Every now and then, my four-year-old son reminds me that boyhood is not a phase, it’s a force of nature. He doesn’t walk; he launches and ricochets. His curiosity sometimes has a hint of interrogation. The world, to him, isn’t a place to inhabit but to conquer with a sword fashioned out of a rather long shoehorn. Somewhere between mopping up his “experiments” and rescuing innocent pieces of furniture, I catch myself wondering, does today’s world still have space for what was once just, boyishness?
Because if I look around, it seems we've begun quietly airbrushing this “boy energy” out of existence. Schools, once a place where curiosity and chaos coexisted, now demand stillness, compliance, and good handwriting. That’s lovely if you’re predisposed to those things; less lovely if you’re a small human whose emotional vocabulary consists mainly of “zoom” and “crash.”
I doubt it’s just nostalgia talking. Across the OECD, boys are 40% more likely to drop out of secondary school, and university enrolment among men has been steadily sliding for over a decade. Boys are three times as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and account for 70% of school suspensions. None of this is because boys suddenly became lazier. It’s because the system has gradually been redesigned to reward traits that align more with principles directly at loggerheads with this boyishness and how they learn and grasp the world's around them.
Don’t get me wrong, girls thriving is a triumph of our society, long overdue, and a victory one we should defend fiercely. But somewhere along the way, equality morphed into symmetry, as though every success for one side must be mirrored precisely on the other. The result? A generation of boys quietly slipping through the cracks while everyone argues about hashtags.
The irony is almost historical. In the 1970s, far fewer women graduated from college compared to men. Today, 50 years later, the gap is almost equally wide, but just gender flipped. Women now make up close to 60-70% of university graduates across the U.S. and much of Europe. What was once a crisis of opportunity for women has quietly become a crisis of motivation for men. We worked for decades to fix one imbalance and somehow engineered another.
Layered on top of this academic slide, there is, whether one should it or not, a broader crisis of masculinity. The word itself now triggers the kind of reaction usually reserved for expired dairy products. Say “masculinity,” and people hear “toxic.” Men are told to “open up,” but when they actually do, there discomforting silence is similar to bringing up politics at a wedding. We claim to want vulnerable men but only when their vulnerability is emotionally tidy. All this while the global suicide rate among men remains four times higher than that of women. Not exactly the footnote you’d expect in supposed conversations about “inclusion.”
Culturally, men have become something of a punchline. The bumbling dad who can’t change a diaper. The incompetent husband who can't do laundry or make toast without burning the house down. Online, on social media, these caricatures rack up millions of likes. Yes, it is it’s considered “harmless fun” but flip the genders, and the outrage would be instantaneous. And rightfully so.
Boys absorb these cues. If all they see are men portrayed as emotionally inept, domestically incompetent, and socially disposable, what kind of self-image are we gifting them? A generation that laughs at itself too much may one day forget how to take itself seriously.
The truth, whispered these days, lest someone misunderstand, is that the world still needs strong, dependable, emotionally intelligent men. Men who fix things (literally and metaphorically), who protect, who lead, who show up even when it’s inconvenient. But we’ve somehow forgotten how to say that without sounding politically incorrect.
As a dad, I find myself walking this mental ans ethical tightrope. I want my son to cry when he’s sad but not build a summer house in his feelings. I want him to be gentle, but also fierce when life demands it. I want him to respect women deeply, and also respect himself, without apologizing for existing in a world that sometimes treats masculinity like a malfunction that needs to be managed.
Raising boys today feels like an act of quiet rebellion. It means teaching them that energy isn’t aggression, leadership isn’t dominance, confidence isn’t arrogance. It means showing them that being a man isn’t about winning over others but mastering oneself.
This isn’t about turning back the clock; it’s about letting the pendulum find balance again. Because if we continue pathologizing everything that makes boys, well, boys, we risk raising a generation of men unsure of their place, and a society unsure of what to do with them.
So this World Men’s Day, I would rather skip the performative hashtags. Do something truly radical: have an honest conversation w:hy boys are falling behind and young men checking out. Because well, empathy is not a gendered virtue. Caring about men’s struggles doesn’t diminish women’s progress, it completes it. A world that raises confident daughters but confused sons isn’t enlightened. It’s just imbalanced.
So here’s to the boys loud, curious, impulsive, imperfect. The ones still climbing trees while the rest of us argue about how they should sit. Maybe, just maybe, the world could use a little more of that chaos again.
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