In 1960, 56 percent of men ages 18 to 34 lived with a wife or girlfriend while 23 percent lived with their parents, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data.
Want to guess what those numbers look like today? In 2014, the percentages flipped for the time where more young men were still in their childhood homes than living with a partner: 35 percent lived with parents and 28 percent with a partner.
It’s easy to dismiss that as a generation of hopeless losers, like the hapless Millennial in New York who was evicted from his parents’ home at 30, but I sympathize with that demographic of young men because that’s my generation.
When I graduated college in 2007, I had job offers from two newspapers: One in the town where I had graduated high school and the county where I’d lived all my life in East Tennessee and another in Greenwood, some 500 miles from home and in the economically and socially struggling Mississippi Delta.
I ended up choosing Greenwood, in part because I did not want to become one of those guys who just hung out in his hometown and never did anything of substance. Looking back on it, I’m glad I made that decision.
Of course, I had some lucky advantages that allowed me to do that: I didn’t have any college debt and in fact had some savings, and my parents were willing and able to help me out a little bit financially as I started to live on my own.
It’s much harder today for a young man out of high school to find a job that allows him to support a family. I don’t think anyone would dispute that.
To make a fair living, it often requires further education beyond that which the taxpayers will pay for. And because of the insane inflation rates of what colleges charge for you to learn from them, there has been a student debt crisis.
It leaves a difficult decision: Work a low-paying job out of high school or get saddled with debt getting a college education.
Yet I see one key alternative, which Gov. Phil Bryant among many others have pushed: Technical programs at community colleges.
For young men who are not particularly fond of academics, they can be out working a good job within a year or two. An electronics teacher at a Mississippi community college frequently lamented to me how the number of jobs industries had available grossly outnumbered the number of young men who wanted to go through the program. And that was for good jobs paying $18 per hour or more. Hard to blame that on demographic trends.
Here’s my other solution to the young men’s responsibility crisis: There must be a push from their fathers to show them the biblical model of what it means to be a man. One of the reasons for our current situation is the widespread rejection of Christian teachings that have gone on at the same time.
The Christian system uniquely teaches the values our society’s young men need:
Work ethic: “If any will not work, neither let him eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10).”
Humility and service: “If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet (John 13:14).”
Sacrificial Love: “Husbands love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself up for it (Ephesians 5:25).”
I could go on, but you get the point: There’s nowhere else where boys are going to learn those values. And it’s not the job of the schools or society as a whole to teach those things: It must come from their fathers or we will continue to see young men floundering aimlessly.
Reach C-P Editor and Publisher Charlie Smith at csmith@columbianprogress.com.
