The Boys Aren’t in Crisis. Worry About These Kids Instead.

IT WAS A typical start to a typical math class in my fourth-grade room: My students had returned from lunch along with the cafeteria teacher, who needed to speak to me; three of my boys, habitual offenders of lunchroom volume and behavior rules, had done it again. At the same time, two students from the neighboring class ran up to complain that one of my students (a boy) had been sprinting down the hall. Yet another boy reported a classmate (a boy) for turning off the bathroom lights. I put out these little fires while ushering everyone into the room; we had to start math; the clock was ticking. Instead of following our established math routine (bring your whiteboard and marker to the carpet), two boys decided they would rather trade Pokémon cards. Another, tugging his things from his messy desk, caused its contents to vomit onto the floor. In as calm a voice as I could muster, I told the boys that they had 10 seconds to join the class before I lost my mind.

Ten, nine, eight…

Meanwhile, the girls were sitting on the carpet, math materials ready, waiting for the lesson to begin. I took a deep breath, looked at the boys, and thought, not for the first time: Come on, my dudes, pull your shit together.

If you haven’t yet heard, social scientists and intellectuals are raising the alarm, declaring a “boys’ crisis” in America. Pick almost any data point from the past two decades, and boys trail girls in category after category. Girls earn a higher GPA than boys. High school–age boys in public schools outpace girls in dropout, suspension, and expulsion rates and make up a majority of K–12 students reading and writing below grade level. Boys are less likely to enroll in college and much less likely to graduate in four years. These achievement gaps extend into adulthood. Men make up 70 percent of opioid-related deaths. Men are four times more likely to kill themselves. The list goes on. Put enough of these data points together and you get the blinding constellation that is the subject of podcasts, articles, and hot takes: Our boys are in crisis.

But are they?

I have another set of data points, collected from my years as a teacher. From my view at the front of the class, the boys are absolutely a disorganized, rambunctious, distractible hot mess. But when I take a step back, I see the boys enthusiastically contributing to our reading discussions about character and theme. I see them learning how to multiply and divide, and plan their personal essays, and make friends, and cooperate productively in their science partnerships. In other words, I see them doing everything we expect and hope fourth graders to be doing. The boys, in my professional opinion, are doing just fine. So I have to wonder: Are the armchair experts making a crisis out of nothing? Or is the “boys’ crisis” masking another problem with far deeper roots?

I’m not denying the statistics. But there is a difference between analyzing the metadata of millions of children from a university office and spending time in a real classroom with real boys and girls.

I’ve taught for over a decade, working with kindergartners, college freshmen, and all ages between. I’ve taught the most privileged kids in America (children of an All-Star New York Yankee, an Academy Award–winning actor, a billionaire Trump donor), and I’ve taught the most disadvantaged, in Maine’s juvenile prison. Last fall, I began another year as a fourth-grade teacher. I’ve worked with hundreds of boys over my career. And, once upon a time, I was a boy myself.

I did some dumb shit as a boy. My guy friends and I used to hop in random swimming pools, throw snowballs at cop cars from the woods, light fireworks in mailboxes. If you didn’t know that boys’ brains develop more slowly than girls’ brains, now you know. According to some studies, we mature about a year behind girls (see above), our judgment mechanisms take some priming before they kick in (see above), and we are less likely to exhibit self-regulation (see above).

There are outliers, of course. I’ve had a female student who behaved like a nonviolent civil-disobedience protester, lying down in the middle of the room, refusing to move. I’ve had a boy obsessed with dirt biking and keeping his desk tidy enough to satisfy a neurotic boot camp instructor. As a society, we’re broadening our understanding of gender, acknowledging that every kid doesn’t fit neatly into a “boy” or “girl” box. And yet, traditional gender behaviors overwhelmingly endure in my classroom. Whether the cause is biological or social, I don’t know, but what I see is clear: The kids born with XY chromosomes are the disruptive, slightly feral, slightly delinquent kids. The kids born with XX chromosomes are not. In fact, what I observe in my classroom these days is that the loud, messy, disruptive boys are not only doing fine academically; they are often outperforming the girls.

What’s true in my class holds true for the more than 600 students in my school. Our gifted and talented program began the year with three boys for every girl. In the intervention wing, where students are pulled for support in literacy and math, the ratio is skewed the other way.

As I compared what I was seeing with my own eyes against the panic of a “boys’ crisis,” I wondered: Could my school be an outlier? Was the population here different? Wealthier? More educated? I teach in Maine, which is below average in median household income (35 out of 50), but the city in which I teach could, in many ways, be a poster child for the “average” American small city. A coastal city of 20,960, it has a median household income ($81,326) that’s a hair’s breadth above the nation’s ($80,610). The poverty rate is slightly lower (8 percent compared to 11 percent nationally), and the percentage with a college education is slightly higher (41 percent to 38 percent). The city has a cute Main Street, farms and factories, a working waterfront, and a brewery. The city, by many metrics, is extraordinarily average, and so are its boys.

So what was I missing? Where was the crisis?

ONE LEADING INDICATOR of underperformance in boys can be found not in school but at home: Boys raised in fatherless families, the statistics show, are less likely to succeed in a host of life measures.

I considered this theory from the sample size of my classroom. Every year, I get students without fathers. These fatherless students fall into two groups. The first group lost their dads to death. The second group lost their dads to life events (divorce, incarceration, restraining orders, addiction, etc.). We might expect that the tragedy of losing a father to death could send a kid off the rails, but this group fares surprisingly well in my class. It’s the second group that worries me.

My students whose fathers are living but absent almost universally suffer from combinations of academic delays and behavioral issues. These tend to be the kids with ADHD diagnoses and special education plans. Last year, I had an extraordinarily bright, fatherless boy whom I thought of as Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. He wouldn’t read, but he was my best reader. He got top scores on math tests, but he wouldn’t attempt a math challenge. I tried to be his Robin Williams, and I failed. Not once did he complete his homework or read anything more challenging than a graphic novel. He preferred goofing around and would often find himself called (again) to the office. His report cards? Abysmal. Some would attribute his academic performance to the lack of a father. But I saw it differently: His mother worked multiple jobs. She couldn’t attend conferences. I could rarely get her on the phone. She didn’t have time to read with him or remind him about his homework. They lived in the city’s poorest neighborhood. The more I considered it, my Matt Damon didn’t need a dad as much as he needed a socioeconomic life raft. I wondered: Could the “boys’ crisis” have less to do with family and more to do with poverty?

The town where I teach is economically diverse, so I can compare kids from different economic classes. And what I’ve seen is clear: If there is a boys’ crisis, it’s among poor boys.

Not all my below-average students are poor, but nearly all my poor students are below average. This isn’t surprising to me as a teacher; could you focus during math class if you were worrying about whether your mom could pay this month’s rent?

Poverty is a grinding force that not only holds kids back but physically stunts their brains. One study concluded that children from poor families had less “gray matter” in their frontal lobes, explaining up to a 20 percent difference in test scores. When we consider poverty as a factor in the boys’ crisis, the statistics take on new meaning: The reason boys appear to be falling behind is because a lot of poor boys are doing very badly, pulling the national average down like an anchor. At the top of the socioeconomic ladder, the gender gap is all but nonexistent: The Ivy League colleges still enroll about half males and half females.

In another country, poverty might be the end of the story. But this is America, with our unique history, where class can’t be separated from race. And sure enough, when race is considered, the city in which I teach no longer seems “average.” Maine is 94 percent white, a full 18 points less diverse than the nation. My classroom isn’t too different; each year about 17 of 20 students are white. If we break down the boys’ crisis by class and race, the picture becomes yet clearer: Upper- and middle-class white boys are not lagging behind at nearly the same rate as poor Black boys and poor Hispanic boys, who, because of generational, institutional disadvantages, are poorer, on average, than their white peers.

One fascinating caveat: On average, poor girls of color academically outperform poor boys of color, and nobody seems to know why. Richard V. Reeves, PhD, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of Of Boys and Men, has said there isn’t an “obvious causal mechanism” but that an environment of poverty seems to affect boys more than girls. It’s led him to question the ways in which “masculinity” could possibly be more fragile and sensitive than previously believed, and to suggest that girls might be a bit more resilient. Regardless, these numbers shouldn’t lead us into believing that poor girls are thriving. Poverty keeps all bright young minds—boys and girls—from achieving their full potential.

“Poor kids are in crisis” is not a splashy headline that will help pundits sell books or appear on podcasts, which is why—if I’m going to be a little cynical—it doesn’t get the same attention as a “boys’ crisis.” The causes of poverty are big and structural, requiring big structural solutions. It won’t be solved by encouraging fathers to step up to the plate, or through boy leadership empowerment programs, or by “redshirting” boys so they begin kindergarten later (all proposed solutions to the “boys’ crisis”). I think about a former student, a boy with a big smile and a great sense of humor, loved by his peers and teachers. He wanted to do well. But he and his mom bounced between three apartments over the year. He couldn’t stay awake in class. He rarely got to school less than an hour late, if at all. This boy didn’t need an empowerment program. He needed rent control. He needed his mom to earn a living wage. He needed a safe, stable place to call home.

FIRST, WE SHOULD recenter the conversation. By focusing on all boys, we do a disservice to those boys experiencing a genuine crisis of poverty. Then, we need those big, structural solutions: a reinvestment in federal housing, a realignment of the tax brackets, a return to the dirt-cheap tuition that boomers enjoyed in the 1960s. These changes wouldn’t help every boy, but they would help many.

Until these policies become reality, what can we do for our boys now? As a teacher, I try to check my gender bias. When I’m exasperated with my boys, ready to call the office, I try to pause. I’ll give the boys extra reminders and transition time. I use restorative justice when conflict occurs, to help kids build an emotional vocabulary and learn to make amends. These things help all kids, but they seem to really help boys.

Instead of putting our messy, rambunctious boys on a disciplinary pathway, what if we teachers, administrators, and parents acknowledged that boys take a little longer to figure things out, settle down, get their shit together? It’s easier said than done, especially in the heat of the moment, when the girls are ready to learn and the boys are sowing chaos. But maybe a slight adjustment in our expectations could help reduce behavioral issues, rather than pathologizing traditional “boy” behavior? I remind myself that my guy friends and I did some very dumb shit, and we turned out okay. The boys—the girls, all the kids—not all of them are alright, but they can be. That choice, as always, is up to us, the adults in the room.

This story appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Men’s Health.

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