The Crisis Facing Boys Is Bigger Than School
Dr. Leonard Sax says pornography, AI, and the collapse of real mentorship are leaving a generation of boys without a path to manhood.
For years, bestselling author and family physician Dr. Leonard Sax has warned that boys are drifting. Today, he believes the problem has become even more urgent.
Appearing on Heroic Hotline, Sax argued that while schools, families, and communities often recognize boys are struggling, few are willing to confront the deeper cultural forces behind it. Drawing on decades of research, clinical practice, and visits to more than 500 schools, he outlined why boys are falling behind—and what it will take to help them become men.
The Missing Men
Sax began with a trend that has quietly reshaped higher education.
Fifty years ago, men made up the majority of students at Canadian and American universities. Today, women significantly outnumber men on college campuses.
When presenting this data to the Toronto District School Board, Sax recalled one trustee asking why anyone should be concerned.
His answer was simple:
“Mating.”
He explained that educational attainment now plays a major role in partner selection. Increasingly, women seek men who have achieved at least as much as they have academically and professionally.
“There are not enough good men to go around,” Sax said, arguing that this imbalance has become one factor contributing to declining marriage rates across North America.
A New Threat Has Emerged
When Boys Adrift was first published, Sax identified five major factors driving the decline of boys.
Now, he says there is a sixth.
“The new factor has three components: pornography, AI girlfriends, and the manosphere.”
While pornography itself is nothing new, Sax believes artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed its nature.
Instead of consuming content someone else created, boys can now generate personalized pornography in seconds simply by describing what they want.
“Every teenage boy now is a magician,” he said. “He speaks his fantasy to the computer, and in 20 seconds, he has professional-grade pornography.”
Sax cited recent survey data showing that more than half of boys between 13 and 17 have already used AI tools to generate explicit content.
The technology, he warned, is becoming increasingly addictive while replacing real relationships before many boys have ever gone on a first date.
Why Brotherhood Matters
Technology is only part of the story.
Sax believes one of the greatest losses over the last half-century has been the disappearance of communities where boys naturally learned from older men.
He pointed to research from Harvard’s Robert Putnam, who documented how neighborhoods once fostered relationships across generations.
Whether working under the hood of a car, joining bowling leagues, or building projects together, teenage boys regularly spent time alongside men in their twenties, thirties, and fifties.
Today, those relationships have largely disappeared.
“The bonds across generations have been broken,” Sax said.
Instead of learning from men, many boys spend nearly all their time with peers—or increasingly, alone in front of screens.
Manhood Must Be Earned
One of Sax’s central arguments is that boys do not simply become men through age alone.
“A boy does not become a man just as a matter of passage of years,” he said. “Manhood has to be earned.”
Drawing on cross-cultural research, he noted that societies throughout history have expected boys to grow into manhood through responsibility, mentorship, and service—not simply biological maturity.
Without those experiences, many young men remain trapped between adolescence and adulthood.
Competence Builds Confidence
One of the simplest ways to help boys, Sax argued, is by teaching practical skills.
He shared the story of a mentoring program where a teenager was handed a hammer and asked to remove nails from old lumber. After thirty minutes, the boy had made almost no progress because no one had ever shown him how to use the claw of the hammer.
“Boys are not born knowing how to use a hammer,” Sax said. “They have to be taught.”
The lesson wasn’t really about carpentry.
It was about confidence.
As boys master real skills alongside capable men, they begin developing the confidence and responsibility that no video game or smartphone can provide.
Parents Must Parent
Sax also challenged a common modern assumption: that parents should become their children’s best friends.
“A friend cannot command,” he said.
Only a parent can set limits, remove phones from bedrooms, restrict pornography, and insist on healthy boundaries.
He argued that many parents believe they must choose between being loving or being strict.
Research, he said, shows the healthiest families are both.
Parents should enjoy adventures with their children—whether hiking, fishing, camping, sailing, or building something together—but they should also remain teachers and guides.
“Parents need to teach children,” Sax said, “not the other way around.”
The Way Forward
Despite the seriousness of the challenges, Sax remains convinced that boys can thrive when adults intentionally create opportunities for real mentorship, responsibility, and brotherhood.
Communities of men, engaged fathers, practical work, meaningful relationships, and clear expectations once formed boys into men almost naturally.
His concern is not that boys have changed.
It is that the structures which once helped them grow have quietly disappeared.
Recovering those structures, he argues, may be one of the most important tasks facing families, churches, and communities today.