Males are struggling. According to a recent report, a concerning number of young men say they feel aimless and isolated. They are much more likely than their female counterparts to be living with mom and dad in their 20s and 30s. Girls now graduate from high school at higher rates than boys. For college, the same pattern emerges: The graduation rate for four-year institutions is 68% for women and 61% for men.
Several solutions have been offered to ameliorate what some call a crisis of masculinity: Boys should start kindergarten a year later than girls; we need more male teachers in public schools to serve as role models; given that schooling has long been better suited to female learning styles, we need to move past the notion that a college degree is the only path to success; more vocational training should be available to young men who are not naturally inclined to higher education. All of these ideas have merit.
But to get at the heart of why men report they are aimless, it’s important ask the question, what is it that makes life meaningful? This is a tricky question, and concepts such as meaning, satisfaction and happiness are often defined differently by different experts. But if there’s anything that psychological science has taught us, it’s that relationships are the most important factor to leading a good life.
Professor Martin Seligman, one of the most influential psychologists of the early 21st century, put it this way: “Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up.” Likewise, Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, who directed the longest-running study on adult happiness for 30 years, concluded that “the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
Why relationships matter
But why are relationships so rewarding? What is it about them that leads to a meaningful life? This is a harder question, and one that has received less attention. Part of the answer likely comes from our evolution. Scholars tell us that during the Pleistocene era (the most recent period before our present one), our ancestors faced a plethora of unpredictable challenges. Among those groups and families that worked cooperatively together, strong relationships were a buffer against these challenges and enhanced survival. As a result, relationships became deeply rewarding.
But perhaps a more fundamental answer for why relationships are so critical in human flourishing has to do with the most biologically relevant relationships: those between a child and his or her parents, especially the mother. This is related to the way in which human offspring are utterly helpless when they are born. A baby giraffe can stand, walk and nurse on its own within an hour of birth. (Can you imagine how your family life would have been different if this were true of your children?) A blue whale calf can swim within moments of being born. But human babies can’t even fully sense their world. They are so helpless that scholars who study infant development refer to the first six months of life as the “fourth trimester.” Our babies are literally born half-baked.
Because of this extreme immaturity at birth, babies depend on an extremely strong bond with their parents, especially their mother, for survival. Everything a baby can do — cry, coo, smile, suckle and laugh — is done in part to strengthen the relationship between mother and child. This is evolutionarily adaptive. But the behaviors of the baby are just one side of the coin. In order for the baby to survive and even thrive, there must be a strong reciprocal attachment on the part of the parents. Fortunately, most of the time, Mother Nature cooperates. Most parents can recall a profound sense of love and affection that they feel toward their newborn child. It’s like you discover another chamber in your heart you didn’t know existed. (This is the basis for attachment theory, developed by the British psychiatrist John Bowlby.)
This most fundamental, biological relationship represents the strongest forms of love and affection that nature has created in the flesh. And for most parents, caring for and raising our children provides a deep sense of meaning and purpose. A study from Pew Research Center found that parents were twice as likely to say that time spent caring for their children was “very meaningful” compared to time spent working. This is how we were evolutionarily and psychologically engineered.
But here’s the problem: The way that nature has shaped human behavior and reproduction leaves a fundamental imbalance in the strength of biological and emotional ties between men and women and their children. A woman carries an unborn child for the better part of a year. For the vast majority of human existence, women have been compelled to breastfeed their young children, sometimes for years. This strong biological connection underlies a strong emotional connection between mother and child. But men have a comparatively tenuous biological link to their children; they contribute a relatively small amount to the conception of a new child. It’s even possible for a man to conceive a child and not even know it. This scenario would be absurd for a woman. This imbalance leaves men with a fragile emotional link to their children and, as a result, it leaves them with a fragile link to one of the deepest sources of meaning. In order to help offset this natural imbalance, there must be a strong cultural force that helps link men to their children and levels the playing field. For most of history, this has been an important but under-recognized purpose of marriage.
Only since the drastic rise in divorce that occurred in the latter part of the 20th century have scholars fully realized how important a role marriage plays in linking men to their children. The most obvious ways that marriage links a man to his children is by having him live with their mother. But when parents divorce, they live separately. And since the early 1900s, children of divorced parents have mostly lived with their mothers, even in cases of so-called joint custody. At this point, in many cases, the relationship with dad is often reduced to phone calls, weekend visits and child support payments.
How marriage benefits men
As the journalist Solomon Jones has written from personal experience, divorced fatherhood is a “disjointed tapestry of love and distance, longing and hurt.” Jones went on to explain how living separately from his child “was painful because a father’s love is so often expressed through providing and protecting. And it’s difficult to provide and protect without presence.”
“Fatherhood,” he concluded, “works best when it is paired with motherhood and sealed by marriage.” A wealth of sociological data shows that, especially for men, marriage and parenting are closely connected. Some researchers even refer to them as a “package deal.”
A huge amount of research has confirmed that children who grow up with biological, married parents have large advantages compared to children who do not. But marriage also has immense benefits for men. And many of these benefits are tied to the way evolutionary forces shaped male psychology. Becoming a father can be a powerful source of motivation and provide a deep sense of meaning and purpose. But as mentioned above, simply conceiving a child doesn’t cut it. A man must be active in his social role as a father to realize this motivation.
The social worker Charles Ballard recognized this as he helped unwed, absentee fathers reengage with their children in the tough inner-city neighborhoods of Cleveland, Ohio. Traditional thinking in sociology dictates that the way to help such men is to provide economic security for them: These men must first have jobs before they are able to meaningfully reengage with their children. But Ballard flipped that logic on its head. He found that when he focused on reuniting these men with their children, the men were able to find the intrinsic motivation to improve their own situations. For about a decade, through a combination of home visits, therapy sessions and parenting classes, Ballard helped reunite some 2,000 absentee fathers with their children. When they entered the program, only 12% of the men had full-time employment. But after reengaging with their children, 62% had found full-time work, with an additional 12% who found part-time work. Over 95% of these men started contributing financially to the support of their children.
The fatherhood initiative led by Ballard is a wonderful approach that yielded strong results. More government and community programs should take note of the powerful motivation that comes from helping men fully engage with their children. Yet social programs such as these are extremely expensive. Our enthusiasm for such programs is further tempered when we recognize that this initiative was essentially trying to serve a purpose that marriage has naturally served for centuries in almost all cultures: tying men to their social roles as fathers of their biological children.
So, returning to our original question: What is to be done to overcome the crisis of masculinity? As noted, several potential options, many of which are reasonable, have been proposed. But if marriage and fatherhood are not part of the conversation, then we are missing the mark. This is how men are psychologically and evolutionarily wired. It’s a function of how they were created.
Samuel T. Wilkinson, MD, is an associate professor at Yale, the medical director of the Yale Depression Research Program and a fellow of the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University. The ideas in this essay are drawn from his book “Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence,” published by Pegasus Books.