Lost Boys: Mentors and role models

Too many boys in Britain feel down and out. That their chance at success in life is over before it has even begun. It’s not hard to see why. Wherever one looks, Britain’s boys are in crisis. As we showed in our landmark State of the Nation report – Lost Boys – boys are falling behind girls on almost every metric, be it income, education, or employment.

This report takes a step back from those metrics and investigates on a more human level why so many boys feel life is going wrong and how improved youth provision can help improve their life outcomes. Analysing the long-term household survey Understanding Society, we find that the proportion of boys who say they are completely happy with life is plummeting, declining from 36 to 27 per cent in just 14 years. This is paired with a significant increase in screen use and a steep decline in participation in outdoor activities.

We recognise that these problems acutely afflict many young girls in Britain too, but here we focus on the boys who are being left behind. Nor do we perceive this to be a zero-sum game, improving outcomes for boys can improve outcomes for girls. We believe that it’s important to speak positively about boys and young men as distinct from young women and that means focussing on the challenges of our times as seen through their perspective. As it stands, it is all too common for us to find it impossible to talk positively about young men without also applying our remarks to young women.