Dr. Warren Farrell

4. Some of the women with whom he nonetheless has sex become pregnant, and raise children without him. Thus, we’re back to step one: the left-out dad and the drop-out son.

3. Women who desire children think of an uneducated young man as undesirable, and an unemployed man as “another child”—hardly marriage material. He’s left out of marriage and fathering.

2. The less education a young man has, the more likely he is to be unemployed or underemployed. He’s left out of the workplace.

1. In neighborhoods where marriage is scarce, fathers are scarce, and more than half of boys don’t finish high school. The boy drops out.

The Drop-out, Left-Out Cycle:

Ironically, as our sons become less educated, our daughters increasingly desire partners who are more educated. In 1939 women ranked education as only the eleventh most important attribute in a husband. Recently, women rank education as the fourth most important.

The number of boys who said they didn’t like school has increased by 71 percent since 1980. Boys are also expelled from school three times as often as girls.

Worldwide, reading and writing skills are the two biggest predictors of success. These are also the two areas in which boys fall the most behind girls. In the US, by eighth grade, 41 percent of girls are at least “proficient” in writing, while only 20 percent of boys are.

On a survey on splitting the bill on a first date, 72 percent of women responded that the man should pay the full bill. Moreover, 82 percent of the men agreed. Males who conspire in pick-and-choose liberation fail to respect women. And themselves.

If your son and a woman make a mutual decision to have dinner, if he suggests splitting the check, he fears she will reject him as a cheapskate. He fears, “no money, no honey.”

It is hard to empathize with victims who are forced to be perpetrators: Russian teenage boys, some calling their mothers in tears, confessing to being unwilling to fire on Ukranians, and unaware of how they were to be used. Imagine the PTSD.

Your son’s economic health can dictate his ability to be loved, which makes his economic health inseparable from his mental health, and therefore his physical health.

You’ve heard the ad for Kay Jewelers, “Every kiss begins with Kay.” Translation: a diamond for a kiss. Or, every kiss begins with pay. Since I wrote this in The Boy Crisis, Kay Jewelers has experimented with fewer pay-for-female-affection type ads. Coincidence?

Over the last forty years, the median annual earnings of a boy with just a high school diploma dropped 26 percent. Without that diploma, his chance of being unemployed during his prime working years (25-54) is 20%, almost 400% greater than the average.

Your son will enter an economy that has made a transition from muscle to mental—or from muscle to microchip. Does your school district have the extensive vocational education that allows Japan’s vocational grads to have 99.6% employment?

... Let’s return the women’s movement to more “I am woman, I am strong,” and less “I am woman, I’ve been wronged.”