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American boyhood used to come with company. For most of the past century, a boy could count on rooms full of men who were not his father — scoutmasters, coaches, religious leaders, the fathers of his friends — that were supplied almost automatically by programs such as Y-Indian Guides and the Boy Scouts. Those programs rested on a premise so ordinary that nobody thought to defend it: Boys need sustained, voluntary, intergenerational time with men who are trying. The aesthetics of some of them did not age well. But the premise was never the embarrassing part. The premise is now an empirical question, and the data have an uncomfortable answer.
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Start with the institutions that used to do this work at scale. The Boy Scouts of America peaked in 1972 at 6.5 million members and remained at 4.8 million as recently as 1998. By 2019, the flagship Cub Scout and Scouts BSA programs were at 1.97 million. By 2020, they had fallen to 1.12 million — a 43% single-year drop. That year, the organization filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, facing more than 80,000 sexual-abuse claims. It emerged in 2023 after a roughly $2.4 billion settlement and has since rebranded as Scouting America. The bankruptcy filings put youth membership at around 762,000. Gallup data from 2010 revealed a generational shape: 45% of men 50 and older report having been Boy Scouts, compared with 27% of men aged 18-24. The bankruptcy explains the cliff. It does not explain the slope, which also runs through 4-H, CYO, Big Brothers, the Police Athletic League, and the local YMCA. Whatever one thinks of any individual institution, they were doing something at scale, and they are no longer doing it.
What did these organizations do? They put boys in regular, low-stakes contact with men who were not their fathers or teachers, around a shared activity, on a recurring basis. They created the social infrastructure of male mentorship. And we now have very good data on what happens to boys when that infrastructure thins out.
As an Eagle Scout and the father of two sons, I know the value of this kind of mentorship firsthand. Scouting gave me adult men who were not my father, working alongside me on tasks that mattered, with the expectation that I would be allowed to struggle. As a father in 2026, I have been seeking and failing to find the contemporary equivalent for my sons. It does not exist in any form I can sign them up for. Travel sports are not it. Enrichment classes are not it. Birthday parties run by professional entertainers are not it.
I am trying, in small ways, to fill the vacuum myself. I took them camping just recently. But it does not work as a one-family project, and that is the point. These institutions worked because they were community-built and community-sustained. A father cannot parent his way out of an associational collapse, and the families most equipped to try are not the ones whose sons are paying the highest developmental price.
The American Institute for Boys and Men’s research on male loneliness finds that 15% of young men today say they have no close friends, up fivefold since 1990. Men are more likely than women to say they are not meaningfully part of any group or community. But the gap that matters most here is not gender but class: People without a college degree are about twice as likely as college graduates to have no close friends. The boys most likely to have grown up with a Scout troop, a parish CYO league, or a 4-H club are precisely the boys whose communities have lost those institutions most thoroughly. The friendship recession and the institutional collapse are the same story.
The mentorship pipeline has thinned in parallel. Men now account for just 23% of U.S. K-12 teachers, down from about 30% in 1988, and only 6% of teachers are men of color. Even returning to the 1988 male share would require over 230,000 additional male teachers. The share of male secondary school teachers has dropped from 48% to 36% since 1987. Boys today move through childhood and adolescence with measurably fewer adult men in their lives — in the classroom, in voluntary associations, and increasingly at home.
The non-paternal male mentor, once a default feature of American boyhood, has become something that has to be deliberately engineered. What was once ambient — the scoutmaster, the coach down the street, the rotating bench of fathers who shared weekend duty — now arrives, when it arrives at all, through formal programs that must be applied for, screened, scheduled, and funded. Those programs do admirable work, but they are retail solutions to a wholesale problem, and their waiting lists are a standing measure of how far supply has fallen behind need.
The developmental picture matches the institutional one — it’s the same collapse measured in a different way. Peter Gray, a research psychologist at Boston College, has documented the disappearance of child-led, unsupervised play since his 2011 paper in the American Journal of Play. His co-written 2023 piece in the Journal of Pediatrics tied the contraction of independent activity since the 1960s directly to the rise in adolescent depression and anxiety. The mechanism is exactly what the old institutions supplied: Unsupervised, mixed-age time in which boys could argue, misread each other, and repair the damage themselves is how children develop an internal locus of control, which is among the strongest known protective factors against later depression. Between 1950 and 2005, the suicide rate for children under 15 quadrupled, while the rate for adults over forty declined. In the more recent window Jonathan Haidt covers in The Anxious Generation, 2010 to 2020, suicide among boys 10-14 rose 91%.
None of this maps onto a single cause, and Gray and Haidt themselves disagree about how much weight to put on the phone versus the prior decades of play deprivation. But the convergence is hard to miss: The institutions that put boys in unsupervised, mixed-age, mostly-male social settings have collapsed; the share of adult men in their daily lives has fallen sharply; the developmental window for friction-and-repair learning has narrowed; and the rates of loneliness, depression, and suicide among boys have moved in the predictable direction.
The implication for policy is concrete. First, we must rebuild the male teacher pipeline. Only about 17% of bachelor’s degrees in education go to men. States and school districts must make a concerted effort to recruit and retain male teachers, particularly in secondary schools and in communities where boys have the fewest adult men in their lives.
Second, we must take voluntary associations seriously as social infrastructure. Tax policy, charitable-giving incentives, school facility-sharing rules, and zoning all shape whether the local Scout troop, mentorship program, or athletic league can actually operate. Most of these levers sit at the state and municipal level, where they are nearly invisible in the high-level conversations around male loneliness.
Third, we must expand earn-and-learn pathways — apprenticeships, trades, and HEAL-sector programs — that pair young men with older mentors around real work. The AIBM’s policy work on Workforce Pell lays out one version of this.
DID THE IPHONE CAUSE A BABY BUST?
The Indian Guides are not coming back, and they should not. But the function they performed — boys and men in the same room, around a shared task, with the boys allowed to struggle and the men allowed to teach — is not optional, and the data are now unsparing about what happens when no one performs it. This was never a project for families acting alone. It was a community undertaking, or it was nothing.
As the nation approaches its 250th birthday, the question is not whether we can afford to rebuild the institutions that formed boys. It is whether we can keep affording not to.
