By: Rachel Wolfe – wsj.com – September 28, 2024

Men in their 20s and early 30s are much more likely than their female peers to live with their parents, and many say they feel aimless and isolated.

Out of Dan and Joana Moreno’s four grown children, only their daughter is encaminada. She recently graduated from business school and got engaged. The Morenos’ three adult sons are still sleeping in their Miami childhood bedrooms. The younger two dropped out of college, and the oldest never went. All three are single. Their only work experience is with the family business.

“Something has gone amiss here,” says their father, Dan, who owns the repair chain Flamingo Appliance Service. “We love them, we love having them around, but that’s not how you build a life.”

The life trajectories of America’s sons and daughters are diverging.

Presented with a more-equal playing field, young women are seizing the opportunities in front of them, while young men are floundering. The phenomenon has developed over the past decade, but was supercharged by the pandemic, which derailed careers, schooling and isolated friends and families. The result has big implications for the economy.

More women ages 25 to 34 have entered the workforce in recent years than ever. The share of young men in the labor market, meanwhile, hasn’t grown in a decade.

As of August, 89% of this cohort of men were employed or looking for work, more than 700,000 fewer than if the current labor-force participation rate was at 2004 levels, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Aspen Economic Strategy Group policy director Luke Pardue. Women’s participation is up 6 percentage points in just the past 10 years, to 79%. A fifth of men in this same age range still lived with their parents as of 2023, according to the Census, compared with 12% of women.

Among noncaregivers who aren’t disabled, men are more likely to be neither employed, in school nor in workforce training, what economists refer to as NEET. Around 260,000 more 16- to 29-year-old men than women fell into this category as of the first half of 2024, according to think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research, representing 8.6% of young men and 7.8% of young women. Rates are up for both groups since 2019, but down from a Covid high.

Until the past decade or so, “there was an assumption that men just needed to show up for their life and they’ll get a job and have a family and be provided for, because they’re men,” says University of Maryland masculinity researcher Kevin M. Roy.

That is no longer true. While women now expect to have more and better opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers, men are in some ways bracing for the opposite. Researchers say that has created a crisis of purpose, especially for men at the entrance to adulthood.

Roy and other social scientists cite shifts away from traditional gender roles and single-earner family structures, as well as declines in traditionally male-dominated industries such as manufacturing. Women, conversely, are flooding the labor market, thanks in part to more remote work opportunities. The divergence isn’t just economic: Young men and women are also farther apart on political and social issues.

“The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan research organization.

One of the first clues popped up a few years ago, when educators began sounding the alarm on high-school boys’ plummeting college-attendance rates. Now that this cohort is in their 20s, their feelings of aimlessness are spilling into the social and professional realms.

Take Dan and Joana Moreno’s middle son, 25-year-old Daniel, who left college midway through his sophomore year after indecision about his major spiraled into a larger existential crisis.

“I just felt so, so lost,” Daniel says. “I didn’t know what I was doing it for.” Five years later, he is still living with his parents and working for his dad’s company, in a product-manager role that he is grateful for but doesn’t necessarily see a future in. He hopes to go back to school to study a subject he is more passionate about—maybe journalism, or veterinary medicine or botany—but he doesn’t know what it would take to get there, or where to find the motivation to start.

“Nothing is really stopping me,” he says. “It’s just myself, standing in my own way.”

While Daniel dropped out before the Covid-19 pandemic, he blames quarantine in part for his transition from a popular high-schooler to a self-described homebody. Researchers concur.

“The pandemic has impacted everyone in different ways, but it’s had a disproportionate effect on the group we were already worried about,” Reeves says.

Men rely more heavily on in-person activities to maintain social connections, Reeves says, and have a tougher time recovering after a setback.

“They’re not as able to talk about their feelings, so they are going to have fewer friendships with other men and suffer more psychologically,” says Niobe Way, a professor of developmental psychology at New York University.

Young men are lonelier as a result. Those ages 18 to 30 spent 18% more time alone last year—an average of 6.6 nonsleeping hours—than in 2019, according to Pardue’s analysis of American Time Use Survey data. That is 22% more alone time than reported by women in the same age range.

“The more that you’re sitting on the couch as opposed to out in the world, your social network gets narrower and then you don’t have the social capital or the skills to step into a job,” says Gary Barker, the director of Equimundo, a progressive gender-equality advocacy organization.

Nearly two-thirds of the 18- to 30-year-old men Equimundo polled last year said that nobody knew them well. A quarter said they hadn’t seen anyone outside their home in the past week.

After Ronan Convery missed out on his senior prom and final year on the wrestling team due to pandemic restrictions, he went into college eager to make up for lost social opportunities. He quickly fell in with a group of students he describes as heavy on drinking and light on going to class.

“I was so ready to be back to hanging out with people in person that I didn’t actually spend the time to think, ‘Hey, are these people I’m hanging out with good people?’ ” says Convery, now 21. “I turned off all my safety warnings.”

His grades and mental health quickly deteriorated. “I had no idea how to moderate,” Convery says, adding that choking on his own vomit after drinking too much one night was a wake-up call. “I had no idea about the dangers of what I was doing, how it affected my brain, my mood, my everything.”

He didn’t return to school after coming back to his dad’s place for his freshman summer, and says he has only recently emerged from a fugue of guilt and anger over how dramatically his first attempt at adulthood derailed. He has been taking online classes, and recently got a promotion at the retail job where he has been working for the past year.

He has also overhauled his approach to friendship to prioritize emotional honesty. “It’s definitely a true stereotype that men say they’re fine instead of getting feedback and criticism and all the useful things you need to grow,” he says. And he has gone to individual and group therapy to overcome his depression.

Many in Convery’s position don’t get the help they need. The suicide rate for men ages 25 to 34 is up 30% between 2010 and 2023, according to Reeves’s analysis of the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, the biggest increase among any age cohort. That is a departure from years past, when deaths in middle age outpaced other groups.

“We’re losing a lot more years of life now,” Reeves says.

Ethan Myers, 25, says he has often felt like an outsider looking in on his own life, rather than the one in control of it.

He has moved past his own mental-health struggles but has had trouble finding a well-paying job, or even figuring what he wants to do with a GED but no college degree.

“I feel like there are many paths, but there is no set goal,” says Myers, who lives with his mom in Silver Spring, Md. “The only thing I want to do is to make sure my parents are taken care of.”

He recently decided to take a break from a plumbing trade program after stints in the food-service industry. And, while he is all for the advancement of women, he longs for the days when he would have been able to more easily slot into the role of a provider for his family.

“I’m not sure what I want out of life,” says Myers. “And that’s the problem.”

Back in Miami, the Morenos’ youngest son, Benjamin, is fed up with feeling like he is on a year-round summer break. He left college after his first semester when, like his older brother Daniel, he couldn’t figure out what he was doing there.

“I felt like I wasn’t doing it for myself,” says Benjamin, 19. “I felt like I was doing it for the people around me and for my parents.”

In the nine months since, he says he has been up to “really not much.” He has a part-time internship with a company affiliated with his dad’s business, and helps his mom around the house.

“I don’t do well if I just stay in the same place and I don’t communicate with a lot of people for a long time,” he says. “So it hasn’t been great.”

After waffling over his next moves, he decided to sign up for a few business classes for the fall. He hopes to return to school full-time in the spring.

“I want to try again,” he says. “And I want it to be for me.”

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Source: America’s Young Men Are Falling Even Further Behind – WSJ