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than did the parable boys of 1990. Reading, however, is a problem. The standardized NAEP test, known as the nation39。 s report card, indicates that by the senior year of high school, boys have fallen nearly 20 points behind their female peers. That39。 s bad, not because girls are ahead but because too many boys are leaving school functionally illiterate. Pollack told me of one study that found even the sons of collegeeducated parents had a 1 in 4 chance of leaving school without being proficient readers. In an economy increasingly geared toward processing information, an inability to read bees an inability to earn. You have to be literate in today39。 s world, says Sommers. We39。 re not going to get away with not teaching boys to read. Even here, though, there may be grounds for a hopeful outlook. Boys at the fourth and eighthgrade levels are showing modest improvement in reading and now trail their female classmates by slightly smaller margins than before. If that39。 s a sign of improved teaching and parental focus on reading, then we ought to expect gains in the higher grades soon. I think it would be an error not to be optimistic, says Michael Gurian, author of several books about raising boys. But at the same time there is reason to worry. He sketches the sinking trajectory of undereducated males as bluecollar jobs move to lowwage countries. Though definitive data on the dropout rate are as elusive as Bigfoot, there39。 s little question that a worrisome gap is opening between boys who finish high school and those who don39。 t. Boys with diplomas are now far more likely to go immediately to college than the boys of my era were. Solution: we need more boys with diplomas. And that can be done. A generation of enlightened teaching and robust encouragement has awakened American girls to the need for higher education. Women now outnumber men in college by a ratio of 4 to 3, and admissions officers at liberalarts colleges are struggling to find enough males to keep their classes close to gender parity. We39。 ve done wonderfully with girls. Now let39。 s do the same for boys, says Gurian. One way to start might be to gear advanced training to maledominated occupationsalready the case in many femaleoriented fields. Schoolteachers and librarians (roughly 70% female) must go to college, but firefighters and police officers (pushing 90% male)? Not necessarily. Top executive secretaries are college educated。 top carpenters may not be. About the only scale on which today39。 s boys are faring dramatically worse than the boys of my era is the bathroom scale. When I was in high school in the late 1970s, roughly 1 boy in 20 was obese。 today 1 boy in 5 is. My favorite statistic seemed to sum up all the others: fewer boys today are deadbeats. The percentage of young men between 16 and 19 who neither work nor attend school has fallen by about a quarter since 1984. The greatest gains in this category have been made by black youths. In 1984, 1 out of 3 young black men ages 18 and 19 were neither in school nor working. That proportion has been cut almost in half, to fewer than 1 in 5. Today39。 s boys may wear their pants too damned baggy and go around with iPod buds in their ears. They know everything about Xbox 360 and nothing about paper routes. I doubt that they slog to school through deep snow as I recall doing back before the globe warmed up. But judging from the numbers, they are pulling themselves up from the handbasket to hell. SO WHERE DID WE GO RIGHT? Unfortunately, it39。 s one thing to observe human behaviorcount the crime reports and the teen births and the diplomas awarded and so onbut quite another to explain it. Popular science and the bestseller lists skip eagerly from one theory to the next, lingering with delight on the most provocative if not always the most plausible. A recent paper suggested that falling crime rates can be explained almost entirely by reduced lead exposure in childhood. Which was odd, because last year economist Steven Levitt39。 s best seller Freakonomics chalked up the improvement to legalized abortion, which, he theorized, cut the number of unwanted children prone to wind up as criminals. Or take the teenpregnancy numbers. It39。 s not enough to credit the virtues of responsibility and better sex education. Something racier is desired. According to some writers, fewer teens are getting pregnant because they39。 ve all switched to oral sex. Or maybe the phenomenon is due to a still unexplained decline in sperm counts. But before we go dizzy on cleverness, let39。 s pull out Occam39。 s razor and consider a simple possibility: maybe our boys are doing better because we39。 re paying them more attention. We39。 re providing for them better。 the proportion of children living in poverty is down roughly 2% from a spike in 1993. And we39。 re giving them more time. Parentsboth fathers and mothersare reordering their priorities to focus on caring for their kids. Several studies confirm this. Sociologists at the University of Michigan have tracked a sharp increase in the amount of time men spend with their children since the 1970s. Another longrange survey, reported by University of Maryland researchers, has asked parents since the 1960s to keep detailed diaries of their daily activities. In 1965 childfocused care occupied about 13 hours per week, the vast majority of it done by moms. By 1985 that had dropped to 11 hours per week as moms entered the workforce. The 2020 study found parents spending 20 hours a week focused on their kidsby far the highest number in the history of the survey. Both moms and dads had dramatically shifted their energies toward their kids. Are there risks of overparenting boys? Sure. And here39。 s where the success of The Dangerous Book gets interesting, because it suggests that as parents spend more time with their sons, we ma。