What's Happening to Boys? - an MD/psychologist's important heresy

[Guest guest]

* " *Maybe it has to do with environmental toxins that affect boys

differently than girls "

* * * *

*

What's Happening to Boys?*

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

By 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 athttp://www.washingtonpost.com.

Friday, March 31, 2006; A19

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

html

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.

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