On Tuesday, March 17th, the University of Virginia hosted the National Marriage Project’s spring conference, bringing together students and scholars to discuss the challenges facing young men. The event, entitled “Lost Boys: The Digital Revolution, the Retreat from Marriage, and the Decline of Men,” featured an afternoon student panel followed by a 7 p.m. keynote with speakers including Richard Reeves, Aaron Renn, and Alvaro de Vicente.
While the evening speakers focused on national trends, the earlier panel offered insight into how these issues are experienced at the student level.
The afternoon panel brought together UVA students Brayson Holmes, Conwell Morris, and Nic Sanker to discuss the role of modern habits, education, and mentorship in shaping young men’s lives. Holmes, a second year, is a Las Vegas resident who is majoring in politics and philosophy alongside heavy involvement in Mock Trial. Morris, the President of UVA-affiliated media organization WUVA and Cartoonist for The Cavalier Daily, is a third-year studying Politics, Philosophy, and Law. The final participant, Nic Sanker, was not a UVA student, but a Charlottesville local and recent graduate of Princeton University, where he majored in economics and played football. He currently works at a private equity firm in Charlottesville. The panel was moderated by Gerard Alexander, Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and President of the Blue Ridge Center.
Professor Alexander began the event inquiring into how each young man sees pornography, video games, or sports betting in the lives of their friends and peers. In their responses, one recurring theme was the prevalence of what Sanker described as “cheap substitutes” for fulfillment. He identified pornography, gaming, sports betting, and social media as vices that mimic deeper desires for purpose, connection, and achievement without requiring long-term commitment. The problem, according to Sanker, is that these habits create “unrealistic expectations.” Morris noted that while some of these activities can be harmless in moderation, others—particularly pornography—can have more serious effects on attention, energy, and is “not compatible” with relationships, as opposed to the culture’s general narrative.
Panelists emphasized that meaningful growth often comes from sustained difficulty. Sanker and Morris cited sports as a formative experience, highlighting the value of discipline, delayed gratification, and coaches as role models. For example, Morris described returning to wrestling after losing every match in his first season–a decision that his father, a “role model” for Morris, required. For Holmes, prolonged challenge came through the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (“JROTC”), which, he said, taught him how to “take orders from a peer” and deal with a dislikable leader: “Doing a hard thing and having to wait your turn in a very structured environment builds up character.” Morris added that the ability to take direction for young men can be fostered through sports and similar competitive activities.
Mentorship also emerged as a central factor in cultivating a healthy sense of masculinity. Professor Alexander asked the panelists whether they knew peers who grew up without fathers, and if so, their impressions on the effects of fatherlessness. Holmes described being raised largely by his grandparents, who modeled both responsibility and caretaking, while Morris pointed to his experience at an all-boys school, where students interacted closely with residential teachers and their families. Sanker told how, despite advanced Alzheimer’s, his father could still remember the name of his role model, “Coach Jackson,” illustrating the pivotal, lasting role a father-figure can play in a young man’s life. Across the panel, fathers, coaches, and other authority figures were identified as key influences.
The discussion culminated in the topic of education. Alexander asked whether the “language of adapting to girls’ interests and learning styles” resonated with the student. Several of the panelists suggested that schools often emphasize academic achievement in ways that do not align with how many boys develop, particularly in terms of attention span and delayed development relative to girls. Holmes argued that schools have a habit of “overprescribing a lifestyle rooted in higher education,” even for students who may be better suited to vocational work. Alexander asked what percentage of students at his high school may have been interested in vocational training if that option was present at Holmes’ Title I high school, to which he estimated that a majority of his peers would have been interested.
Panelists also noted a cultural dimension, describing a perception among some young men that academic engagement or participation in certain extracurricular activities is socially discouraged. Morris contrasted this with his experience at an all-boys school, where a wider range of interests—including the arts—was more normalized.
The evening keynote expanded on many of these themes, placing them within a national context. The event was a panel of four prominent figures, including moderator Brad Wilcox, Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at UVA; Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Of Boys and Men; Aaron Renn, a writer and senior fellow at the American Reformer known for his work on culture and “negative world” Christianity; and Alvaro de Vicente, principal of a private boys’ school in Maryland. Wilcox kicked off the panel with a framing of the crisis of masculinity, comparing young men of today to the “lost boys” from the musical Peter Pan who “inhabit Neverland” and “have no parents, no bedtimes, and no real responsibilities.”
This sort of male malaise, Wilcox explained, means that they “miss out on the best that life has to offer: real work, real community, and real love.” He cited his colleague, Professor Joe Davis, whose new research from the Institute from Family Studies found that 42% of young men think of themselves as failures. With this context, he proposed that the event would seek to understand: “what’s happening to young men, why are so many males struggling, and what can we do to boost the fortunes of boys and young men?”
Richard Reeves, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, emphasized that declining outcomes for young men should be understood as a social challenge rather than a personal failing. He pointed to rising suicide rates since 2010 and disengagement from education and the workforce as indicators of a broader issue, arguing that “men have a problem, not that they are the problem.” But why should women care? Reeves posited: “In the end, we only will rise together.”
Reeves also discussed the erosion of traditional models of masculinity, suggesting that while opportunities for women have increased—a positive development, he stressed—society has failed to articulate a compelling replacement for men. “We’ve been very good at telling boys and young men what not to do,” he said, “but not what to do.” In many schools, he added, boys are implicitly treated as deficient: “lots of schools end up treating boys like malfunctioning girls.” The result is a vacuum where a coherent script for manhood once existed.
Into that void, Reeves argued, has crept what he described—borrowing a term popularized in online spaces—as “male sedation”: a retreat into gaming, pornography, and digital life. These are not the root causes, he suggested, but rather symptoms—“a place to which we can retreat…if the outside world is scary and unpredictable.” In place of older breadwinner models, Reeves proposed a new vision of “prosocial masculinity” grounded in service and responsibility: “a mature male gives more than he takes,” with fatherhood—biological or otherwise—serving as its clearest expression.
Diving deeper into the effects of family structure on developing men, Renn focused on family breakdown and fatherlessness, noting their impact on long-term outcomes for children. Emphasizing that single-parent households are a prevailing issue in the US, he referenced a 2019 Pew Research Study finding that the US has the highest share of children living in single parent households. “It affects both boys and girls,” he said, “but it seems to affect boys worse.” Illustrating this, Renn cited statistics published by The Institute for Family Studies which show that coming from a broken home makes one more likely to become incarcerated than to attend college. Renn posited that, until we address the disparity between single parent households and traditional ones, including the drastic poverty gap therein, boys and young men will continue to exhibit more negative outcomes. He opined: “If we don’t move the needle on intact families a little more, I think we’re going to be pushing a rock uphill.”
But Renn also widened the lens beyond structure to culture. The narratives available to young men, he argued, are deeply impoverished. In the wake of second-wave feminism, many traditionally masculine virtues—courage, provision, protection—have been recast as either gender-neutral or suspect, leaving behind what he described as a thin and often negative conception of masculinity. Boys, in turn, are left with “a collection of traits they’re told to avoid,” rather than a vision of what to become. That absence helps explain the appeal of online influencers who offer clearer, if often distorted, scripts for male identity. Compounding the problem, Renn noted, is the reality that young men make life-altering decisions—about education, work, and relationships—“at an age when they do not fully understand the implications.” Without what he called a “meta-awareness of change,” many fail to anticipate how their desires and circumstances will evolve. “We need to find a way to illuminate those decisions,” he said, so that young men can make them freely and with greater foresight.
Wilcox then moved the conversation to the topic of education and boyhood. Alvaro de Vicente, the longstanding principal of The Heights School in Potomac, Maryland, argued that “the school system has betrayed boys and young men”—and done so in both “tactical and philosophical” ways. Tactically, he pointed to everything from classroom management to scheduling. “Seventy percent of all discipline problems in schools are boys,” he noted—not, he insisted, because boys are inherently worse students, but because “if seventy percent of the problems are coming from one group, something is wrong with the way we’re teaching.” He criticized long classroom blocks that require boys to sit still for hours—“there’s no way a middle school or high school boy can sit for that long”—and emphasized the shortage of male teachers. “We don’t have enough men in the classroom,” he said, a deficit that leaves boys without role models who can answer what he sees as their central, often unspoken question: am I going to make it as a man? The answer, ideally, comes from a trusted adult who can say: “You’re going to make it. I enjoy your company. Come join the tribe.”
Philosophically, de Vicente argued that schools have stripped away the very content that most engages boys. “We’re taking stories out of literature,” he said, even though “boys love stories…every teacher knows that if you have a group of boys, and you tell a story, you’ve got them.” History, too, has been transformed from narrative into abstraction—“a theory which is not interesting to fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds.” The deeper issue, he suggested, is that schools increasingly focus on information and skills while neglecting formation. “We just want you to be compliant, we want you to be vulnerable, we want you to be nice,” he said. But this vision is both unappealing and, if successful, socially corrosive: “we have a problem in our society…because we have a lot of compliant, submissive, silent, unproductive men.”
De Vicente’s alternative centered on clarity of purpose and personal formation. Successful schools, he argued, begin with a clear vision of the graduate—“what should an eighteen-year-old look like?”—and align faculty and parents around that goal. The real work of education, however, often happens outside the classroom: “the most important thing a teacher does” is in the hallways, parking lots, and informal interactions where mentorship takes root. At his own school, this extends to what he called “a conspiracy for the good,” in which teachers and parents collaborate—sometimes quietly—on behalf of the child. Echoing Cicero, he noted the paradox that young people must make life-defining decisions “at the moment when they are least equipped to do so,” making the presence of mentors all the more essential.
He also emphasized the importance of risk and failure in forming young men, distinguishing between “debilitating risks” and “growth risks.” Modern parents, he argued, often fixate on physical dangers while ignoring moral and developmental ones—“you think the subway can take you to bad places; the iPhone can take you to much worse places.” The result is a generation less capable of self-advocacy. “Parents have to allow their sons to self-advocate,” he said, “which means they have to tolerate failure.” Without that tolerance, boys never develop the resilience required for adulthood.
Across the panel, a common thread emerged: the problems facing young men are neither reducible to individual failings nor solvable by a single policy fix. They are, instead, the product of overlapping cultural, educational, and familial shifts—what Reeves described as a failure to replace old structures with new ones, and what Renn framed as a breakdown in both institutions and narratives. A strong point of agreement emerged: boys are not beyond help, but helping them will require a renewed willingness—from families, schools, and communities alike—to offer not just critique, but direction.
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