Why Are Boys Falling Behind?

Women continue to surpass men by “large margins” when it comes to college enrollment and graduation rates and “the gap continues to widen.”1

This certainly has not always been the case. In 1960, there were 1.6 males for every female graduating from a U.S. four-year college and 1.55 males for every female undergraduate.2 A survey of the literature reveals that this performance gap can be attributed to the maturation delay in boys’ development, or even “feminized classrooms,”3 as though these conditions haven’t always been present in the educational setting. Because young males, especially white males, are so privileged in our culture, the disparity must be attributed to some phenomenon that is totally outside their personal control. It couldn’t possibly be their fault.

The answer is hiding in plain sight. Girls are now diligently doing their lessons and preparing for their futures while boys are wasting their time playing videogames.

I speak as a mother who has raised two pairs of boys who are ten years apart. Benjamin and Spenser were born in 1987 and 1991, and we adopted Lane and Tristan, birthdates 1998 and 2000, after Spenser’s death in 2001. Whereas my mothering techniques did not change significantly during their growing years, their exposure to screens certainly did.

For example, some of our best times were reading a story together every night. After the noisy chaos of the bath, we sat on the maroon couch and immersed ourselves in the colorful illustrations and musical rhyming…