Boys Are Not Falling Behind. They Are Being Kept Out of Care.

On the care we withheld from boys, the men it produced, and the world we could build instead

One hundred care changemakers gathered in Rio this week to name something most of the world still refuses to say plainly: that when men don’t do care, everyone suffers — including men.

I am writing this from Rio, where the air is thick and the conversations are thicker. I came here as one of a hundred changemakers and advocates who have spent years, in some cases decades, working on the most undervalued infrastructure in the world: care. What strikes me on day one is not the urgency of the arguments made in these rooms. We all know the urgency. What strikes me is the fact that we are finally, seriously, insistently talking about men.

Not men as the problem. Men as the missing piece.

That is a different conversation. And one I have been waiting to have.

What the data already knows

The evidence is not new. It has simply been inconvenient. We have known for years that when fathers step into care — real care, not performative care, not babysitting their own children — something shifts. Not just for their partners and their children, but for them.

• 80%+ of fathers say being a dad is the most important job in the world, and they’re twice as likely to report a sense of purpose compared to men without children.

• 4× women more likely to experience couple conflict among men who hold traditional gender beliefs about caregiving

Equimundo’s State of the World’s Fathers 2026, the most comprehensive global study of its kind, drawing on survey data from roughly 8,000 parents and caregivers across 16 countries finds that engaged caregiving is associated with more than a sense of purpose. For fathers, active caregiving fosters greater life satisfaction, encourages healthier behaviors, and strengthens emotional bonds with their children. Engaged fathers report fewer health issues, including reduced substance use and lower rates of illness.

There is neuroscience behind this too. Fathers who are actively involved in caregiving show measurable changes in hormones, increases in oxytocin and prolactin that enhance emotional bonding and responsiveness. These are not soft outcomes. These are biological adaptations. The brain that learns to care becomes more capable of caring.

And yet. The same report documents something that should give us pause. Between 2023 and 2026, there has been a noticeable rise in fathers’ agreement that boys “shouldn’t be taught to cook, clean, or care for siblings” jumping from 25 percent to 40 percent in just three years. Agreement that basic childcare tasks “are a mother’s responsibility” has grown by thirteen percentage points among fathers in this period. We are not standing still. In some places, we are going backward.

“The data show how traditional gender beliefs get in the way of true caregiving. Men who hold traditional beliefs about gender roles were four times more likely to experience couple conflict.”

Time poverty, and what boys do with the time they have

One of the arguments I want to press harder in these conversations, and one I pressed in the room today, is that we have been misreading the so-called crisis of boys and men.

We talk about boys falling behind academically, about young men disappearing into online spaces, about the manosphere recruiting a generation. These are real. But the usual response — more emotional support for boys, more mentorship/role models, more content made for them — misses a structural root cause that we have not been willing to name.

Boys have too much unstructured time. And girls do not.

This is not an accident. It is a design feature of unequal care systems. When we look at the numbers from UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2025, women and girls devote 2.5 times as many hours per day to unpaid domestic and care work compared to men. In parts of the world like North Africa, Western Asia, the figure is over four times as many hours. Girls are learning, from early childhood, that their time is not fully their own. It belongs to the family. It belongs to whoever needs feeding, minding, managing. Boys, by contrast, often grow up in homes where their time is treated as sovereign.

That time does not disappear. It goes somewhere. And increasingly, it goes online, into spaces that have been designed, deliberately, to fill it with identity, belonging, and a very particular story about what it means to be a man.

The AI adoption gender gap tells the same story from a different angle. Men are adopting generative AI faster than women, a pattern observed across geographies, sectors, and occupations. It has been easy to interpret this as a preference gap, or an interest gap. It is not. It is a time gap. Employed women spend approximately six and a half fewer hours per week in paid work than men, not by choice but because their non-work hours are filled with care. When women’s time is structurally colonized by caregiving, they have less margin for experimentation, for skill-building, for the kind of playful engagement that drives technology adoption. Men’s time, particularly when not structured by care, flows freely toward whatever is new and available.

If we want to close the technology gap, the leadership gap, the earnings gap, we have to close the care gap. These are not separate conversations.

The boyhood problem no one is saying clearly enough

Here is what I keep coming back to, and what I said today in Rio: we are not going to fix the boys problem by building programs that coddle boys emotionally without giving them real responsibility.

We know what works. The research is decades old and still being ignored. An 85-year Harvard study, one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever conducted found a strong connection between doing household chores in childhood and later professional success and happiness. Children who took on regular household responsibilities developed greater self-worth, confidence, work ethic, and empathy for others. The University of Minnesota’s landmark work on household task involvement found that children who participated in chores from an early age were better at goal-setting, more capable of handling setbacks, and more likely to complete education. Chores, which are a form of care, build executive function, perspective-taking, and what researchers call self-efficacy: the belief that your actions matter and that you can follow through.

When girls are given these responsibilities and boys are not, the gap compounds over time. It shows up in the classroom, in relationships, in the capacity for empathy in the boardroom. It shows up in who leads and how they lead, with accountability or without it.

“Boys are not falling behind because they lack support. They are falling behind, in part, because no one has asked them to show up for anyone other than themselves.”

I am not indifferent to the real pain of boys who are struggling. I take that seriously. But I think the solutions being proposed — more male mentors, more boy-centered content, more validation — are treating a symptom rather than a cause. Boys need to be brought into care. Into actual caregiving. Into the work of attending to others. Not as an afterthought, not as an elective, but as a fundamental part of education and family life from the very beginning.

Caring is not a female skill. It is a human one. We have simply been training half the population in it and calling the gap natural.

What Rwanda is showing the rest of us

Rwanda is on the cusp of becoming the first country to integrate fatherhood training into its national health system, a milestone built on more than a decade of grassroots work through Equimundo’s MenCare+ initiative and the Rwanda Men’s Resource Center. The Bandebereho program, “role model” in Kinyarwanda, enrolled over 1,700 couples across four districts in a 17-week course that brought fathers into conversation about childcare, couples communication, and men’s health, facilitated by other fathers in their own communities.

This is what systemic care policy looks like. Not an app, not a campaign, not a viral moment. A government deciding that fatherhood is a matter of public health and acting accordingly. The data from Rwanda’s program shows reduced intimate partner violence, improved maternal and child health outcomes, and critically fathers who report that caregiving gives their lives deeper meaning.

This is the cascade effect. It does not stay inside the household. Men who learn to care become different workers, different neighbors, different citizens. Boys who grow up watching their fathers care grow into men who understand that strength and tenderness are not opposites.

The economic argument, if you need one

For anyone who remains unconvinced by the human case, there is an economic one that is almost impossible to argue with. UN Women estimates that closing the gender digital divide alone could generate $1.5 trillion in global growth by 2030. Investing in women’s full participation, which requires redistributing care, could accelerate poverty reduction at a scale that decades of conventional development spending has not achieved.

The Equimundo 2026 report makes the economic precarity argument from the other direction: parents who deal with the highest levels of financial insecurity are 1.7 times more likely to vote for care policies. The appetite for systemic change exists. The political will is what has been missing.

Three in four fathers and more than four in five mothers in the global survey say they are losing sleep over their financial futures. A majority feel that homeownership is out of reach. About one in four parents are simultaneously caring for children and older relatives, with little or no support. Parents are not asking for rescue. They are asking for infrastructure. Paid parental leave. Affordable childcare. Flexible work. Post-natal support. Basic recognition that care is labor, that it has economic value, and that its absence has economic costs.

From Rio, a beginning

This summit is called the MenCare Changemakers Summit, and I want to say clearly: I am glad it exists. I am glad we have moved past the point where talking about men in care felt like a betrayal of women in care. The conversation has matured. We understand now that these are not competing interests. Every hour a father spends in genuine care is an hour that a mother does not spend in invisible, uncompensated, exhausting labor. Every boy who grows up understanding that care is his responsibility becomes a man who does not leave it all to someone else.

The tracks here — democracy, men’s health, boyhood and education, workplace care, online spaces, caring cities — are not separate. They are the same argument told from seven different angles. Care is not a women’s issue. Care is the connective tissue of every functioning society. When half the population is excluded from it, we do not just harm women. We produce men who are less empathetic, less connected, less capable of the emotional range that good leadership, good partnership, good fatherhood requires.

We are in Rio for three days. One hundred of us, from across the world, with different languages and different systems and different fights. But the same belief: that it is not too late to build a world where care belongs to all of us.

Day one. More to come.

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Blessing Adesiyan is a chemical engineer, climate and care economist, Editor-In-Chief of The Care Gap and the Founder and Chief Care Officer of Caring Africa, advancing care as essential economic infrastructure through systems change, policy, and investment.