Dr. Paul Golding is the Founding Director of the Santa Fe Boys Foundation and a specialist in infant attachment and mental health.  His foundation is at the forefront of boys’ work in the Southwest.  We are honored to publish his guest post this week about Boys, A Rescue Plan.

Our Summer Training Institute will take place on Zoom on June 21 – 22, 2025 with recordings available for three weeks.  Boys, A Rescue Plan will be featured in some of the training and we hope you’ll get a copy on Amazon.com or wherever you get books.  To learn more about the summer training and to register, visit:  https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2025/.

Paul Goldng, PhD, is the Founder of the Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation (santafeboys.org).

Reading Boys, A Rescue Plan, I was reminded of a Spanish expression: If you raise crows, they will take your eyes out. Sean Kullman and Michael Gurian richly describe how many boys in our families, schools, and communities are failing as a consequence of an ignorance being perpetrated by popular opinion through the press, government, and academia—how our culture is raising crows. But they also propose steps to reduce many boys’ estrangement from schools and increase nurturing environments more suitable for young males, including through the highly neglected field of male psychology and by reforming schools to be less distancing for boys.

Too many boys are being raised as if maleness were the problem. This book documents some of the negative societal consequences that reflect that: an abundance of lost and unmotivated boys who are alienated from school and life generally. We see it documented in Boys, A Rescue Plan with rich data sets reporting educational failure and mental health issues such as high male rates of depression and drug use and high levels of developmental disorders such as ADHD and autism. The book reflects the consequences of not accommodating boys’ uniqueness: what makes boys different and thus in need of and deserving a “boy way” in school, psychotherapy, and family.

The picture Gurian and Kullman paint is not a pretty one and indicates how the growing disregard of boys—usually based on ascribing biological and psychological difference incorrectly to socialization in toxic masculinity—is costly to our social coherence. The authors detail how neglecting boys “takes our eyes out” and blinds us to the underlying causes of male rage that, turned inward, result in mental health problems and, turned outward, end in violence, death, and incarceration.

The book shows how we live in a society that, for its own political reasons, prefers not to look for ways to better attune to boys. Rather than search for ways to meet young male developmental and educational needs compatible with boys’ natures, schools and other social institutions that promote child wellbeing too often choose to see boys as privileged by the patriarchy; thus, they do not merit attention.

This dismissal, the authors tell us, bridges differences of income and race. It’s boys, as males, who are bad, and their nature needs to be reined in rather than understood. However, Boys, A Rescue Plan emphasizes how boys are different from a brain science point of view, and how families, schools, and others in society can better relate to this difference.

Because of the very skillful way that Boys, A Rescue Plan is written and pulls together the complex societal issue of young male failure and its consequences, we must ask the question: how can we continue to raise crows and not see what is happening?

Kullman and Gurian offer solutions to this problem, and they provide critical questions for any person or group to think about far more deeply. Boys, A Rescue Plan is required reading for any parent, educator, policymaker, school-board members and anyone in the fields of social work and psychology concerned about boys.

Important note: The Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation ran the most compelling conversation around sex and gender in 2023 with leading experts from around the world. You can see their presentations by clicking here and learning more at Boys Santa Fe Boys Educational Foundation at santafeboys.org