The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It Read Free Page A

trust
    Divorce isn’t easy for anyone. But it’s not so much the divorce itself that affects young people’s perceptions of relationships as it is how the parents handle the situation. Many children lose faith in relationships because they watch their parents become emotionally unstable and react irrationally, sometimes violently.
    This is the pattern many kids observe right now: Man and woman meet, fall in love and get married, make babies. Enter stress. Babies take over lives. Distance grows between man and woman; communication was never great to begin with but is now much worse. Enter stress-relieving but relationship-destroying behaviors, such as physical abuse, drug and alcohol use, and emotional and physical infidelities. Everyone is unhappy. Divorce follows. One or both parents now are struggling and are emotionally, mentally and/or financially broken.
    Since we are brought up to think that conventional marriage is for everyone and that marriages last forever, the breakup is devastating to the entire family. As a kid you think, Is this what I have to look forward to? Then as an adult you think, Why bother? What's the point? The entire burden will fall on me in the end anyway.
    It doesn’t have to be that way if the divorce is amicable and both parties communicate to their children their respect for the other parent and love for them, but that’s usually not what happens. Young people in America don’t grow up seeing great role models for trust and reliability, especially in intimate relationships. Monogamous relationships are now thought of in terms of what you lose rather than what you gain; they’re seen as a restriction on independence and freedom, and commitment is seen as sacrificing your own goals and passions for something that will most likely fail in 10 or 20 years, if not sooner. Young people are expected to still want these things yet are never taught how to talk about or handle the challenges that come with these commitments.
    And if we can’t trust those closest to us, whom can we trust? If mom and dad can’t even keep it together, who can? Learning how to trust others starts with our primary relationships, so when our primary role models are unreliable and don’t deliver on their promises or aren’t there for one another, no doubt we will find it harder to trust others.
    Something else worth noting is the overall decline of trust in the United States. The percentage of Americans who believe “most people can be trusted” plummeted from 58 percent in 1960 to 32 percent in 2008, meaning the majority of Americans now view other Americans as untrustworthy. 26 One source of this downsizing of trust is the media’s highlighting instances of corruption, deception and deceit by politicians, celebrities and other public figures. Obviously, more than mere social implications stem from this lack of trust; countries in which citizens don’t trust each other don’t do as well economically.
    “Countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. … In these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. So poor countries are, by and large, low-trust countries,” says Paul Zak, professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University, in his TEDTalk, “Trust, Morality — and Oxytocin.” 27

Helicopter parents
    Boys are not the only ones reluctant to grow up. Many parents are also reluctant to let go, to allow their sons to develop self-reliance and create solutions to their own problems. Lori Gottlieb, a clinical psychologist in New York, wrote in the Atlantic magazine about the role parents play in shaping their child’s sense of happiness: “Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?” The rise of so-called helicopter parents supports this idea. The University of Vermont has even hired “parent bouncers” to help these parents keep their distance.