Inside the Male Mentor Shortage
By Jean Rhodes
Over the past half-century, the presence of men in boys’ daily lives has declined sharply. Between 1970 and 2023, the proportion of U.S. children living in single-parent families more than doubled, driven largely by increases in female-headed households (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2023). Teachers, coaches, clergy, and other community figures can help fill these gaps, but opportunities for sustained connections between boys and caring male adults have eroded. The share of male teachers has declined from roughly 30% in 1987 to 23% in 2022, with men comprising only 3% of preschool teachers, 20% of K–8 teachers, and 43% of high school teachers. Same-gender teachers can have outsized effects on boys’ motivation, identity formation, and occupational aspirations (APA, 2023), particularly for Black boys (Gershenson et al., 2021).
The same trend is visible in extracurricular settings. Where teacher–coaches once linked athletic mentorship with academic oversight, today only about half of coaches are teachers (Aspen Institute, 2022). Meanwhile, the rising costs of youth sports are pricing many low-income families out (Drape, 2025). Participation among children ages 6–12 has dropped from 45% in 2008 to 37% in 2022, with wealthier youth twice as likely to participate (Project Play, 2021). These shifts have deepened inequalities in access to male mentors and role models. Broader social forces have compounded the loss. Declining participation in unions, religious congregations, and civic organizations has reduced intergenerational contact between men and youth. In this vacuum, many boys turn to athletes, celebrities, and online influencers as informal “mentors”some of whom perpetuate harmful masculine ideals.
Although many families turn to mentoring programs to fill these gaps, programs face persistent gender imbalances. Across national surveys, men comprise only about 43–47% of volunteer mentors (Raposa, Dietz, & Rhodes, 2017; Garringer, McQuillin, & McDaniel, 2017; Jarjoura et al., 2018). The result is long waitlists dominated by boys, especially boys of color. In Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS), for instance, over 30,000 youth were waitlisted in 2022, the majority male (BBBS, 2022). Men’s lower mentoring participation may reflect cultural barriers including persistent suspicion of men in caregiving roles, and limited societal encouragement for men to engage in relational work. Programs have responded with targeted recruitment campaigns emphasizing activity-based engagement and shared purpose rather than emotional caregiving. Notably, programs with more male mentors tend to show slightly higher effectiveness and retention (Raposa et al., 2019). Female mentors, by contrast, are marginally more likely to end matches prematurely (Grossman & Rhodes, 2002), often because of unmet expectations for emotional intimacy (Spencer et al., 2018).
Seven Tips fo
1. Targeted Recruitment: Men respond best to direct, peer-based invitations rather than generic appeals (MENTOR, 2016, 2020). Programs are having success recruiting through workplaces, sports leagues, and faith communities, emphasizing practical benefits like leadership, skill development, and community impact. Statewide initiatives such as California Volunteers’ *Men’s Service Challenge*—aiming to recruit 10,000 men through a $5 million investment (California Volunteers, 2025)—offer a promising model for scaling.
2. Male-Friendly Models: Flexible mentoring formats, hybrid, flash mentoring, co-mentoring couples, or corporate lunch-hour models, can expand access (Alberta Mentors, 2020). Cross-age peer mentoring, where older students support younger peers, has shown particular promise, with male participation rates exceeding 60% (Burton et al., 2021).
3. Smarter Stewardship: Given that formal mentoring can only reach a small fraction of youth, programs must focus resources where structure is most needed while supporting informal connections elsewhere. Framing mentoring as early, non-stigmatizing paraprofessional support, more structured than natural mentoring, less intensive than therapy can clarify its niche (Raposa et al., 2019). Shorter, high-quality matches may be preferable to longer but uneven ones, and AI-enabled tools, like MentorAI, can further scale effective matches, providing mentors with real-time coaching, progress tracking, and relational guidance .
4. Embedding Mentors: Rather than extracting youth for mentoring, programs should integrate mentors into schools and community settings. Models like Experience Corps demonstrate how embedded mentoring can improve academic and behavioral outcomes. Embedding mentors within classrooms or extracurriculars offers clear structure and roles, contexts often preferred by men.
5. Supporting Boys on Waitlists: Even brief, single-session interventions (SSIs) can make a difference for youth awaiting mentors (Schleider & Weisz, 2017). Likewise, working with youth on the waitlist to identify and recruit men in their schools, communities and extended family may be helpful (Schwartz et al., 2018, 2023). More generally, youth-initiated mentoring (YIM) helps boys identify and formalize relationships with adults already in their lives—teachers, coaches, or family friends. This approach eliminates recruitment bottlenecks and builds lifelong relational skills.
7. Stocking the Pond. Ultimately, mentoring will remain limited unless more men occupy caring roles in boys’ daily environments. Initiatives like NYC Men Teach show that professional mentorship pipelines can increase male teacher representation, improving outcomes for boys. Beyond recruitment, schools and organizations must explicitly recognize and reward relational work as part of all men’s professional roles.
In the end, mentoring alone cannot overcome systemic inequities of poverty, segregation, and underfunded schools. But ensuring that every boy grows up with access to caring male adults, whether parents, extended family, teachers, coaches, or trained volunteers, can create networks of support that buffer against these challenges. By combining evidence-based program design with creative strategies to engage men where they are, the field can move closer to ensuring that all boys have the relationships they need to thrive.
