Boys are Pulling Away. Mentorship Can Bring Them Back
Across the country, parents, teachers, and researchers are increasingly noticing the same troubling pattern among boys and young men: fewer close friendships, more isolation, and increasing struggles with mental health.
Fortunately, solutions to this growing loneliness crisis for boys exist, and they start with rebuilding the relationships that help young men feel supported and understood. We believe mentorship offers one of the most powerful ways we have to build meaningful relationships at scale so that boys and their families, schools, and communities can thrive together.
By the time a boy becomes a young man, he's likely absorbed a pretty clear set of rules about what he's allowed to feel—rules that often leave little room for the kind of connection and support young people need. Nobody hands him a manual, but he learns it from what gets rewarded, what gets mocked, what the adults around him model, which messages and influencers flood his phone. Too often, boys learn that toughness is currency and vulnerability is a liability. And so when things get hard, he pulls away. One in four young men in America reports feeling deeply lonely on any given day. Two-thirds of men under 30 believe no one cares whether they're okay. And upwards of one in seven young men report having no close friends—nearly five times the rate in 1990.
As a result, many boys tend to express distress through aggression, withdrawal, and risk-taking. And our current support systems are poorly equipped to catch these cries for help. Rather, these behaviors are often read as defiance, labeled as conduct issues, and treated accordingly. As Dr. Megan Paxton, Vice President of Clinical Effectiveness at Home of the Innocents, describes it, we give girls more words to describe their emotions. Boys, instead, mostly learn about anger.
The consequences can be devastating. Boys are less likely than girls to be diagnosed with depression, yet they are more likely to die by suicide. Since 2010, suicide rates among young men have risen by a third. A new Humana Foundation report, “Strengthening Belonging for Underserved Boys”, lays bare how much worse this gets for boys who are already on the margins.
Boys of color carry the weight of racial trauma alongside everything else. Black boys are more than 2.7 times more likely to die by suicide than Black girls. American Indian and Alaska Native boys face the highest attempted suicide rates of any group. LGBTQ+ boys often don’t feel safe enough among their own peers to ask for help. And in rural communities, where stoicism is expected and a therapist might be a 30-minute drive away or more, boys learn to work through the pain.
At Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA), we see another side of this story: what happens when boys find connection. Frankie Lucio, a Latino youth leader from Houston who serves on the Big Brothers Big Sisters National Youth Council, describes loneliness prevalent among his peers as a kind of shutdown: sleeping all day, pulling away from everything they used to care about, staying in their rooms because they don’t want to add their problems to parents already carrying too much. Carter Howell, a 22-year-old from farm country in Kentucky, has watched friends go silent before attempting suicide. “They just stopped talking,” he says. “That’s the sign.” Both young men found greater meaning and purpose through mentorship.
Few interventions build belonging as reliably as mentorship. A caring adult who shows up week after week, who asks real questions and sticks around for the answers, can completely transform a young person’s trajectory. Young people who have a mentor are 54% less likely to be arrested, 41% less likely to engage in substance abuse, and 20% more likely to enroll in college. They show dramatic improvements in emotional regulation and hopefulness about their futures. Remarkable benefits extend to mentors as well. Men who volunteer often describe finding renewed purpose and community through mentoring and report stronger self-esteem, a greater sense of meaning, and deeper connections in their own lives.
Yet right now, too many boys don't have the opportunity for that type of meaningful connection. Across the country, thousands of young people are waiting for a mentor, and most of them are boys. For instance, boys make up nearly two-thirds of the young people currently on BBBSA’s national waitlist. The good news is that there is already growing momentum for scaling access to mentorship nationwide. At BBBSA, we’ve seen a 7% increase this year in men of color signing up to mentor.
Mentorship efforts help boys talk openly about what they’re experiencing, learn from one another, and build relationships with adults who model empathy and emotional honesty. We are also supporting research and better screening tools so that boys’ struggles are recognized for what they are, rather than dismissed or mislabeled.
With half of all mental health conditions showing up by age 14, the case for reaching boys early is overwhelming. So we must reshape the cultural narrative around boys by supporting storytelling and media that make room for the full range of what boys feel, vulnerability and joy included.
More than a century ago, during another period of rapid social change, civic leaders built institutions that offered boys mentorship, structure, and community. Big Brothers was one of them. The challenges facing boys today may look different, but the underlying need is familiar: young people searching for guidance and adults who can offer it.
Today, many boys are quietly looking for someone to notice when they pull away, and men are simultaneously searching for meaningful ways to contribute to their communities. And we have decades of evidence showing that when those two groups meet through mentorship, lives change. What we need now is concerted investment, attention, and the willingness of more adults to step forward so that we can overcome the loneliness crisis—and build a more connected and healthy society for all in the process.