The importance of role models for girls seems irrefutable. Efforts since the 1990s to provide female role models have had great success opening doors for girls and young women, who now outpace boys in education, outnumber men in law and medical schools and excel in male-dominated fields like tech and politics.
At the same time, boys have many fewer male role models in their daily lives. While men still fill most positions of power across American society, the people who interact with children are largely women. Occupations like pediatrics have switched to mostly being done by women, while those that were always female-dominated, like teaching, have become more so.
At a crucial time in their lives, boys are increasingly cared for by women, especially the many boys whose fathers aren’t a regular presence. This lack of male role models, say researchers, parents, young men and those who work with them, is contributing to their struggles in school and employment — and the overall feeling that they’re adrift.
Working with children has long been considered women’s work, and as a result, has been undervalued, with low pay and a stigma against men doing it. The share of professional men in children’s lives has decreased even more in recent decades.
Over roughly the same period, single-mother households became more common. Mentorship groups say they struggle to find as many male volunteers as there are boys who need them. And as families have become more insular — participation in community groups and churches has declined, and children spend less time playing outside with neighbors — children get to know fewer adults.
Some researchers and people working to support boys say there needs to be more of a focus on recruiting and training men to work with children.
“While women, I believe, are doing their very, very best to raise boys, I believe until men become part of that process, we’re not going to make a huge dent in this issue,” said Tony Porter, the chief executive of A Call to Men, a group that provides training on healthy manhood and violence prevention.
Face-to-face role models matter
Girls continue to need more role models, especially in areas once closed off to women, like leadership. Boys have many examples of men in power — and of course, boys also learn from female role models.
But research suggests that it’s the adults whom children personally know — and who share their gender or race — who have the biggest effect. They influence children by representing what’s possible, modeling behavior and empathizing from shared experience. And their presence has been found to improve educational performance, career decisions, motivation and relationships.
Much academic research on the role model effect has been about girls, but some studies have shown how having men in their lives helps boys.
Black boys do better in neighborhoods where there are more fathers around, even if not their own. Coaches, one of the few male-dominated jobs working with children, can play a formative role in shaping children’s outcomes.
Growing up without a father at home, as one in five children do, particularly disadvantages boys, several studies have shown.
In interviews and written responses sent to the Upshot as part of our reporting project on young men, several said the need for role models was more crucial than ever, because they thought society no longer had shared values about what being a good man means.
Those on the political left have rightly called out problematic male behavior, some said, but haven’t offered positive role models as alternatives. Filling the void on the right are online influencers who offer a clear take on how to be a man, but sometimes a harmful and misogynistic one.
“It’s not personally my politics, but I can see how people flock to these kind of people like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, because they kind of give them a structure, they give them rules, this is how you can improve your life,” said Patrick Hirschfeld, 22, who lives in Richmond, Va., and is studying to work in homeland security.
“Basically there is an attack on masculinity with no positive alternatives to turn to,” he said.
Boys in poor areas are the least likely to have male role models, which most likely contributes to achievement gaps by family income and gender, researchers have found.
Michaela Kiger teaches at an alternative high school in New Castle, Del., where most of her students are boys from low-income families. The girls often have clear career plans, she said — mostly being health aides or cosmetologists — while the boys do not.
They cling to traditional gender roles, she said, believing they should provide for and protect their families, yet being unwilling to seek fast-growing health care jobs because they’re considered women’s work.
“We tell them that they have a future and can pursue a different kind of life for themselves than what they were born into, but they don’t see enough concrete examples of that actually happening for men in their community,” Ms. Kiger said.
A big role for coaches and teachers
Many men told me that male mentors can make all the difference.
Tristan Armstrong, a 26-year-old engineering graduate student in Salt Lake City, grew up in rural Utah, where he said he was surrounded by male role models — his grandfather, father, uncles, neighbors, teachers, Catholic priests and coaches.
When he was having a hard time in junior high, the football coach noticed, and recruited him to play. The coach ended up being pivotal in Mr. Armstrong’s life, “reaching out and helping me through that and finding the thing I excelled at and took pride in,” he said. “He really looked at it like he was teaching us to be good, healthy, functioning young men.”
Tim Gruber, 31, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in Driggs, Idaho, said he hopes his students see in him a full version of manhood.
“They see me as a guy amid a sea of women,” he said. “I would like to believe that I’m exhibiting different notions of masculinity. Yes, I’m a hard worker. Yes, I’m going to be strict and hold them to high expectations. But also I will willingly share, I’ll cry with the kids, I will show my emotional side too.”
His own male role models included a dean at his college, who helped him define what masculinity meant to him, and a mentor early in his career who encouraged him to teach young children.
More boys would have these kinds of positive experiences if more men took jobs that involved work with young children, like teaching, researchers said. Formal recruiting initiatives — like those that have helped bring girls into engineering and leadership — could help.
Public support for activities outside school, in the arts or sciences or athletics, is important to ensure that children, especially those from low-income backgrounds, have a range of caring adults in their lives, said Jean Rhodes, a psychology professor and director of the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
And, she said, men who interact with children, even informally, could recognize their role in boys’ lives and receive training to become effective mentors.
Claire Cain Miller is a Times reporter covering gender, families and education.
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