How parents can help boys find their footing as the job market changes
The gymnasium smelled like old wood floor and rain jackets. I was four rows back in a plastic folding chair, wedged between the sixth grade team’s trophy case and a man who kept checking his phone. Parent-teacher night at the middle school. I’d been to enough of these to know the drill. Math worksheets in a neat pile, a slideshow about reading logs, a small plastic bin where students were supposed to put their phones during class.
The teacher, Ms. O’Donnell, was going through the usual items. Homework completion was down. She said it carefully, the way teachers do when they don’t want thirty parents to panic at once. But then she paused, and I noticed something. She was looking at me.
“Your son is doing fine academically,” she said. “But he’s one of about six boys in that class who I notice are drifting. They’re not misbehaving. They just stopped raising their hands. They turn in work, but it’s like the fuel’s out.”
I nodded. At home, my fourteen-year-old still answered when I asked about school, but the answers had gotten dull. “Fine.” “Okay.” “Nothing.” He wasn’t playing video games all night or trying to hide a phone under his pillow. He just seemed to have pulled up to the shore and cut the engine.
I read something that same week. Actually, I was standing in the kitchen making coffee, thumbing through an article on my phone, the same way I check the weather. A news headline about job growth. Between March and July, essentially all of the new jobs created in the country went to women. Three hundred fifty thousand of them. Men were basically flat.
The coffee finished brewing while I stood there. I thought about the statistic, then I thought about my son. The article wanted me to feel some kind of way about it. Buttons being pushed, candidates to blame, the usual. But I couldn’t get there. All I could think about was Ms. O’Donnell’s face and that phrase, fuel’s out.
Because the truth is, something real is happening with a lot of boys, and it’s not really about politics. It’s happening at kitchen tables and in classrooms. My son has trouble explaining it. I have trouble explaining it. But there is a thread connecting what he feels when he looks at a six-page research packet on the American Revolution and what the labor statistics look like.
He’s not lazy. He’s observant. He watches adults. He sees his mom leave for work at a hospital and come home at seven. He sees me and his dad at the dinner table, and he knows that Dad’s job has shifted so much that he’s retraining to stay current. He watches the news sometimes, not out of interest but out of a kind of early, sour form of citizenship. And he has started to wonder what the point is. Not school generally. But the parts of school that ask him to sit, isolate, and produce pages of words about something he cannot touch.
Last Sunday he was sitting at the kitchen table with a worksheet that asked him to write an essay about the spoils system. He didn’t know what that was, which is fair. He looked up at me and said, “What’s the actual purpose of this?”
It’s the hardest question to answer honestly.
I didn’t say because I said so. I didn’t say it builds character. I said something closer to, “It teaches you how to organize your thoughts,” which felt thin the second it left my mouth, because he’s a kid who can organize his thoughts just fine when he’s explaining how a carburetor works.
I’ve been thinking about what the shift in the job market tells us about what boys need, and what we can actually do inside our own walls with our own kids, without waiting for the politicians to fight it out.
I’m not a teacher, but I am a parent. And from where I sit, the problem is not that boys are lost in a new economy. The problem is that they’ve inherited an old definition of what they should be, and that definition is breaking down, and no one has handed them a replacement. They’re expected to perform in a system that rewards kids who organize their binders, plan ahead, turn in rough drafts, and revise based on feedback. Those skills matter. And at fourteen, girls often have more practice doing them. That isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just development. But the consequence is that many boys quietly conclude they are less capable, when in fact they’re just learning on a different timeline.
So here’s what we’ve done, and it’s not fancy.
We stopped asking, “How was school?” and started asking, “What did you actually do today?” The difference matters. The first question leads to a dead-end, one-word answer. The second one, if you keep asking it, gets you, “We built a bridge with popsicle sticks and then ate them,” and from there you have something to talk about. It doesn’t fix the system. But it keeps the conversation open.
We also started making the relationship between school and real life visible in a way that is not an inspirational poster. Instead of saying, “You need to do this for your future,” we started doing the mapping out loud. When he had to write a persuasive essay last month, I didn’t just tell him he’d need to write emails someday, which is about as motivating as a dental appointment. Instead, we sat down and looked at the Amazon review he wrote for his fishing rod. He’d written a really good review. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It even included a recommendation. When I pointed out that he’d already written a persuasive essay, he actually paused, like the pieces had clicked together.
The other thing we’ve done, and I’m still not entirely sure about it, is we’ve pulled back from enforcing the “everything matters equally” line. Some homework is busywork. Some assignments are genuinely not worth the tears. Letting him skip the busywork, intentionally and calmly, with a note to the teacher, has done more for his attitude than any reward system. It tells him I’m on his side, and that arguing is a skill. It also means that when a teacher says an assignment actually does matter, he believes me a little more.
A few weeks ago, I sat in on a class where the teacher, a young guy with a beard, had his students building small ramps out of cardboard and measuring angles for a physics unit. It wasn’t a special program. No grant money. Just a teacher willing to let the period get a little messy. The difference was immediate. The boys I’d seen slump over worksheets were standing up. Debating about degrees. Measuring twice. They were, in a real sense, ordinary kids doing ordinary things. But they were awake.
That’s the smallest version of the answer. And maybe the largest. Boys need to feel useful. They need tasks that have visible outcomes, physical or at least tangible. They need adults who are not afraid to say, “I don’t know either, but let’s look.” And they need patience, more patience than is convenient, while they figure out what it is they’re good at, especially if it doesn’t match what school makes visible.
I don’t know where my son is headed. I don’t know what the job market will look like when he’s thirty. Nobody does. But the other night, after he finished his history essay, he came out to the garage where I was changing the air filter in the car. He watched for a minute, then picked up the socket wrench and asked if he could do it. I sat on a five-gallon bucket and watched him. He got it done. He didn’t say anything about it afterward. But he walked back inside with his shoulders a little straighter than when he’d walked out.
It’s not a solution. It’s not even a conclusion. It’s just one small thing going right, in a stretch of time when a lot of what happens in the larger world can leave a parent feeling unsure. But sitting there on that bucket, I thought that maybe the job for us isn’t to fix the big statistic or win the argument. It’s to make sure the boy in our own kitchen has at least one place where the fuel isn’t out.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How parents can help boys find their footing as the job market changes