{"id":28,"date":"2013-08-29T14:06:14","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T21:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/searchingfortomsawyer\/?p=28"},"modified":"2013-08-29T14:06:14","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T21:06:14","slug":"the-high-cost-of-bored-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/timwright\/2013\/08\/the-high-cost-of-bored-boys\/","title":{"rendered":"The High Cost of Bored Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for its men. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2013Anthropologist Margaret Mead<\/p>\n

Over the last several months we have witnessed far too many stories about \u201cbad\u201d boys\u2014boys setting off a bomb at the Boston marathon; a boy taking up a weapon to shoot his fellow students; to name a few.\u00a0 But what makes this latest \u201cbad\u201d boys crime so shocking\u2014the shooting of an Australian man\u2014is the seemingly cavalier attitude of the shooters.\u00a0 They were bored<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These boys certainly need to be held accountable for their actions.\u00a0 I in no way want to diminish their complete responsibility for their crime.<\/p>\n

But\u2026as a society, we need to be asking questions about how we\u2019re raising boys (or not raising them) and the consequences of raising a generation of \u201cbored\u201d boys.<\/p>\n

Boys raised with no compelling vision for manhood, boys who have no good men pouring noble, heroic masculinity into them, become bored. And bored boys damage society either through passivity or violence.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Over 90% of the prison population is male.\u00a0 And almost 80% of them grew up without a father in their lives.\u00a0 These are boys who were raised with little or no good masculine energy being poured into them.<\/p>\n

Bored boys see no value to life.\u00a0 Life loses its sacredness.\u00a0 And so any life becomes expendable.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Most bored boys won\u2019t express their boredom through murder, but crime, playing on the edges of what\u2019s legal, breaking the law because of a dare, and other acts against society grow, in large part, out of a sense of lostness\u2014a lack of a vision for what it means to be a good man.<\/p>\n

The other response to boredom\u2014passivity\u2014doesn\u2019t get the press violence does, but we certainly feel its effects.\u00a0 Boys are checking out of society. Because they are falling behind girls in almost every area of education, fewer and fewer of them are attending college. \u00a0They aren\u2019t keeping up with the skills training required of them for 21st<\/sup> Century work.\u00a0 Over the last 20 years, the reading skills of the average 17 year boy have declined!<\/p>\n

We stereotype these \u201cboys\u201d as the guys in the cave playing video games for hours on end.\u00a0 Or the guy who still lives with his parents at the age of 35.\u00a0 Or the guy watching ESPN 27 hours a day.\u00a0 These \u201cimages\u201d are certainly symptoms of boredom.\u00a0 But the high cost of passivity runs deep.<\/p>\n

Robert Bly, in his book, Iron John<\/a>, <\/em>offers some challenging insights into passive boys\/men:<\/p>\n

We know that for hundreds of thousands of years men have admired each other, and been admired by women, in particular, for their activity.\u00a0 Men and women alike once called on men to pierce the dangerous places, carry handfuls of courage to the waterfalls, dust the tails of wild boars.\u00a0 All knew that if men did that well the women and children could sleep safely. \u00a0Now the boars have turned to pigs in the stockyard, and the rushing rivers to the waterfall in the Museum of Modern Art courtyard.\u00a0 The activity men were once loved for is not required\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2026Women are coming out into activity just as men are passing them going the other way, into passivity\u2026During the last 30 years men have been asked to learn how to go with the flow, how to follow rather than lead, how to live in a nonhierarchical way, how to be vulnerable, how to adopt consensus decision making.\u00a0 Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man\u2014they are called priests <\/em>(authors note\u2014ouch!); the university wants a domesticated man\u2014they are called tenure-track people\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

The passive man may not say what he wants, and the girlfriend or wife has to guess it.\u00a0 As compensation for passivity at home, he may go into robot production at work\u2026The passive man may skip over parenting\u2026The passive man leaves his wife to do that.<\/em><\/p>\n

A Swedish man\u2026told me recently that his women friends complain that the Swedish man has no overview of the relationship.\u00a0 The man knows what he wants today or tomorrow, but does not know how he wants the relationship to be two years or ten years from now.\u00a0 We would call that a sort of passivity of vision<\/strong>. <\/em>(pages 60-63)<\/p>\n

Women in the US echo that concern as they are finding it more and more difficult to connect with men they want to date, let alone marry, because so many boys have grown up into passive men\u2014men with no compelling vision for what it means to be a good man.<\/p>\n

We have yet to fully experience the effects of a generation or two of boys growing up with no vision for manhood, but the glimpses we\u2019ve seen so far should cause alarm!<\/p>\n

This is a societal issue.\u00a0 One that we can positively impact if we have the courage to change the storyline of our boys and raise them with a noble vision for what it means to be a man.<\/p>\n

What can we do about it?<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0\u00a0 We need to re-value boys.\u00a0 We\u2019ve poured (and continue to pour) lots of energy into our girls over the last 40+ years.\u00a0 That\u2019s a good thing.\u00a0 But our boys are lost, and we need to put that same energy into them.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u00a0 Educators need to learn more about how a boy brain learns and fight for getting our boys caught up in school and parents will want to insist that their local teachers learn to teach to boys. \u00a0(One great resource is the Gurian Institute<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

3)\u00a0\u00a0 Men need to step up and start mentoring boys, pouring good masculine energy into them.\u00a0 Men need to model for our boys what it looks like to be a man of principle, character, and vision.\u00a0\u00a0 The church, by the way, is filled with men looking for something world-changing to do.\u00a0 Men, this is your moment.\u00a0 You can change the world by mentoring a boy into manhood.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for its men. \u2013Anthropologist Margaret Mead Over the last several months we have witnessed far too many stories about \u201cbad\u201d boys\u2014boys setting off a bomb at the Boston marathon; a boy taking up a weapon to shoot his fellow students; to name a few.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1621,"featured_media":29,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[47,24,2,27,48,15,49,50,8,51,9,34],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-boys","tag-bored-boys","tag-boy-brains","tag-boys","tag-educating-boys","tag-iron-john","tag-men","tag-mentoring","tag-mentors","tag-parents","tag-robert-bly","tag-searching-for-tom-sawyer","tag-vision-for-manhood"],"yoast_head":"\nThe High Cost of Bored Boys<\/title>\n<meta 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