 years and Gurian Institute has
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existed for 20. So both me personally and us institutionally, we've been advocating for both
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boys and girls, you know, nationally with Congress, etc. And sometimes nothing happens. And so I decided
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I needed to write a book that, including a couple chapters on the politics, on, on what we have to do
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if we're really going to save our sons. Well, let's talk about that. Why, why do American boys need
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saving? I mean, what's the problem with boys today? Well, it's many fold, you know, there's a chapter
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in the book on neurotoxins. I mean, one of the problems is just what's coming in to their brains
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and bodies. And then technology, you know, that's really having an effect on their brains and bodies.
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So there's those sorts of environmental things we have to look at. Impression, under motivation,
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the WHO put out a study last year, that said, you know, this isn't, this isn't just an American
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problem, or even a European problem. All over the world, males are behind females, you know,
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in health outcomes. So that's both physical and mental health outcomes. So I think what we what
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we have thought was that, you know, boys are fine, girls are troubled, we got to help girls, boys are
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fine. But they're just not in, you know, in suicide, in the grades, they're getting, they get two thirds
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of the D's and F's, they only get 40% of the A's. So it's not as if they're succeeding very well in
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school. There's really isn't an environment right now, where boys are doing well, except those men,
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who are, you know, really strong, high testosterone, really smart guys. You know,
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there's probably 100,000 of them who are running corporations who are at the top, who are running
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the White House. But as we go below them, then we're starting to see 10s of millions of boys in
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trouble. So why do these problems that boys are facing? Why do they often get ignored, overlooked?
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Or why is it often seen that girls are the ones that need more help than boys, even though the
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statistics show that's might not be the case? Well, yeah, I think we're we're in a kind of
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political, sociological bind. And I call it the big three, that sort of runs this bind that we're
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in. So the big three is is academics. So the academy, universities, colleges, government,
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and the media, and all three of them. And I'm, you know, I've been a part of all three. So I'm really
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not saying anything negative about all three, they all are doing their best. But when it comes to boys,
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they're not doing their best. So the academic world doesn't really want to look at males,
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you know, it mainly looks at females, obviously. So it doesn't want to look at it. So it doesn't
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really, in comparison to females, it doesn't really generate research, it doesn't create programming
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that really helps young guys. So obviously, some are doing it, but very, very few in comparison to
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what's happening to help girls. And then government takes what academics do. So government just says,
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the people at Harvard say this, this is what we're going to do. So government isn't really helping
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boys very much. And in fact, I have a quote in the book from a Department of Justice official who said,
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look, when we spend money on guys, it's prison, right? We're spending correction dollars on them,
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billions of correction dollars, but nothing really preventative. And it's very hard for guys to get
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any kind of government programming that mainly goes to women and children. So, you know, so that's
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good, it goes to women and children, but it's not going to guys. So we're not really seeing what's
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going on with guys. And then the media sort of takes what government and academics do.
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And while some of us in the media, like yourself, are working to try to understand boys, you know,
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most come from what I call the dominant gender paradigm, which is that masculinity is toxic,
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guys have everything, females are oppressed. And that's just, you know, no longer true in the U.S.
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and in the West. We've got to be more subtle than that. But that's kind of the paradigm. So we don't
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really get the help for these guys because academics, government, and the media are not
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really understanding how dire the situation is getting for young men.
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Well, let's delve deeper into this dominant gender paradigm, because it's an important idea
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that it's woven throughout your book. When and why did this paradigm arise that, you know,
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masculinity is toxic and girls need more help than boys?
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Yeah. You know, 50 to 100 years ago, it was a really smart paradigm. So I'm 60, I'll turn 60 next year.
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So I'm raised as a first wave feminist by first wave feminist parents. And, you know, I completely
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bought into it. And to some extent, obviously, I still think there are parts of the world where
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this dominant gender paradigm is important. And the paradigm is females are oppressed,
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males are the oppressors. When it's not males, it's the patriarchy. So the patriarchy is oppressive.
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Even if guys are good, it's the patriarchy. And the patriarchy is systemic. So the patriarchy
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hits everything. So there's no nothing going on that isn't oppressive of females. And if someone says,
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well, but wait, you know, then the response is, well, you're just part of the patriarchy. So you
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can't see the systemic problem. You know, as you deconstruct that, we find things like white male
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privilege is the problem. And masculinity is the problem, right? And we got to get rid of white
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male privilege. And we got to get rid of masculinity. And that's going to solve the problem. So this was
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all really logical 50 years ago, we needed to turn things around, we just couldn't have a situation
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where females were so under nurtured in our culture. So I think it was useful then. But I think the
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problem with the paradigm now is, it was not based in science. And we now have a lot of science. But
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now it's very superficial. And I prefer brain science, I prefer real scientific data to look at
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what's happening. And so I think this DGP, this dominant gender paradigm, we just simply have to battle
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it in the big three. Or we're not going to get the science through, we're not going to get the real
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data through. And we're not going to solve these problems. You know, we can't solve things anymore
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by just saying, oh, it's masculinity, that's really bad. And oh, the patriarchy is systemic. And oh,
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these white males are bad. Like it's, this is just not going to solve the deep rooted problems in all
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races, in all groups, and in all socioeconomic levels in the US.
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So I mean, some, I guess that one of the gists that I got, your idea of the dominant gender paradigm
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is that they often think that gender or masculinity or femininity is a social construct that can just
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be changed and manipulated. You know, that's why they say you can get rid of it, right? But you argue
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that there's more of a you, I guess you argue for a nature based theory of gender. So what is that
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Yeah, yeah. Well, for instance, you know, male violence, I have a whole chapter in there where I
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completely deconstruct the supposed causes of male violence in the US, right? I mean,
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the supposed cause is masculinity, toxic masculinity, patriarchy, etc. And I kind of get rid of that
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and say, look, hold on, that is a correlation. That is not a cause. The causes are, you know,
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neurotoxins, lack of attachment, abuse, trauma, all these other things are the causes. So nature based
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theory says we got to look at the causes. So for instance, if you say, look, there are guys,
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we're natural creatures, right? We're creatures of nature. And nature is not teaching boys to go
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become violent. That's not what nature is teaching boys. It's much more, much more complex than that.
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So why would they become violent? Well, it's not, not because of this culture construct that makes
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them become violent. It's because there's stuff going on in their cells in their brains that are that
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are making them become suicidal or making them go hit and hurt other people. That's what we need
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to look at. So that's sort of where I introduced this concept that the way we approach social
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problems is not natural. And so we're not solving social problems. We're not solving male violence.
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Male violence is bad, right? All violence is bad in the US and we're not solving it through these
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paradigms. So nature based theory starts with that. And so then, of course, I'm starting with the
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human brain and the male and the female brain are part of the human brain. The male and the female
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brain are different. And we have thousands of studies. I have thousand on my website that show
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how different the male and the female brain are. Now, obviously, there are some people out in the
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kind of the big three, especially the media, you know, who are saying, oh, no, no, no, no,
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male and female brain aren't different. That's just not the case. There's no way to say that
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and really look at science. So you have to just say, okay, forget the science. We're going to just use
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our culture concept. So the important thing for people to remember, which I do in the book,
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is I distinguish between sex and gender. Gender is something that's amorphous and that we can talk
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about and say, hey, on this day, I feel more female than male. And that's, I actually think
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that's great. I'm very glad that I have a well-developed feminine side. You know, that's
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gender. But sex on the brain is sex. That's sex on the brain. And that happens in utero. And so the
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male brain is doing words on the left. The female brain is doing words on both sides. That's true
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whether you're, you come from Africa, whether you come from Europe, Asia, you know, anywhere,
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because this comes in on the X and the Y chromosome. So that stuff, that stuff is binary.
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Male and female are different, but you can argue that gender is amorphous. And so what we have to
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be able to do is do both. And of course, as you know, in my book, in my work, I do both. I say,
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okay, gender's over here. We can talk about it. Let's do it. But maleness and femaleness,
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that's rooted in nature. So we're going to have to look at that.
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And besides, you mentioned one difference between the male and female brain, where
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males use words on the left side and females doing both sides. What are some other differences
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Well, another profound difference is the way that we use our white matter and gray matter.
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So we all have white matter and gray matter, all brains. But male brains are using up to seven times
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more gray matter activity to do the things they do. And gray matter happens in splotches in the brain.
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White matter is spread throughout the brain. Females are using up to 10 times more white
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matter activity when they do what they're doing. And this is when males and females are doing the
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same task. So for instance, let's say that we're talking about protecting the emotional lives of
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girls and the emotional lives of boys. When I work with that in the book, I'm saying to people,
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you know, the emotional lives of boys works differently than girls. So if we say to four-year-old
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boys in preschools and four-year-old girls, if we say to them, use your words, you know,
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if every time they do something that we don't particularly like, something impulsive or they
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move around a lot or they fidget or they bop someone else on the head, you know, or whatever
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it is in their sort of affectionate way. If we say, no, no, no, no, guys, that's bad. You got to use
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your words. So if guys can't access the words as quickly as girls, you know, we're going
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to punish the guys. And the reality is their brains don't access these words, especially
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words connected to feelings and emotions and impulses as quickly as girls do. So from preschool
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all the way through elementary school, of course, we just keep punishing these guys as if they're
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inherently defective and they fail and they drop out and, you know, they hate school and
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all of this. And we're not realizing, whoa, we never trained preschool teachers. We never trained
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elementary, secondary school teachers, not even college teachers. We didn't show them these
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brain scans. So in my lectures, of course, I'm showing all these brain scans and saying,
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look how different these brains are. And, and, you know, that becomes life-changing. But if we
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don't show that stuff to people and don't teach them this stuff, then they will be punishing boys
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and they also won't be teaching girls in the best ways.
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Right. And you make an interesting point too, not the difference between the male brain,
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the female brain, also male physiology and female physiology, that in a lot of ways, boys are more
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fragile than girls are when they're first starting out in life until they get to adulthood.
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Yeah. Well, the Y chromosome itself, you know, which is the male chromosome, the Y chromosome itself
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is a more fragile chromosome even than the X. I mean, so this starts at a cellular level
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and certainly guys armor up. That's part of testosterone, especially through puberty,
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we armor up and, and that that's normal. That happens everywhere. But part of why we're armoring up
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is because our emotional construction and our cells are so fragile. And we know this unconsciously,
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we know this. And this is one of the reasons also that, you know, pretty much every culture as it has
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raised boys has said, Hmm, you know, we got to make sure to toughen these guys up. And of course that
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became a negative construct in that some people used it to just shut down guys to just say, you know,
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no emotional life for you. So they misinterpreted what nature is trying to do to help guys. They
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misinterpreted that those folks did, and they did damage. And that's part of what led to the dominant
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gender paradigm actually, was, you know, that, that no one wanted to see guys being told you can't feel
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feeling is bad, right? No one wants that. So, but the reality is that that male emotional life is very
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fragile, that you see it on the chromosome, and then you see it in the first few months and years of
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life. And in fact, new studies have shown that when females and males suffer trauma, trauma is bad for
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every everyone. But when females and males suffer trauma, females are more likely to develop good
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social emotional skills later. And they are more functional later as adults than males are. So like
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divorce trauma is one that's been studied. Divorce trauma is harder on males than females. On average,
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some females obviously destroys them. But on average, it's harder on males than females.
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Partly because males are fragile, and partly because the father gets removed generally. And
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then that increases the male fragility and affects his development. So in many, many ways,
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males are more fragile than females. And I have two daughters. So this isn't to say females are not
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fragile, or that we shouldn't protect them. But one of the calls in saving our sons is to understand
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So that means, the argument you make throughout the rest of the book is that because boys are
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different from girls, we need to approach raising them differently. We can't do this sort of one size
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fits all approach that we've been doing maybe for the past 50 years.
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Yeah, absolutely. This goes for schools, this goes for homes, preschools, you know, everywhere where males
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are. We have to understand them better, understand their fragilities and their strengths,
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their assets, right, etc., who they are. And then we need to use multiple strategies. So I'll give an
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example of how this works. A number of new studies have come out, and I have them in the book on what
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we call bi-strategic parenting, and then multi-strategic mentoring. So like when you say one size fits all,
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the most common one size fits all that gets used is use your words, right? Use your words. Don't do that.
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Use your words, okay? That's an example of a mono-strategic approach. So school systems and
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parenting systems, when fathers are gone, they rely heavily on that single strategy. And it's not
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enough for, I believe, either boys or girls and a trans. Anyone on the gender spectrum, I don't think
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it's enough. But for boys especially, it's problematic because they're not able to access the words and the
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feelings that people want them to access. And it's not the only way to help them develop impulse
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control. So bi-strategic means, okay, we need another strategy. And so it's not going to be
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word-oriented. It's going to, for instance, be more physical, more kinesthetic. And an example is
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intervention and non-intervention. The use your words is, I'm going to intervene. So if you go knock
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another guy down, I'm going to intervene and stop that. Stop that. Don't touch that person. Use your
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words. Touch is bad. But the other strategy in the bi-strategic would be, oh, guess what? That's
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actually okay. Neither of you is in danger. You guys are going to work this out. And by working it
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out, you're actually going to control your impulses, develop self-regulation, mature, grow up,
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right? Et cetera, et cetera. That's a different strategy. And what we need is a bi-strategic and
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multi-strategic approach to these boys. When schools do that, so the Green Institute trains schools in
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this, so that's the educators and the parents, when they switch over toward this bi-strategic
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approach, they get rid of things like zero-tolerance policies, which basically punish boys
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and massively punish boys of color. They get rid of that stuff. And they use this more complex
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approach on the playground, in the classroom, at home. And boys' grades go up. There's less
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discipline referrals to the principal, right? So they're better behaved, et cetera. So that's kind
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of what I'm getting at is I'm agreeing with you. This one-size-fits-all, zero-tolerance,
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that stuff has got to be part of the past. It does not work to help us really raise the wonderful
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kids we want to raise. Yeah, I think this raises an interesting point. One of my favorite chapters
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was about male nurturance. There's this idea, I think, because of the dominant gender paradigm that
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boys, males, they're not naturally nurturing, right? Girls, females, they're the more nurturing
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sex. But I've always thought, no, in my own experience, I never saw that. In my own experience,
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males are nurturing. We just do it in a different way. How do males nurture in a way that's different
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from, say, females? Well, yeah, at the baseline, because of the testosterone, oxytocin differences,
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and these other sort of hormonal, biochemical differences, and then the cellular differences,
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and then, of course, which affects brain differences, this is all sort of creating a baseline at which more
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females will use what I call direct empathy nurturance, and more males will use what I call
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aggression nurturance or challenge nurturance. You know, both females and males can use what each
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other does, right? We're very complex. And males can nurture in the same way females do, females,
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males, absolutely. But in general, we find this baseline difference. So to give an example,
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there's a street hockey game, and it's 10 to 12-year-olds, and they're playing street hockey
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on their rollerblades, and this, like, 11-year-old boy falls down. And the girl who's on her skates
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comes right over, you know, and kind of gets to his level and says, are you okay? What can I do for
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you? Okay, that's direct empathy nurturance. And the cells in her brain, especially in this part of
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the brain called the insula, fill up with these mirror neurons. And so her brain and her body move
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toward what we call empathy, right, which is this getting at his level, trying to make him feel better
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right now. Well, another boy, kind of a 12-year-old boy over here from the other side,
00:21:30.360
comes rolling by, and he ascertains that this 11-year-old is not hurt. You know, he's skinned
00:21:35.420
his knee, but oh, well, he's not dead. So he says, come on, get up, get up, we need you.
00:21:40.420
Well, that's called challenge nurturance or aggression nurturance. And both of these kinds
00:21:45.180
of nurturance are crucial. We need to have people, you know, saying to the boy, are you okay? What can I
00:21:49.900
do for you? And guys can do that too, of course. And we need to have people saying, you know what?
00:21:54.920
You're needed as part of this team. You're needed as a human being. You're needed as an asset.
00:22:00.360
I'm going to nurture you by helping you feel needed, as opposed to by saying, oh, it's okay. You know,
00:22:07.080
you're okay. What can I do? So both are equally good. Both are essential. Males tend more toward
00:22:13.560
challenge nurturance, even though males can be quite empathic. Females tend more toward empathic
00:22:18.360
nurturance, even though they can be challenging. And this is actually a very, very good thing.
00:22:23.160
So that chapter is kind of laying out all the ways from empathy to aggression nurturance that
00:22:28.420
males are nurturing and trying to get guys to tap into that and get the communities and the
00:22:34.260
families to understand that it's, that these are equally good ways of nurturing, that we have to
00:22:39.020
stop thinking of nurturing as only being, how are you? Are you okay? What do you need? What can I do
00:22:44.660
for you? Yeah. I think that's a good, I think it's a good point. Cause I think a lot of new moms,
00:22:48.960
particularly like they'll have boys and they don't understand that. And they'll see boys
00:22:52.440
like the aggressive aggression nurturance. I've also seen manifest in like teasing or you give like
00:22:58.920
your buddies a nickname. That's not that nice. Right. But it's all done in like, like goodness,
00:23:04.420
like you give them that, that weird nickname because you actually care for them. And I think a lot of
00:23:08.460
moms or women don't understand that. Uh, yeah, you're right. Moms and female teachers and,
00:23:13.480
and they're coming from their brain base and which, you know, obviously we completely,
00:23:17.440
we're so glad they have their brain base because without the female brain base, humanity would not
00:23:22.340
exist right now. So we think it's a great thing of course. Um, but because they come from that point
00:23:27.180
of view, they see danger when danger may not exist. They see bullying when bullying may not exist.
00:23:35.960
They see teasing as a negative when, as, as you've expressed all of us who are guys, right? We know
00:23:41.780
that teasing is actually a way of respecting. It's a way of challenging. It compels the one who's teased
00:23:47.560
to tease back, which actually builds self, build self-concept, self-construal. It's actually really
00:23:53.400
a good thing. And neither person is hurt by it. And it's, it's all locked into the way that males do
00:23:59.900
pecking orders and hierarchies and how they earn their place. And all of it's incredibly emotional.
00:24:04.640
We are doing a lot of emotional work and emotional development in the pathways between the limbic
00:24:11.320
brain and the frontal cortex. A lot of this stuff is happening for males while they're engaging in
00:24:15.640
this behavior, but females especially don't think it's happening and very sensitive guys also, you know,
00:24:21.180
it's harmful to them and they don't think it's happening. They would rather it was this other way.
00:24:26.160
And so we want to respect the other way, but we want to say that, no, no, there's gobs of emotional
00:24:31.760
development going on when I name someone something and he has to respond. And then we bop each other
00:24:37.460
on the shoulder and then we wrestle and then we make fun of each other. And then a day later,
00:24:41.080
I'm making fun of him. All of this stuff is deep emotional work.
00:24:45.340
So besides all these, just these issues that are facing boys, you give out these extensive
00:24:49.580
statistics about the problems boys are facing. You mentioned this sort of underlying
00:24:53.920
condition you're seeing in boys more and more and it's male. I'm probably going to butcher this
00:25:00.200
anhedonia. Yeah. Anhedonia. You're right. Yep. Yeah. What is male anhedonia? Well, you know,
00:25:05.760
it's a number of us started looking at this 30, 40 years ago, right? We were starting to see guys who
00:25:11.420
seemed kind of mildly depressed, like we wouldn't call them clinically depressed. They didn't fit the
00:25:17.000
DSM for that. But, but we said, God, they just seem kind of depressed. And then over the last
00:25:22.740
20 years or so, you know, under motivation is a term that's used a lot now. Now we're seeing
00:25:27.200
millions of them, you know, basically living in basements, playing video games, under motivated,
00:25:31.700
they're dropping out or they're getting C's and D's in school, but they're really, you know,
00:25:34.980
they're smart guys, et cetera. So this under motivation is an example of this anhedonia.
00:25:39.460
So anhedonia is a term that comes actually from sexual anhedonia. It's when a guy isn't motivated
00:25:45.000
to have sex. He's not motivated to, to have that emotional intimacy as well as to procreate.
00:25:50.040
He's just that that's where it comes from. Well, I'm taking the term now as a way of, as
00:25:54.440
looking at this under motivation and these, these lethargic sort of almost paralyzed guys
00:25:59.220
who just stimulate their brains through video games, or then they use porn instead of actual
00:26:03.520
intimacy. This is anhedonia. This is an under motivated, I would, I would say mildly depressed
00:26:09.580
male. And now I believe we have between 10 and 20 million of them in the U S
00:26:14.660
and that is really worrisome because they're not going to be able to find jobs and work.
00:26:19.700
It's going to grow. We're going to grow more of these guys. They're not, you know,
00:26:23.440
going to be able to partner or if they partner, they'll have sex and have a baby,
00:26:26.540
but they're not going to be able to be fathers. Um, you know, this is, this to me is a crucial
00:26:31.380
social issue that, that the big three has got to look at and, and the dominant gender paradigm,
00:26:36.840
which is, Oh, it's, you know, masculinity, they're holding onto male privilege.
00:26:39.440
That just doesn't work. You know, it's just a silly paradigm for this condition.
00:26:44.080
Gotcha. Well, let's go back, circle back to schools. Uh, academics is one of the big three
00:26:48.780
you talk about that are kind of encouraging this dominant gender paradigm. When parents are looking
00:26:54.680
at schools and they're looking for a school that takes into account the differences that boys have
00:26:59.040
and how they learn, how they mature, what should parents look for in a school? Like how do they know
00:27:04.080
if a school is boy friendly? Yeah. The first thing they should ask is have your teachers and
00:27:09.860
your staff been trained in how boys learn. So that's a keyword in how boys learn. And then another
00:27:17.220
keyword is in how boys and girls learn differently. You could also say in the minds of boys, these are
00:27:22.560
key terms to ask. And, and, you know, it's, are your teachers trained in these things? And if the
00:27:28.780
principal, or if it's a preschool, if the teachers, et cetera, if they come back and say,
00:27:33.100
yeah, we did a book study or yeah, we know about that. Right. But they haven't gotten training in
00:27:39.540
it. So they haven't really altered their system to take it into account. Then, you know, parents
00:27:45.340
are probably walking into a situation where at some point one or more of their sons may have trouble
00:27:51.760
in that school. It may not happen in the first six months. It may happen in the next grade, but we're
00:27:56.060
going to, what we're going to have is a number of teachers who don't understand how guys learn.
00:28:00.300
So they're not creating classrooms and they're not creating behavioral policies that are going
00:28:07.540
to work for boys. So that's the easiest thing to do is your staff or your teachers, is everyone
00:28:12.540
trained in how boys and girls learn differently? And let's say you're out of school and you say,
00:28:17.300
you know, how much choice in a school, you're going to public schools and like the school you
00:28:19.880
have, the school you have, how can you raise or push for the teachers to make the school more
00:28:26.440
boy friendly in a constructive manner? Because I imagine a lot of you, a lot of people might get
00:28:30.040
some pushback against that. Oh yeah. Yeah. There's definitely pushback happens. One of the reasons
00:28:34.220
I wrote Saving Our Sons, I wrote it as a resource so that parents can take it into the schools.
00:28:39.760
And I did it even better than I did Minds of Boys, which came out 12 years ago. I wrote that one also
00:28:46.000
as a resource saying to parents, okay, take this into the principal. I've set it up for you to do that.
00:28:50.660
And I know that parents did that because a number of those schools, you know, are different now than
00:28:56.080
they were before. And there are books by others that parents can take in as well. I've just set
00:29:01.000
these books up for parents to do it. And so what I argue for parents to do is to form what I call a
00:29:06.400
parent-led team. So this is going to be three to five parents and or parent couples. So it's going
00:29:13.000
to be five to 10 people, right? Five moms, five dads, or, you know, depending on the family structure,
00:29:17.920
could be some single mom, some mom's dads, but it's going to be somewhere between five and 10
00:29:22.480
parents and their sons. They're going to get together and form this team because their sons
00:29:27.920
are having trouble. And our research, we show in classrooms of 30. So we've trained 60,000 teachers.
00:29:33.460
So we have 20 years of research. We show in classrooms of 30 that five or more boys are going to be
00:29:39.560
struggling and that one girl is going to be struggling, right? So it's a big difference. And we're
00:29:44.720
bracketing out learning disabilities. These are not learning disabled. So that means there's going
00:29:49.580
to, there's a pool of parents. And if they get together, you know, and they say, wow, your guys
00:29:54.420
get C's and D's and oh, yours is too. And yours is always going to the principal. Okay. So then we know
00:29:59.280
that school hasn't received this training. And very often the principals actually will look at it
00:30:04.640
because it's all set up for them. You know, the, okay, I've got five parents to 10 parents. So it's not
00:30:09.220
one parent, it's five to 10 parents coming into my office. Oh, she, I better pay attention to this,
00:30:14.140
you know, and then they study it. You know, they read a chapter or two of it. That's all they have
00:30:18.220
time to do. And then they go, Hmm, maybe we ought to look at this. And then they pool the faculty,
00:30:23.020
they talk to the faculty and then they start finding, Oh, look at our data. So then they,
00:30:27.160
what they do is they disaggregate their data, which means they just look at their data for gender.
00:30:30.800
And they say, Hmm, look at this, you know, 70% of the D's and F's are going to boys. Oh yeah,
00:30:36.200
we have a problem, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's a process that takes three to six months
00:30:40.620
of parent led teams going in and, and getting the schools to pay attention. And luckily now
00:30:45.660
see the green Institute, we have 150 trainers. So, so we have the trainers available. And so
00:30:51.640
quite often what the principals do is they just call and then we set up the training and then
00:30:56.140
they gather their data a year later. They see their data and they see the grades of the boys have gone
00:31:00.840
up. The discipline referrals have gone down. So what's happened is the grassroots, the parents
00:31:05.120
have fomented change in the schools and they've done it in a collaborative way
00:31:09.100
so that they're not attacking the schools. They're collaborating with the schools.
00:31:12.700
I mean, how does a teacher's approach to teaching boys change once they go through this training?
00:31:17.640
Well, I'll give you some examples of sort of things that immediately happen. So for instance,
00:31:22.600
teachers after the training, they'll let boys use squeeze balls. For instance, they'll have them
00:31:26.900
have objects in their hands because they'll learn, we'll show them the scans and they'll learn that
00:31:31.360
the right side of the male brain is not doing words, but it is doing what we call spatial,
00:31:35.800
spatial mechanicals, which means objects moving through space.
00:31:38.100
So they'll start tapping into the right side of the male brain, right? They'll go,
00:31:42.700
oh, shoot, we've been teaching almost completely verbally with workshops, words, you know, words,
00:31:47.340
words, words, and not realizing that the female brain does that on both sides. So of course the
00:31:51.540
girls are going to do better at that. And some guys are very wordy, like I am, by the way. And so,
00:31:56.680
you know, we'll do fine with words. But we got five to seven guys in that classroom who need the right
00:32:01.700
side of the brain stimulated so that they can stimulate the left, right? They need the spatials.
00:32:05.260
So they'll give them these squeeze balls. They'll let them move around physically in the back of the
00:32:09.620
classroom, you know, in ways that are non-intrusive. This is all physical kinesthetic. They'll change
00:32:15.740
the lesson planning so that they'll always have project-based learning, which is where you do
00:32:20.320
something for a week. You don't do it on a worksheet for a half hour. You do the project for a week and
00:32:25.060
you learn everything while you're doing the project. That's kinesthetic that allows for guys to
00:32:30.620
move around, for everyone to do things. And none of these strategies are bad for girls,
00:32:33.460
by the way. It's just that girls tend to like to sit still more. They tend to like to do more words,
00:32:37.780
you know, et cetera. And then the visual. The other thing males are doing on the right is visual.
00:32:42.860
So what we call visual graphic. And the teachers will start tapping into that. And they'll say,
00:32:47.180
oh, okay. So now what we're going to do is we're going to have more drawing, more graphics,
00:32:51.280
more graphics projected. And we're going to say to guys, hey, if you want to draw a storyboard
00:32:56.440
before you write this paper or before you write this story I want you to write, go ahead and draw
00:33:01.260
the storyboard. So, you know, that's easy to do. You just take a big piece of paper, divide it into
00:33:06.240
six sections and have them draw what they're about to write. And in elementary school, this is just
00:33:12.920
great because fourth, fifth, sixth grade, you can already see boys' grades going down. But this
00:33:18.520
practice, they incorporate this practice and grades start going up, especially on writing tasks,
00:33:23.500
because now the guys have drawn out what they're going to write. So when they write,
00:33:27.480
it's better organized because they've got six quadrants, right, that they can refer to.
00:33:31.360
And they have more detail because they've drawn it out already. So now they're getting very detailed
00:33:36.660
essays and stories. And we find boys that were getting C's and D's in those classes go up to A's
00:33:42.240
and B's because now they're doing better at it. So these are just a few examples of what happens
00:33:46.760
when the teachers get trained in it. You know, they need training in it. They need a couple days of
00:33:51.380
really inculcating it so that they change things around. And so the system changes things around.
00:33:56.520
But by the end of the year, as they're incorporating all of this and getting the feedback on it,
00:34:02.340
Yeah. And I think another approach you advocate, and I know Leonard Sachs does, is don't be afraid
00:34:06.980
of competition in school. I feel a lot of it's just like, make sure no one feels bad, that they're
00:34:12.360
worse. But like, boys actually thrive on competitive learning in a way.
00:34:16.500
Yeah. And actually, competition now is a double asset. It's good for both boys and girls to
00:34:22.360
compete. So because the real world is competitive. So it's just, it's really good that they compete
00:34:26.700
at all levels. It's good to compete. And for boys in particular, competition will help them to learn
00:34:33.640
better because there's something at stake for them, especially in a lot of the stuff that's getting
00:34:37.640
taught, which really isn't relevant to them. And in fact, it's not relevant for life. That's an
00:34:42.060
unfortunate thing that's going on that we're trying to work on with educational reform,
00:34:45.060
is trying to get teachers, especially in public schools, to stop teaching things that are just
00:34:48.820
not relevant. So it's especially good for guys, if they're going to try to learn this stuff,
00:34:53.300
to get the grades to be competing, because that helps them to make it relevant to them.
00:34:58.520
And then the second whammy on it, the second reason it's an asset is that with male testosterone
00:35:02.540
levels being lower anyway, which is not a thing we want, competition does compel the cells to
00:35:08.780
develop more testosterone, right? There's an access, brain to body access. And so it will actually
00:35:14.340
help them to develop more of the chemical we need them to develop so that they will be motivated.
00:35:19.220
And that's kind of the big takeaway when we teach this to teachers. They look at how unmotivated guys
00:35:24.360
are, and then they use these competition strategies we teach them. So then they use these games in these
00:35:30.080
competitions. And then they look back two months later and they say, ooh, yeah, those four boys who
00:35:35.180
are so unmotivated, they're more motivated now. And so that's like the outcome that they can measure.
00:35:40.860
All right. So we've been talking about elementary, middle, high school. Let's move on to college.
00:35:46.680
Campus gender politics in the past 20 years have just become a minefield. How are college campuses
00:35:55.400
Well, yeah, the colleges, you know, part of the big three. I mean, the academic world is
00:35:59.280
kind of the ground of this stuff, of the not teaching this stuff. And it's really showing in
00:36:05.940
our colleges. I'll give a few ways that I talk about in the book. One is the minefield itself.
00:36:11.280
So I tell that story of me and the college president talking, and I've hidden everyone's
00:36:14.660
names to protect everyone, you know, where this is a female college president who can see
00:36:19.040
that they're losing males, you know, males are not graduating as much as females. Obviously,
00:36:24.580
it's a 60-40 split now, only 40% males. And then they're not even coming in, right? And then when
00:36:30.640
they're in, they're not involved, they're not engaged. And then, of course, now with all the
00:36:36.940
sexual drama going on, this rape crisis kind of hysteria out there that guys are raping women in
00:36:42.400
colleges, that's really added to this problem. So what the academic world has to do, what I'm
00:36:48.740
suggesting in my book, as you know, is it needs to develop a manhood studies program in every college.
00:36:55.000
And obviously, in every college that has a women's studies program, it's got to do this. Because if
00:37:00.900
it does not do this, and if it does not reorient colleges toward a kind of balance between females
00:37:06.700
and males, what we will continue to have is an environment in which males are attacked,
00:37:11.900
masculinity is attacked, the dominant gender paradigm, the DGP is very, very active in colleges.
00:37:16.740
And it's driving males out. And we really don't want that. We got to have males trying to love
00:37:22.020
college, you know. And we got to have males in college. Not every male will go to college,
00:37:26.440
God knows. But the males who want it and who can go, we need it to be an environment where they're
00:37:31.620
going to succeed as well as the females. And right now, females are just totally outpacing them.
00:37:35.640
And that's bad for employment. That's bad for our economy. It's bad at an individual level. It's bad
00:37:40.300
for future families. So our colleges are going to have to really look within. And they're going to have
00:37:45.720
to fight against these sort of very vocal forces inside the college that are using this old
00:37:51.540
dominant gender paradigm that is just no longer the best paradigm for modern life. I actually
00:37:57.100
don't think it's a paradigm for females either, by the way, as a father of daughters. But it's
00:38:00.920
going to take a big fight. Because whenever someone raises their voice, and like I've gone to colleges
00:38:05.720
and spoken, and when I speak out about this, you know, of course, we get this vocal attack that you're
00:38:10.800
white male and the masculine privilege and you're terrible and you're patriarchal and you're oppressive
00:38:15.460
and all of this. And the colleges are going to have to battle against this. Because one individual
00:38:20.820
like me or Leonard Sachs or you, we need a grassroots effort. You know, it's one individual
00:38:26.500
is only going to peck a little, chisel a little hole in it. It needs a whole, who needs the whole
00:38:31.900
country to awaken to the fact that the colleges are so overrun by a paradigm that does not apply
00:38:41.380
Right, right. So it's a long-term project. It's not going to happen overnight.
00:38:47.200
Well, it can't because this dominant gender paradigm is so entrenched. And an example is
00:38:52.000
what's happening with the rape culture. And I, as you know, in chapter four, I spend a long section
00:38:55.980
on that. I asked them, this whole rape crisis hysteria thing, one in five females are sexually
00:39:00.920
assaulted in college, right? That came out. It was all kind of bogus studies. They weren't correct,
00:39:06.000
but that's what came out. And so then we got the dear colleague letter in 2011. Well, my kids were
00:39:11.520
still in college, my daughters. So I went to them and I said, okay, look at this. I mean,
00:39:16.300
I'm, I'm writing about this. My colleagues are writing about this. We know the statistic is a
00:39:19.380
bogus statistic, but one rape is too many, right? So all of us want to help protect young women.
00:39:25.220
So is this the right way to do it? Is the right way to do it to just say, if a woman accuses a guy,
00:39:30.020
he needs to get kicked out. And even my own daughters said, uh, no, this is, this is not a correct way
00:39:36.360
to handle this. Um, and of course it's going to drive more and more guys out of college.
00:39:40.840
So that's an example of where, where this extreme view that's not accurate to real life takes over.
00:39:48.480
We can protect females without creating this massive backlash by males and by females,
00:39:55.700
my own daughters who didn't really think this was a good idea. We can protect females better
00:39:59.900
without accusing males of all of these, all this malice and all this crazy violence, uh,
00:40:05.780
really there are better ways to do it. And our colleges will have to deal with that. They'll
00:40:10.100
have to say, wait a minute, males and females in partnership. Um, let's do this a better way.
00:40:14.520
All right. So it's not a zero sum game is what you're saying.
00:40:16.720
It's not. No, it's, we, we've got to stop thinking. Um, okay. If we see this area where
00:40:23.160
females are not doing as well, that we therefore have to crush, you know, all these other things
00:40:29.660
going on with males, we got to stop thinking like this.
00:40:32.700
So, uh, another issue that you talk about that kind of contributes to this male
00:40:36.940
anhedonia is a technology or digital technology. Can you talk about what you see the role of
00:40:43.460
digital technology in the lives of young men and how it's contributing to the problems that
00:40:48.080
Yeah, I have all the updated. So for anyone who's raising a son or looking at this, I have all the
00:40:53.060
updated research in a couple of places, including one long chapter in saving our sons. And then I
00:41:00.000
have all the studies, et cetera, in the end notes. So people can check this themselves
00:41:03.620
because people, you know, especially if their guys are into video games and into technology
00:41:08.440
quite often, they don't want to say, Oh, wait, this could be harmful because they're saying to
00:41:15.360
themselves, well, look, my guys are engaged in something, you know? So isn't that great.
00:41:19.580
And I'm not anti-technology. And I make that very clear. Technology is a great asset.
00:41:23.420
And my whole nature-based theory is based on brain scans and on technology, right? Showing
00:41:28.320
this to people. So technology is a good thing, but it's developmental. So what we have to realize
00:41:33.300
is two major areas of potential distress for male development. One is screen time itself.
00:41:39.300
So I kind of divide things up so people can look at this developmentally. You know, like a two-year-old,
00:41:45.160
you don't really want that two-year-old's brain in front of a screen hardly at all. And I travel a lot
00:41:50.560
in airports, right? So I'm seeing people giving their one and two-year-old kids their cell phones
00:41:57.420
to keep those kids occupied. Well, those people don't realize that that will damage the brains
00:42:02.180
of these kids, male and female. And for males, the male brain is pretty fragile in its development.
00:42:08.360
And we're going to damage a lot of its impulse control ability, its social emotional development,
00:42:13.000
and even some of its cognitive ability by putting it in front of the screen so young.
00:42:17.660
So screen time itself is an issue all the way through from birth all the way through 25-ish,
00:42:24.040
you know, which is sort of as males are finalizing their development. And then the other thing is
00:42:29.400
social emotionals, to look at how... So in normal male development, over a period of, you know,
00:42:36.880
this birth to 25, these pathways are developing and the synapses are closing, et cetera, because
00:42:42.500
that brain is involved in its natural environment. It's learning through its family system, through
00:42:48.640
nature, through playing in the mud, through its chemistry set, you know, all of these things. It's
00:42:52.780
learning all this stuff in normal pathway development because normal pathway development is not set up
00:42:58.300
for screens. Screens are very passive. Normal pathway development is active as a boy is interacting
00:43:03.800
in its environment. Well, screens make everything passive. So, and then video games themselves as a screen,
00:43:10.700
not only, you know, are somewhat passive, even though they seem very active, in terms of brain
00:43:14.640
development, they're only developing certain parts of the brain, and they're fooling the brain into
00:43:18.580
thinking it's accomplished something. So as it gets better at the video game, the brain thinks it's
00:43:23.140
accomplishing something. So then it leads to some under-motivation in the other tasks, like school,
00:43:28.620
you know, chores, work, all these other things we really need the brain to do, family development,
00:43:33.800
and then social-emotional development, being able to interact, being able to be a mature adult and
00:43:38.480
interact with others. It's doing so much fooling of the brain that it's not developing these other
00:43:44.340
functions. And so video games especially can be problematic. By the time the kid's 15, you know,
00:43:51.240
to the 25 age group, they're probably going to be playing more video games. I'm begging people,
00:43:56.220
however, to, number one, don't give these kids cell phones until they're 13 or 14. Really protect those
00:44:01.900
brains because they can do everything on their cell phones now anyway. So that helps them get rid of
00:44:06.460
some screen time. But then number two, don't let them be playing video games on school nights. Just
00:44:11.640
say no to video games on school nights. Yes, video games on the weekend, no on school nights. Just so
00:44:17.300
that we can tamper back some of this negatives to brain development. Yeah. And I also like the point
00:44:22.880
you make is you can use video games in a constructive manner. Like you can talk to your kids or your sons
00:44:28.400
about some of the themes that they're playing in the video game. If you're playing some kind of war
00:44:32.840
game, like talk about heroism and warriorhood and things like that. And then you can have a
00:44:38.220
conversation about important topics through the video game. Yeah, well, absolutely. And I'm glad
00:44:43.060
you said that because of course, we don't want to be saying it's all negative. Of course, it's not.
00:44:46.220
You can use video games for this sort of hero development, character development. And I give a
00:44:51.380
number of strategies for that where like from Halo, you know, where you can take dialogue and take actions
00:44:56.680
right from the video game. And dads are often playing games with sons, right? So they're a
00:45:00.720
great asset for this. And they can say, okay, you know, what'd you think of that? What do you think
00:45:04.760
of that? You know, you'll do it after you play the game, of course, but then you're reflecting.
00:45:09.200
And this self-reflection, this ability to reflect is really great for the brain development of these
00:45:14.980
kids. And this is where you're using the video game as an asset. And we want to say that the makers
00:45:20.160
of video games, you know, they're very, very smart people. And I don't think they understand that there can be some
00:45:26.120
brain development issues. I think what they were tapping into was the hero development in the male.
00:45:31.520
And we really want that hero and character development in guys. We need that. We want them
00:45:36.080
to become men of character. And video games are developing that kind of warrior part of the
00:45:40.300
character. And that's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. They're developing the hero part. That's a
00:45:44.980
good thing. So we can use the games as long as we tap into that positive development. Now, games like
00:45:51.480
Grand Theft Auto, it's very hard for me, truthfully, to find anything redeeming about that game. So I
00:45:57.900
would like to talk to my son even about that. If he's playing that, I better play it with him.
00:46:02.020
And then I better say, okay, look at the way women are objectified. Look at what this is doing
00:46:06.080
to you as a man. And look what it's doing to women. So even the games that I don't like,
00:46:13.480
Well, Michael, there's a lot more we could talk about. Where can people go to learn more about your
00:46:17.600
book and your work? Well, yeah. If people go to michaelgurian.com,
00:46:21.760
G-U-R-I-A-N, michaelgurian.com, if they go there, that's going to tap them. The book's right there.
00:46:27.140
They're going to see that and tap them into other things. And then if they're in schools or if their
00:46:30.980
parents are concerned about boys in schools, go to gurianinstitute.com and you'll see all our
00:46:36.180
programs for schools and for communities. Awesome. Michael Gurian, thank you so much for your
00:46:40.340
time. It's been an absolute pleasure. Oh, thanks, Brett. Thanks for what you're doing.
00:46:43.680
My guest is Michael Gurian. He's the author of the book, Saving Our Sons,
00:46:46.680
it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can also find out more
00:46:49.800
information about his work at michaelgurian.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is
00:46:55.040
slash savingoursons for links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:47:09.260
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:47:13.440
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy
00:47:16.860
this show, I've got something out of it. I'd really appreciate it if you take one minute or so to give
00:47:20.160
us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. That helps that a lot. As always, thank you for your continued
00:47:23.900
support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.