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Many boys today are struggling with low motivation and disengagement in school—prompting parents and educators to explore how to better support their growth, purpose, and long-term success.
“How can I motivate my son?” a friend of mine recently asked. “He shows up, does the bare minimum, but is not striving. What can I do?” Another friend chimed in: “It’s the exact same for my son. While his sister is involved in everything, taking all the hardest classes and succeeding, he’s just coasting, and it doesn’t seem to bother him in the least.” When four dads get together to walk in the woods, we inevitably talk about our kids, and more often than not, the bulk of our worries has shifted towards our sons.
Neither of my friends was an academic powerhouse back in high school, but they both attended and graduated from public universities that have become so selective in recent years that they are effectively out of reach for their sons. Without striving, their boys will not be able to have the same educational opportunities they once had. And these dads want to set their kids up for success, in school and well beyond. They are worried that this absence of motivation or initiative at this stage may be part of a larger pattern.
For as long as there have been parents, there have been parents worried about their kids. That’s a fact of life. But the heightened scrutiny of our boys, our sons, has taken on new energy. There’s more concern about our sons and their prospects. Will they be successful? Are they prepared to launch into satisfying careers and families? At a societal level, we are looking more closely at the trajectories of our young men, particularly given the rising disparities in educational attainment and outcomes for our sons and daughters. The growing gender gaps in education, with women dominating at nearly every stage, are transforming the world of work and society at large.
In 2011, I attended a conference where Leonard Sax, MD, PhD, laid out his framework for the challenges facing our young men in his 2009 book, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men. Sax wanted to understand what my friends were worried about. Why the disengagement? Why the passivity? Why were the boys taking a back seat and checking out? Rather than pathologizing the young men or pointing to some defect in their natures, Sax explored societal and structural forces leading to differential educational outcomes. Maybe the apparent lack of motivation my friends were seeing was a reflection of something else entirely.
School wasn’t always a place where boys disengaged. But over the last few decades, schools have evolved in such a way that may be rendering them less friendly to young men. Sax delineated some of these changes: the decrease of male role models in education; the move from the outdoors to indoors, from tactile and physical experiences to didactic learning; the shift away from competitive formats and ranked awards; and the acceleration of the early elementary curriculum. Christina Hoff Sommers also covered these very trends in her book, The War Against Boys. Sax notes that if school becomes perceived as a place that favors girl students, the boys are going to devalue learning and disengage. He argues that never before has academic success been perceived as less masculine.
Fascinated by this topic, I dove into the academic research on gender differences in education, gave numerous talks on this topic in the mid-2010s, and published an article about some of the emerging gender differences in educational attainment. A decade ago, the patterns and gender gaps were already well established. Female students had achieved prominence in almost every academic domain, taking harder classes, rising to more leadership positions, putting in more time on their studies, and achieving better grades, higher rates of graduation, academic persistence and degree attainment.
Since then, the gender gaps have only widened as male students have fallen further behind. Over the last decade, more than 2 million more women than men have graduated from college, and we are now approaching a 60/40 female-to-male ratio in bachelor’s degree attainment. Pew has tracked the female dominance in advanced degrees, and in 2021-2022, females earned 62.6% of master’s degrees and 57% of doctoral degrees. While we celebrate our girls’ successes and the breaking down of historical barriers, we do not want to leave anyone behind. Society suffers if the boys check out.
Beyond the differences in attainment, ample research has pointed to differences in how boys and girls experience and navigate school. Girls are more likely to report positive, supportive relationships with their teachers, while teachers rate their relationships with boys as higher in conflict and lower in closeness. Boys are more frequently retained, suspended, and expelled, and they receive harsher exclusionary discipline than girls for the same behaviors. Parental academic involvement and expectations are higher for girls. While boys have higher base rates of learning differences and disabilities, girls have an edge when it comes to Executive Functioning skills. Girls have more success overcoming distraction and procrastination, structuring their environments for learning, setting goals, persisting on tasks, seeking out help, and regulating thoughts and behaviors.
Reading this list, it’s not surprising that so many young men are falling through the educational cracks. Sax and others have called for structural changes to how we educate our boys: early interventions, inclusive pedagogies, explicit instruction for Executive Functioning skills, male mentorship and more. But what is an individual parent to do? When my friends see their sons coasting, not striving or reaching for any meaningful goals or achievements, how can they actively make a difference for their boys?
What you do as a parent always trumps what you say. Your kids are always observing your behaviors. They learn with their eyes. Albert Bandura, the founder of Social Learning Theory, and Lev Vygotsky, giants in the field of education, place observational learning at the absolute center of learning. As a child, I remember seeing my parents reading on a regular basis. I watched my father descend nightly to his study, lined with hundreds of books, perusing his medical journals, staying current in his field. My father invited me to attend lectures where he presented on changes in the practice of medicine, findings from his drug studies. I watched him, thinking to myself, “I’m like him. This is what men do.”
Just as it is important that your sons see you reading and learning, so too is it important that they see you caring about things outside of work. When we tend to our passions, investing in ourselves, improving ourselves, our kids see this and learn from it. When we strive, aspire, and reach to achieve goals, our kids understand that this is an expected norm in the family.
Everyone needs someone to admire, a standard against which you can evaluate your own growth and progress. We can find heroes most anywhere: people we know, people in the public sphere, historical figures, even fictional characters. People who rose to the occasion, overcame challenges, didn’t give up.
It’s important whom we choose to admire. If I can see myself in another, and that person was able to achieve great things, then maybe I am too. Maybe I can tap into that same energy. We all come into this world with a sense that there is something special, something great in us. Hang out with small children for a few days, and you will get a sense of that innate grandiosity. It’s a good and healthy thing. If one can hang on to that sense of greatness and maintain admiration for others who have achieved great things in their lives, that can do a lot of good on the motivational front.
Some young men may lose their motivation because they have experienced early failure and frustration of their natural ambition. They made the decision that it was better not to try again than face the pain of additional rejection or failure. This is one strategy for ego protection, but playing it safe comes at a tremendous cost. The young man who doesn’t go out for team captain, or editor of the yearbook, or peer leader or student government—to avoid the risk of rejection—is missing out on pivotal and instructive life experiences.
Parents can help here. We have enough life experience under our belt to have faced down the sting of rejection and then recovered. Persistence, or grit, is a learned behavior and a major predictor of success in life. Sharing our stories and experiences can help our children integrate their own setbacks and disappointments. When we were knocked down or rejected, did we give up? Or did we learn from our experiences and try again with new knowledge and insight?
Young people are highly motivated to avoid embarrassment and humiliation, and we can help them integrate failures. We can help them reframe setbacks as steps on the path to success, guiding them towards reflection and insight. We can teach our kids that we can all handle some pain, and it won’t break us. Every hard thing we do facilitates the next hard thing.
When you put yourself in a context where other people are striving, it’s contagious. When you join a team where everyone is working hard to improve, it’s very hard to stay still and be content. Angela Duckworth explored this phenomenon in her work on Grit, and encouraged us all to join groups where growth was a central feature. If you surround yourself with peers who have ambitions and are working hard, you can draft off their momentum. You can encourage your children to put themselves in high-growth contexts. Motivational contagion is very real.
Though we all have hopes and dreams for our kids, sometimes we have to simply be patient. There are times when ambition and motivation are on the back burner for years, waiting to be activated. I’ve seen this so many times. When the context and environment are right, and the young person is ready, the fire ignites. Sometimes a young person will coast through high school, and even through college, and finally hit their motivational stride in their twenties. Perhaps they didn’t value the outcomes of their education. Perhaps they were bored or felt frustrated. Or they were living in the shadow of an outstanding older sibling and had no interest in competing. Or they opted out to avoid the pressure.
Sometimes the right thing to do is to accept that our children are exactly where they are supposed to be in this moment. Acceptance is not the same as passivity. It can be intentional and active. You meet them where they are, able to respond to them when they are ready. This is not an easy line to walk. We often want to do something, but there are times when creating space is the wiser move than trying harder.
Raising kids is the ultimate engine for growth. Our children are not extensions of our own egos—they are independent, their own beings, on their own journeys. From when our children take their first steps, we want to protect them, shield them from harm, and provide them with opportunities. We want to give them everything we had and more. But there are limits to what we can do for our kids. We can show them a path, teach them about our lives and experiences and what drove us to achieve.
Motivation is something we can scaffold for our kids, but they have to own it, internalize it, and make it theirs. Sometimes our kids want different things, on their own timelines, and this can be humbling. Therein lies the growth. Our job is to show up, again and again, have compassion and love for our children, and be there when they need us, in the manner in which they need us. We celebrate their successes, stand with them in their failures, contemplate their trajectories as we walk together in the woods, and simply enjoy being a part of their journey, wherever it will take them.
