Denver’s Mayor Says That Boys Face a “Crisis of Connection.” Mentors can Help

Jean Rhodes

Days after the midterm elections, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a former teacher and high school principal, was asked during a live taping of the Pivot podcast why so many boys are struggling. “I do think we have a real crisis here,” he said. “And for me, it’s a crisis of connection” (Swisher & Galloway, 2026). Boys, he explained, “see fewer male role models in their lives that they can connect to. They have fewer places where they can find a tribe of people who are going to support and sustain them.”

Indeed, over the past several decades, the presence of male role models and mentors in the lives of boys and young men in the U.S. and other developed countries has steadily diminished. The proportion of male public school teachers declined sharply over the past 35 years, from approximately 30% in 1987 to 23% by 2022 (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2023). Males now represent only 3% of preschool teachers, about 20% of K-8 teachers, and 43% of high school teachers (NCES, 2023). At the same time, as youth sports become increasingly expensive, participation rates among boys from lower-income families are dropping sharply (Project Play, 2021). Johnston made the same point. “If you have a 4,000-student high school that has one football team and one soccer team, they’re going to take 50 kids out of the 4,000,” he said. “Those are a lot of boys without a place to belong.” He blamed the commercialization and professionalization of youth sports, which he described as “a private equity-backed venture rather than a collective process.”

More generally, growing income inequality and an overall decline in youth athletic leagues, neighborhood associations, labor unions, church attendance, and community group participation have reduced the availability of male role models. As Johnston observed, “boys are more likely to be solitary.” In the absence of consistent access to positive male role models, boys and young men are increasingly influenced by celebrities, athletes, politicians, and online influencers, who may promote and reinforce coarse, harmful masculine behaviors and expectations (Kearney & Levine, 2020).

Unfortunately, mentoring programs are increasingly struggling to meet the demand for male volunteers. Women are far more likely to volunteer, but there are things that programs can do to extend their reach. Research demonstrates that personal, face-to-face recruitment by current male mentors is the most effective recruitment strategy, as men respond more favorably to direct invitations from peers than to traditional mass marketing campaigns (National Mentoring Resource Center, n.d.). Cross-age, peer-mentoring programs may be a particularly promising solution. Burton et al. (2022) found that school-based, cross-age programs that enlisted more-advanced students averaged 61% male mentors and 55% male mentees, a substantially higher rate than traditional adult-youth programs. Peer-mentoring programs benefit from lower recruitment costs, continuous replenishment of participants, and shared lived experience, which may be particularly salient for boys exploring masculine identity development.

Many boys already know the right adults but lose them along the way. “Often, if you’re a boy, you just make it through a class in high school,” Johnston said. “You find one teacher that you like and you feel close to, and you never see him again. We need to find mechanisms for them to keep that connection for years.”

Rather than focusing solely on recruiting more adult volunteers to serve as mentors, programs should also equip boys with the skills and confidence to identify, recruit, and sustain mentoring relationships with men in their existing social networks, that is, “teach them to fish.” Youth-initiated mentoring represents a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of naturally occurring relationships with the infrastructure and support provided by formal mentoring programs (Schwartz et al., 2013). In this model, youth nominate nonparental adults from their existing social networks, such as school personnel, employers, extended family members, and family friends, people they already know and trust. The program then screens, trains, and supports these nominated mentors while providing structure, expectations, and ongoing monitoring to strengthen and sustain the relationships. Van Dam and colleagues (2021) conducted a meta-analysis of 14 studies that examined youth-initiated mentoring programs and found a medium effect across academic and vocational functioning, social-emotional development, physical health, and psychosocial outcomes. This approach, which has been successfully deployed within the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program, eliminates the primary bottleneck in traditional mentoring programs, recruits more male mentors, and provides boys with transferable skills in identifying, approaching, and maintaining supportive relationships with adults (van Dam et al., 2021).

Schools can build that kind of continuity into their structure. At the high school Johnston founded, each teacher served as a crew leader who “had a responsibility for 25 kids” and was “that mentor for those 25 kids for often all four years of their high school career.” Parents had one person to call, and students knew “they have someone always in their corner.”

Of course, young people of all genders are navigating an economy that has grown more precarious and a social landscape that has grown more fragmented. Mentoring, connection, and opportunity are not zero-sum resources to be rationed by sex. And, while mentoring cannot resolve these systemic issues, the evidence reviewed here shows that caring, goal-focused relationships can buffer some of the academic, social-emotional, and identity-related risks that boys and young men face, particularly those growing up in single-mother households, attending underfunded schools, and living in communities with few positive male role models. As Johnston put it, “they need more continuity in those adult relationships. And those adult relationships are harder to find now for boys.” Programs that recruit and retain more men, embed mentors where boys live and learn, balance relational and goal-focused work, and equip youth to recruit natural mentors appear especially well positioned to narrow gender gaps in education and well-being.

References

Burton, S., Raposa, E. B., Poon, C. Y. S., Stams, G. J. J. M., & Rhodes, J. (2022). Cross-age peer mentoring for youth. A meta-analysis. American Journal of Community Psychology, 70(1-2), 211-227. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12579

Kearney, M. S., & Levine, P. B. (2020). Role models, mentors, and media influences. The Future of Children, 30(1), 83-106. https://doi.org/10.1353/foc.2020.0006

National Center for Education Statistics. (2023). Characteristics of public school teachers. Condition of Education. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr

National Mentoring Resource Center. (n.d.). Strategies for recruiting male mentors. Practice review. https://nationalmentoringresourcecenter.org/resource/strategies-for-recruiting-male-mentors

Project Play. (2021). State of play 2021. Pandemic trends. Aspen Institute. https://projectplay.org/state-of-play-2021/pandemic-trends

Schwartz, S. E. O., Rhodes, J. E., Spencer, R., & Grossman, J. B. (2013). Youth initiated mentoring. Investigating a new approach to working with vulnerable adolescents. American Journal of Community Psychology, 52(1-2), 155-169. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-013-9585-3

Swisher, K., & Galloway, S. (Hosts). (2026, November 10). Nvidia CEO’s spy scandal, JD Vance’s 2028 problem, and America’s brain drain [Audio podcast episode]. In Pivot. New York Magazine and Vox Media Podcast Network. https://podcasts.happyscribe.com/pivot/nvidia-ceo-s-spy-scandal-jd-vance-s-2028-problem-and-america-s-brain-drain

van Dam, L., Blom, D., Kara, E., Assink, M., Stams, G.-J., Schwartz, S., & Rhodes, J. (2021). Youth initiated mentoring. A meta-analytic study of a hybrid approach to youth mentoring. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 50(2), 219-230. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-020-01336-5