What's happening to Boys?

[Guest guest]

Although article does not specifically implicate toxic ingredients

found in vaccines, the third to the last paragraph does state boys'

exposure to some sort of toxins.

Dr. Sax will be taking phone calls today at noon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2006/03/30/AR2006033001341.html

What's Happening to Boys?

Young Women These Days Are Driven -- but Guys Lack Direction

By Leonard Sax

Friday, March 31, 2006; Page 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.

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

, 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

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. 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, ,

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? " 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 Stotsky,

and 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. He

will take questions at noon today at http://www.washingtonpost.com.