Boy Trouble - Family breakdown

Kay S. Hymowitz writes in Atlantic magazine:

Family breakdown disproportionately harms young males—and they’re falling further behind.

When I started following the research on child well-being about two decades ago, the focus was almost always girls’ problems—their low self-esteem, lax ambitions, eating disorders, and, most alarming, high rates of teen pregnancy. ...

The reason for boys’ dismal school performance, they argued, was the growing number of fatherless homes. ...

In fact, signs that the nuclear-family meltdown of the past half-century has been particularly toxic to boys’ well-being are not new. ...

On average, boys are more physically active and restless than girls. They have less self-control and are more easily distracted. They take longer to mature. They have a harder time sitting still, paying attention, and following rules, especially in the early years of school. ...

Boys — not girls — often require remedial education to sit still, to look at the person speaking to them, to finish the task they were working on. These days, experts might put it this way: boys come into the world with less natural human capital than do girls.

No, boys do not have less human capital. They only appear to have less if you judge them by feminine standards, such as the willingness to sit still in class for feminized educators.

If boys pay too much attention to something, it is considered a symptom of autism, and if they pay too little, a symptom of ADD. They are only considered normal if they behave like girls.

Keoni Galt points out how her analysis is partially right and partially annoying:

Boys don't just need Fathers in the home to role model and provide guidance them on how to become Men.

Boys need Fathers in the home, to keep the mothering from becoming smothering. ...

Where did this Fatherless boy learn how to be cruel and heartless? By imprinting his single mother's worst feminine traits and emotional stability causing an intermittent reward addiction for her approval, combined with his base masculine drive and aggressiveness.

Which is precisely why the lynch pin to destabilizing and destroying a civilization, is to remove the Father from his role at the head of his home.

Update: James S Taranto of the WSJ also says that Hymowitz's analysis falls short, and explains the root of her problem:

The real revelation comes in the first paragraph, wherein Hymowitz laments non-elite boys' diminishing "chances ... of becoming reliable husbands and fathers." To be sure, this columnist is acquainted with any number of men who fit that description, and by and large they report that family life is a source of great happiness. But we can't recall ever hearing such a man describe himself, nor can we imagine one describing himself proudly, as a "reliable" husband or father.

Hymowitz would like men to organize their lives around maximizing their usefulness to women and children. Hey, what woman wouldn't?

That is, she is measuring the success of boys by what is good for girls. She is arguing that boys are not improving themselves the way girls are, but fails to grasp that boys and girls may want different things.