Michael Gurian’s new book, written with Sean Kullman, President of the Global Initiative for Boys and Men, has just been released.  Our blog post this week is the Introduction to the book.  We hope it inspires you to get the book on amazon.com or wherever you purchase your books.

If your school or organization would like to bulk order, please write us at info@gurianinstitute.com.  We will arrange the bulk discount and shipping for you.  To begin to explore the book, please read on here.

Authors’ Note:  Boys, A Rescue Plan is published just as a new U.S. President, Donald Trump, begins his new term.  We publish in a time when sex and gender were hot button topics for both the Republican and Democratic parties during their 2024 campaigns.  Our book broadens the necessary conversation and offers solutions that address root causes.  We hope President Trump will fund a White House Council on Boys and Men early in his term and we hope he will work with the new Congress to address the crisis our boys are facing in pre-K through 12 education, physical and mental health, and male social growth. 

Introduction

Between them, Michael Gurian and Sean Kullman have worked for more than sixty years in the field of boys’ development on both the diagnostic and the solution sides.  Both of us have been academics, and both have moved into the public, educational, and policy spheres.  Our work has focused on what children need to thrive, with an emphasis on how boys thrive in our homes, schools, social-emotional development, and what they need from public policy.

Michael is a social philosopher and mental health counselor in private practice, President of the Gurian Institute, author of 36 books as well as the MichaelGurian.Substack.com, and co-host of the Wonder of Parenting Podcast.  Many of his books have inspired national debate on issues related to sex, gender, educational achievement, psychology, parenting, and social policy.  The Wonder of Boys (1996), his third book on male development, was credited by national media as “the impetus of the boys movement.”

Sean taught middle school, high school, and college English and was actively involved in boys and girls sports programs as a coach and director.  In 2019, he became President of the Global Initiative for Boys and Men.  Sean writes a weekly substack (InHisWords.us), and has educated policymakers on the outcomes of boys and men.  He is also the Director of  the American Institute for Responsible Research, which provides research services in education, mental and physical health, and other seminal areas.

Sean and Michael began to collaborate on this book during a series of conversations with one another, and with others who work in what Michael calls “The Big Three” (academics, government, and media).  In these conversations Michael and Sean noticed hyper-use of masculine norms theory or the politics of masculinity to explain why boys struggle today and have struggled for more than three decades.  According to the politics of masculinity, our boys and men abandon natural love, empathy, care for others and self, moral conduct, accomplishment, success, values of equality and diversity because they are forced by their cultures to accept masculine social norms and masculine social roles (often called “the Man Box”) in which they are trained to be:    

• Emotionally suppressed. To project strength always, don’t cry or show sad feelings, only show anger.
• Self-sufficient. Don’t talk about feelings with others, solve any issues you have on your own.
• Be dominant and violent including using, abusing, and controlling women and girls.
• Avoid close relationships with other men and boys so that you will not be called gay.
• Economically and socially limited. Be the sole breadwinner, make your family obey you, don’t wear pink, be manly.

According to the proponents of masculine norms theory, boys who don’t adhere to these masculine norms pay a significant price by being ostracized from society for their disloyalty to the norms.  Boys who do adhere to masculine social norms have it no better, we are told, because they will be destroyed from within as the masculine roles limit the psyche of the boy, and from without, as toxic masculine norms (toxic masculinity) make them do immoral things that require punishment.  Overall, we are told, boys harm people, become violent, fail in school, abuse substances and porn, and reject women’s equality because of masculine norms, roles, and stereotypes.  Even suicide is connected to the politics of masculinity by proponents of this thinking because masculine norms and roles make it so that boys don’t cry or talk about their feelings, which compels them to kill themselves.

Assessing and Replacing Masculine Norms Theory

A recent example of masculine norms theory used in the media is “Why Do Some Teen Boys Turn Aggressive?  The Surprising Role of Masculinity,” reported by SciTechDaily on July 15, 2024:  “A new study by a team of psychology researchers shows that adolescent boys may also respond aggressively when they believe their masculinity is under threat—especially boys growing up in environments with rigid, stereotypical gender norms.  The findings, reported today in the Journal, Developmental Science, underscore the effects of social pressure that many boys face to be stereotypically masculine….beyond just aggression, manhood threats are associated with a wide variety of negative, antisocial behaviors, such as sexism, homophobia, political bigotry, and even anti-environmentalism. Our findings call for actively challenging the restrictive norms and social pressure that boys face to be stereotypically masculine, particularly during puberty and coming from their parents and peers.”

Because stereotype threat is a real phenomenon, accounting for it in society can be helpful.  For instance, girls who are told that they are not good at math are more likely to feel inadequate in their math-reasoning than girls who are told that they are good at math.  Programs to help girls in STEM assist girls in avoiding these negative stereotypes.  Similarly, boys and men who are told that they must live in the Man Box can be assisted to step out of social stereotypes and limited social roles as part of their maturation.  A successful Nurturing Fathers program in Phoenix, AZ does just that.  M.A.N.C.A.V.E. (Men All Need to Be Caring, Actively Engaged, Vested, and Encouraged) was founded by City of Phoenix Head Start Program Coordinator Marion Hill to help dads, parents, grandparents, and male role models to enhance their child-raising in families and communities.  One of the tools used in this program is the Man Box.

Marion told Michael recently, “Look, we know that masculine stereotypes don’t cause boys’ and men’s problems, but the Man Box model can help us, especially with boys and young men who have hardened themselves for survival.”

Michael asked Marion to say more about what does cause male problems, and Marion provided a history of his program’s development.

“The first step for us was to understand males–not just masculinity–but males. We want to know who they are, what makes them tick, their nature.  Gurian Institute’s (GI) nature-based theory and work in male/female brain difference helped us look at how men father naturally (paternal nurturance), and how to enhance that with children and families.  By dealing with their biology, we are working with the men rather than against them.  Personally, when I discovered evolutionary biology and the science around these things in 2016, I realized these were the missing pieces in both our preschool classrooms and in our parent outreach. We began to work with GI in our schools at that time and within two years, this led to the creation of M.A.N.C.A.V.E.  Now we use brain science and bi-strategic parenting (valuing both female and male leadership in families) as our base theory.  We added the Man Box model to our program because it reaches some of the dads–but our lane is definitely the brain science and the bi-strategic parenting that we know to be natural to women and men.”

Marion’s assessment of what is needed by males, and the program he founded, mirrors the vision of this book.  Boys, A Rescue Plan works with a Nature Imperative much more than a Culture Imperative though culture imperatives are welded into human nature when obvious.  By this we mean: boy-friendly families, schools, and politics do their best to raise and educate healthy boys and men when they begin their work with nature (the science of male development); bring in healthy nurture (family, schools, other institutions that raise and educate boys); and look at culture (“masculinity”) models when needed.  We favor what Michael calls the Nurture the Nature approach (he published a book with that title in 2007), the nature-based theory Marion mentioned, in which parents and others who nurture the child’s core personality focus on knowing who the child is and understanding the child’s nature, then, nurturing that nature, then looking at culture questions in that order.  Because the neuroscience of sex and gender has grown over the last thirty years, our society can ground social programming, like M.A.N.C.A.V.E. does, in who boys and men are rather than mainly in the politics of masculinity and social norms theories that may or may not have much to do with who boys and men really are.

Moving Beyond Limited Social Theory to Rescue Our Sons

Natural male development is universal across cultures and racial groups–it needs no limiting culture theory.  The science of male development applies to all males no matter where they are being raised and educated, including males on the gender spectrum, and males with chromosomal abnormalities.  Because masculine norms theory and the politics of masculinity only apply to certain boys, we find them to be inadequate to fully work for boys across racial groups and throughout the socio-economic continuum.  The Big Three mainly or only use masculine norms theory (usually eschewing discussion of male nature) to try to dictate to our society what we should do with our males.  Sean and Michael agree that sometimes they are right, but more often they are wrong, and perhaps equally worrisome:  they often use masculinity conversations to attack males as inherently defective, and not needed by nature, nurture, or culture anymore.  It is our view that our culture has had forty years of the politics of masculinity, and people all around us still don’t know how to help our males.  Boys and men remain under-nurtured and under-developed, many of them purposeless, whether masculine or not.

You Can Be a Citizen Scientist

Thirty years ago, in The Wonder of Boys, Michael asked our culture to emphasize new maleness in manhood development of a democratic society rather than emphasizing masculinity study and politics.  In the ensuing decades, he has continued to call for first emphasis on male and female development inclusive of gender interests and themes but not bound by social constructs theories.  In Boys, A Rescue Plan, Michael’s final book in sex and gender development, he is joined by Sean, who agrees with this social position, and brings new facts that make the argument even more important today.  Meanwhile, because Michael and Sean are (perhaps like many of you) suspicious of the overuse of the politics in sex and gender, we ask you to become a citizen scientist to test out theory and practice as you read this book.  Don’t just believe one or two experts–do your own research.

Take your yellow pad or computer or smartphone into the world and take notes as you study the boys around you.  Watch them live, emote, love, laugh, challenge, aggress, regress, develop, struggle, and grow.  Study their hardiness and their sensitivities.  See them for who they are, and note everything about human nature and male nature that you are seeing in your collective science.  When you see masculine stereotypes being taught to your sons, of course you can talk about that with them.  Meanwhile, as you study boys and men from the nature-based perspective (which this book will help you to do in every chapter) you will likely find that most boys around you are not dominant; most  wear pink and other pastels at some point in life; most if not all the boys you know have friends with whom they are intimate in their own natural boyish way; most boys talk about feelings with trusted others like peers or mentors, though perhaps not as much as girls do or as much as parents of teen boys especially would like; some boy near you might be violent or abusive to girls and women, but most boys are not; most boys and men enjoy their mother’s, sister’s, and partner’s equality, though they don’t mind some healthy competition for resources, too.

When Sean and Michael understand the nature of boys and men, we do so as experts and citizen scientists, like you, who have studied boys and men for decades.  We are two people who have found that the civilization-wide struggles our males are having right now, in real time, need social attention to the very nature of what it is to be male.  Here is a snapshot of the struggle our boys are experiencing today.  Notice how stark these numbers are when compared to girls’ lives.  We thank colleagues Mark Perry of the University of Michigan and Thomas Mortenson of the Pell Institute for Higher Education for their “For Every 100 Girls” research.

Studying the Boy Crisis

As a citizen scientist, you may end up doing what we do for a living–study the boy crisis.  Michael first used the term in 2005 (The Minds of Boys) then returned to the theme in The Purpose of Boys (2008), How Do I Help Him? (2011) and Saving Our Sons (2017) to try to capture the difficulties that boys are having today. The term “boy crisis” was used for a cover story in Newsweek in 2006 that featured The Minds of Boys.  In 2019, the powerful The Boy Crisis was published by Warren Farrell and John Gray to explore important aspects of the boy crisis, including dad deprivation.  In 2022, Richard Reeves’ On Boys and Men, provided further research on the boy crisis, noting its specific escalation in this decade.  Christina Hoff Sommers, Lisa Britton, Ruth Whippman, Michael Thompson, Bill Pollack, Leonard Sax and others have explored the boy crisis via a variety of important lenses.  Dr. Sommers called our modern cultural approach to males “a war on boys,” and Sax, in Boys Adrift, has powerfully shown just how adrift many of our young males are.

In Part I of Boys, A Rescue Plan, Sean and Michael provide further evidence of the crisis, especially focusing on the male mental health decline in the last two decades.  This is not a crisis of “masculinity” as the culture-based approach proposes, but a crisis of male brains and bodies under-nurtured, unprotected, and medically and psychologically neglected across boyhood and young adulthood.  Millions of boys and men struggle with brain disorders, childhood and adolescent trauma, dad deprivation, severe educational decline, increased unemployment, increased homelessness, sexual abuse, child abuse, sex trafficking, criminal activity, suicide, addiction behavior and overdose deaths, increased self-loathing, and male loneliness (a highly dangerous form of social withdrawal that can intersect with the illness of violence as we will explore in Part I).  Loneliness and male depression are not about social roles, nor about “codes of masculinity” taught to boys.  To solve the male health crisis we must look at the place where mental health resides–the male brain–and this book does that.

Sean and Michael come to this point knowing from experience that boys and men want to become loving, wise, and successful male adults (good men).  They are born to be of service to others as men, ready to sacrifice themselves for the health and well-being of children and families.  They enter our worlds hoping to take risks and find their balance; challenge others and empathize; love and be loved.  They are males with these various and beautiful goals who need our help as males to become adult men.  They need our help on a brain-healthy and boy-friendly developmental arc of maturation, service, and purpose.

The Four Sections of the Book

Sean and Michael will ask you to reassess the way our culture talks about males while also providing insight and solutions to male issues in your home, school, neighborhood, and city.  We will include actionable strategies in the four parts of the book.

• Protecting the Mental Health of Boys. We will explore social-emotional issues males face today, provide analysis of the real causes of increased male mental illness in America and the Western World, and provide solutions you can use to meet the mental health needs of boys and young men in your family, school, and community.
• Understanding the Neuroscience of the Male Brain. Michael will provide in depth discussion of male and female brains so that you can become a citizen science of nature, nurture, and culture aligned rather than at odds.  This research will help you understand your daughters, too, and everyone on the gender spectrum.
• Adjusting Social Politics to Be Boy-Friendly. Sean’s work with state and federal legislatures will be especially featured in this section.  He helps legislators and stakeholders, on a state by state basis and federally, to address male health and wellness gaps, and to develop male-friendly social and political investment.
• Instituting the Rescue Plan. In the chapters of Part IV, we will provide dozens of solution-based programs, including M.A.N.C.A.V.E., with which the Gurian Institute and the Global Initiative for Boys and Men have worked over the decades.  These programs specifically solve the boy crisis one location at a time.

In providing these four sections, we will be arguing that the core problem facing boys today is our society-wide abandonment of natural male development.

A Comparison of Research Methods

Because our approach to boyhood is based in neuro-psychology, neuro-anthropology, and evolutionary biology, we employ male development theory that can be replicable worldwide rather than focusing on limited sociological theories about masculinity that only apply to limited groups of males who live under stereotype threat.  We study brain scans that show male/female differences across cultures and races (wherever XX and XY chromosomes express themselves), and thus, our research pool is in the millions.  We believe that colleagues in the Big Three who focus only or mainly on masculinity theories are able to do so because their sample sizes are small.  As you read this book and study boys around you, we hope you will become wary of researchers who avoid hard science and in its place, interview a few boys and men (usually 100 to 300) using surveys, questionnaires, and personal interviews.  If they supply you with their research, you may notice that the questions they ask are questions that mainly regard social conditioning via definitions of masculinity.

For instance, an author or researcher might ask their college students (or the boys in their neighborhood) just how much boys cry.  Adolescent boys will generally agree that they do not cry a lot, though they might not know that there are biological reasons for this, which we will explore in Part II.  They may also be asked whether they talk about feelings as much as girls.  Boys generally do not, and they self-report this gap accurately even though most of them don’t know the male neurobiology behind this gap.  They may also be asked whether masculine stereotypes are harmful to them.  Adolescent males will generally say that they are harmful because those social norms and stereotypes are what they have studied in their college, high school, or in the media.

This research struggles with confirmation bias.  A small research population confirms the bias already held by the masculine norms focused researcher.  A book is published in which the author argues that the boy crisis is caused by masculine norms based on the limited and biased data.  While no actual proof is offered for causation except other articles and books that also use small sample sociological questionnaires and confirmation bias, this sociological research bypasses maleness and, thus, the real drama of male nature.  No doubt the author is trying to help boys and men, but flawed research ends up allowing a culture to pretend it is solving the troubles that boys have, adding up to increased abandonment of boys and men.

Abandoned boys and abandoned male development are dangerous.  Abandoned and neglected males find silos, groups, and gangs, on the street or online, to support them in their battle against the neglect.  They want to belong somewhere in some place and time with some people who understand their nature.  They are struggling to survive competitively in a competitive world; to find meaningful relationships at home and in the neighborhood; to discover purpose in school and life; to be employed and motivated; to lead and follow.  When they are abandoned, they respond to trauma and neglect by joining groups that often use masculine norms to help them to survive. This is true not just in the West but all over the world.  The masculine norms did not cause the abandonment or trauma but they sometimes provide succor.

As the programs in Part IV illustrate, we can deal right now with the very real drama playing out in our culture–the specific and widespread abandonment of male nature in our families, schools, communities, government, and media–via programs already developed and programs you can further develop with your own insights in your own part of the world.  Working to rescue one young male at a time, you might include masculinity conversations; meanwhile, we hope you will also help the boys around you–and their families, schools, and communities–to focus on their own particular and shared natural development.  This is where they need you, us, and everyone to meet them–male development is where they are.

A Note on Format

Because Sean and Michael have researched and written separate articles on these topics, we decided to shape this book into a hybrid essay/chapter format that will allow you to use one chapter/essay at a time in your family discussion, in a high school class or university course, in a book study group or professional learning community, in a policy meeting or policy form.

As you use each chapter, don’t be surprised if some people roll their eyes around you, people who argue that male and female don’t exist anymore.  In Part II especially, as Michael explores the male brain and male nature with you, he will arm you with responses to that fallacious argument.  One term he will use is “the culture of the exception,” a through line in this book regarding our culture’s tendency to uplift the lives of a few people but try to sacrifice the majority.  LGBTQIA+ advocacy today, which is needed and important, provides an example of the culture of the exception:  some advocates try to erase male/female (sex) as if gender fluidity (gender) is the final story about humanity.  In reality, gender fluidity applies to a few people statistically while male/female (sex) applies to all people.  Erasing the whole to assist a part is bad science and it is not needed, as Michael will show in Part II.  Sean and Michael use the essay/chapter format to provide practical advice for dealing with all males, including gender exceptions.  In helping you advocate for parts and the whole, this book does not exclude anyone.

By understanding nature and science for all, we can raise boys to become the men we need them to be, and in so doing, solve a lot of our social crises today by dealing with the nature of the boys; specifically, with how males are raised and trained in our era, and whether the drama of maleness is being abandoned to its own devices too much in an era that needs good, loving, wise, and successful men as much or more than it ever has.   Thank you for reading and using this book.  Please write to us as you wish to share your own citizen science around sex, gender, and the development of boys.

seank@gibm.us and seank@airr.pro

michaelgurian@comcast.net