Your Son Says "I Don't Know"

Ask your son what he wants to do with his life.

Not what he wants to be when he grows up, that fairy tale version of the question. The real one. What's his plan? Where is he headed? What's he working toward?

If he's like most boys, you'll get a shrug. A mumble. Maybe an "I don't know" that's supposed to end the conversation.

That answer isn't laziness. It's lostness. And it's everywhere.

Researchers consistently find that when asked about their futures, boys are far more likely than girls to have no concrete idea. Girls have plans. Goals. Direction. Boys have... uncertainty. And that uncertainty is manifesting in collapse across every measurable metric.

The Numbers Are Brutal

This isn't hyperbole. Look at what's happening:

Women earn 58% of bachelor's degrees. The gap is widening every year. In 2020, male first-time college enrollment dropped 5.1%. Female enrollment dropped less than 1%.

Boys are failing at every academic level. They perform worse than girls on almost every marker: grades, graduation rates, standardized tests, college enrollment, college completion. They're more likely to be held back, more likely to be disciplined, more likely to drop out.

One in four male college freshmen don't return for sophomore year. At two-year colleges, male dropout rates exceed 45%.

And it's not just education. Young men classified as NEET (not in employment, education, or training) now exceed young women by 260,000. A growing number of young men are simply... not doing anything.

What Happened?

This didn't happen by accident. A confluence of factors created a world where boys struggle to find their footing.

School changed and boys didn't. Over the past few decades, education shifted toward skills where boys, on average, are at a disadvantage: sitting still, verbal processing, early literacy, extended focus without movement. Schools pushed reading requirements earlier without adapting teaching methods for how boys learn. Non-reading boys got labeled as behavior problems. They concluded school was for girls. And they checked out.

Male teachers vanished. Boys need to see men in educational settings. They need male role models who show that learning is masculine, that achievement matters, that men can care about knowledge and ideas. Instead, 76% of teachers are female. In elementary school, it's even higher. Boys often go years without a male teacher.

The path became unclear. Previous generations had clearer on-ramps to adulthood. You graduated, you got a job or went to trade school or joined the military, you got married, you became a man. Those pathways have become muddied. College is expensive and doesn't guarantee anything. Trades have been devalued. Marriage is delayed. The milestones that used to mark manhood are harder to reach and less clearly defined.

Screens offered an alternative. When real life feels confusing and unrewarding, screens offer achievement, mastery, and community. Boys retreated into gaming, porn, and social media, where the feedback is immediate and the path to success is clear. Unlike real life, which just keeps saying "I don't know what you're supposed to do either."

Masculinity became a problem to solve. Boys heard that masculinity is toxic. They were told to be less aggressive, less competitive, less rough. But no one told them what to be instead. The message was "don't be that" without a compelling vision for "be this." So they became nothing.

Your Son Isn't Broken

Here's what I want you to understand, Dad: Your son isn't broken. He's not defective. He's not lazy, even if it looks that way.

He's lost.

He's lost in a world that doesn't know what to do with masculine energy. He's lost without clear pathways to adulthood. He's lost without mentors who can show him the way. He's lost because no one gave him a map, and then we blamed him for not knowing where to go.

The "I don't know" isn't defiance. It's despair wearing a mask of indifference. He doesn't know. He really doesn't. And he's ashamed of not knowing, so he pretends not to care.

But he needs you to care. He needs you to see through the shrug, see through the screen, see through the indifference, and find the lost boy underneath.

What He Actually Needs

Your presence, not just your provision. He needs you in his life, not just funding it from a distance. He needs hours with you, not just checks from you. He needs to see how you handle conflict, make decisions, treat his mother, face difficulty. He needs access to your life.

Vision, not just options. "You can be anything you want" is paralyzing, not empowering. The tyranny of infinite choice leads to no choice at all. He needs you to help him see specific paths forward. Not dictate his future, but help him narrow the overwhelming possibilities into something he can actually pursue.

Challenge, not comfort. You can't protect him into manhood. He needs difficulty. He needs to do hard things and discover he can survive them. He needs you to expect things of him, to hold him to standards, to let him struggle and fail and try again.

Skills, not just degrees. College isn't the only path to a meaningful life. Many boys would thrive in the trades, in entrepreneurship, in practical work with their hands. Don't let cultural prestige keep you from seeing the paths that might actually fit your son. A skilled tradesman with purpose is doing better than a directionless man with a degree.

Initiation, not just aging. In every traditional culture, boys were initiated into manhood through challenge, ceremony, and mentorship. We've lost that. Your son needs you to mark the transition intentionally. To say, "You are becoming a man, and here's what that means." To give him tests and then celebrate when he passes them.

Adventure, not safety. Boys are designed for risk, exploration, and physical challenge. Our safety-obsessed culture has stripped all of that away. He needs camping trips and hard hikes and physical competition. He needs to skin a knee, lose a fight, and push through exhaustion. He needs to discover what he's capable of when it's hard.

Practical Steps

Have the conversation differently. Instead of "what do you want to be," try "what problems do you want to solve?" Instead of "what interests you," try "what makes you angry about the world?" Help him find cause, not just career.

Expose him to work. Take him to your job. Introduce him to men in different fields. Let him shadow people. Help him see what adults actually do all day. The "I don't know" often comes from having no concrete picture of what work even looks like.

Build something together. A project that takes time. Something physical if possible. The discipline of sustained effort toward a goal, with you alongside, teaches more than any lecture.

Limit screens radically. The screen is where boys go to hide from the hard work of figuring out real life. You may need to be the bad guy who says no. His future self will thank you.

Connect him with other men. He needs a tribe, not just a father. Find a men's group, a youth ministry, a sports team, a scouting troop, anything that surrounds him with men who expect something of him.

Don't rescue him from struggle. When he faces difficulty, your instinct is to fix it. Resist. Let him wrestle. Let him fail. Let him figure it out. Be there, but don't steal the struggle that would build him.

You're Not Too Late

Maybe you're reading this and thinking you've already failed. Your son is already lost. He's already checked out. It's already too late.

It's not.

God is in the business of resurrection. Dead things come back to life. Lost sons come home. It's never too late to start showing up, start engaging, start fighting for your son's future.

He needs you. Even if he acts like he doesn't. Even if he rolls his eyes and retreats to his room. Even if every attempt at connection feels like it bounces off a wall. Keep showing up.

You're his father. No one else can play that role. No one else can reach him the way you can. The void of father absence creates more damage than almost anything else in a young man's life. Your presence, imperfect as it is, matters more than you know.

Don't give up on him. He hasn't given up on you, even if it looks like he has. Somewhere underneath the "I don't know" is a boy who desperately wants to know, who desperately wants to become someone, who desperately wants his father to believe in him enough to show him the way.

Be that father. Starting today.