Jeremy Bodenhamer

The research tells you what's happening to boys. Fiction tells you what it's like to be one. Essays + poems + fiction →

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

I'm changing what I write about here.

I'm focused on boys, fathers and formation.

I write fiction, poetry, and essays because lectures don't reach boys and fathers don't need another manual.

If you are here for that, welcome.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

That 70-to-61 drop has a sex. Most who walked away from college this past decade were young men. Kang mourns the professor who awakens a kid to an idea. He should. But boys stopped getting awakened years ago, by institutions that treated their restlessness as a disorder, their drive as a threat, their boyness as something to medicate. AI didn’t break college for them. It handed them the exit they were already taking.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

This isn’t a women’s success story. It’s male collapse. Nearly all of that growth is healthcare, where women already hold 80% of the jobs.

Meanwhile male labor force participation just hit its lowest point since 1948 outside the pandemic, with the steepest drop among teenage and twentysomething boys.

You don’t hit 94% because women are sprinting ahead. You hit it because men are walking off the field entirely.

And men don’t walk off at 25. Boys check out at 9, 12, 15, back when school, reading, and nearly every institution around them decided they were a problem to manage instead of a kid to build.

The fix isn’t downstream in the labor market. It’s upstream, in grade school, junior high, and high school. Fix the boy and the man takes care of himself.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Full article here: https://t.co/FRCJ09DoC5

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Most parents fail their boys through protection, not cruelty.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Healthcare is eating the payroll chart. But that's not the whole story.

Electricians: 81,000 openings a year. Plumbers, HVAC, welders, carpenters. It's all the same. 1.4 million skilled trade jobs - unfilled - by 2030.

These jobs pay well. They can't be offshored. They aren't going away to AI.

And boys aren't taking them.

Not because the jobs are bad. Shop classes were cut. The men who would have shown them disappeared. Nobody is showing our boys that physical mastery is worth anything.

We'll have plenty of healthcare workers. We won't have anyone to wire the buildings they work in.

Boys want to be influencers. Influencers don't build infrastructure. And they don't build men.

[Richard V. Reeves @RichardvReeves]

“if you want a one-word answer for why men are doing so much worse than women right now in terms of jobs, it is this: https://t.co/7eQF9z2zsh

Healthcare.”

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Healthcare is where jobs grew, yes, but skilled trades tell a different story. Not job scarcity. Labor scarcity.

Aviation mechanics, electricians, plumbers, engineers, etc. Demand is high and the pipeline is nearly empty. That gap doesn’t show up in payroll growth. It shows up in project delays and aging workforces.

More importantly, these are six-figure salaries we aren’t training our boys for. Instead we continue to try and route boys toward four-year degrees that, even when they do go, they often don’t finish. And frequently for jobs that don’t exist.

Trades are the need and trades are the answer. America has these job opportunities and America needs boys to fill them.

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Sometimes the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all, Russell Shaw wrote in 2024. https://t.co/YBKi92XN9X

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

These mothers are terrified of who the boy becomes, but the Slate piece never names a single value, virtue, standard, or source of truth. It’s all vibes and vigilance. “Empathy” floats around as a word but it’s untethered from anything that produces it. They’re trying to raise good men with no theory of goodness, no standard to believe in, and no good men to aim him at.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

@educator4ever36 I love this if “pass” means there is a standard and we have proof that that standard has been met meaning the information has been learned.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

@LisaBritton Making it easy on purpose instead of hard on purpose.

No struggle, no competence. No competence, no confidence. No confidence, no man.

The collapse of rites of passage is downstream of this. We removed the proving ground, then wondered why failure is now the default.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Defending Boyhood
@AnthonyEsolen

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

@RichardvReeves The “lazy dad” bit was always lazy analysis. The story didn’t change because dads got shamed. It changed because dads showed up. The real work now is making sure every kid has one.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

“Patriarchy is a system of reality control.”

No. It’s a book deal.

Every institution touching boys: schools, courts, medicine, publishing, is built on the premise that male power is the problem. Then we act surprised when boys check out, drop out, and die younger at 4x the rate of girls.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Wild that this has zero replies. We are constantly expressing concern about young men who can’t afford to buy homes, and meanwhile we’ve handed an entire industry the keys to their phones and their wallets at 16. In ten years everyone will be scrambling to explain why a generation of men is broke. It won’t be a mystery. We watched it happen and said nothing.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Getting cut isn’t the problem. The labels are.
Manosphere. Gentlemanosphere. Both invented by people who don’t coach a team or raise a son.

Boys don’t need a label. They need a dad, a standard, and the freedom to be boys without being punished for it.

Reeves gave us the data. Now do the work.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

@AnthonyEsolen

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

First, yes yes yes! Reeves is right. Build the 1,000 schools.

Boys thrive where:

1.The work is real (meaning challenging)
2.A standard is fixed
3.And someone is paying attention, holding the line, showing they care

Trade schools work because of one word: Standards. A wall is plumb or it isn’t. A weld holds or it doesn’t.

The thing today’s critics call “militarized” is what we used to call school. That’s the missing ingredient in conventional schools. Enforced standards.

So, build the 1,000. But the rest of the boys are still sitting in regular classrooms.

Those boys still need a challenge to conquer and an adult who won’t lower the bar.

Build the 1,000. And rebuild the other 130,000 with enforced standards of excellence while we’re at it.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Every week brings new charts on school failure. Kids who can’t read. Boys who can’t do math. Grades inflated to hide it. Diplomas handed out to boys who earned nothing.

What I never see: who are those boys spending their time with?

I tell my sons almost daily: you become like the people you spend the most time with.

Want them to take school seriously? They need friends who take school seriously. Want them to work hard in sports? They need teammates who stay late. Want them off the radical-influencer pipeline? Keep them off social media and around boys who don’t live on their phones. (And don’t tell me those kids don’t exist. They do.)

Schools need accountability. Fine. But monitoring my sons’ friends and influences isn’t the school’s job.

It’s mine.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

Dads have a job no one else can do. @LisaBritton ’s data shows they are showing up at home. When they don’t? Father-absent boys are 2x more likely to drop out, 2x more likely to end up incarcerated, and account for 71% of high school dropouts.

That’s the job. We need men to be good dads. That is how we get good men.

[Jeremy Bodenhamer @FounderDad]

@FreeRangeKids A boy who can’t navigate his own neighborhood at ten or twelve or fourteen can’t navigate anything at twenty-four. The more his map shrinks, the more his future shrinks with it.