Dr. Leahcim Semaj
Psychologist | Author | Social Philosopher | Spiritual Guide | Management Consultant
In Response to Major Basil Jarrett’s “Our Birth Rate Isn’t the Problem. Our Boys Are”
“We continue to punish boys for behavior we’ve never bothered to understand, while celebrating a version of masculinity built on dominance, silence, and performance. The boys did not raise themselves.” — Dr. Leahcim Semaj
My colleague and friend Major Basil Jarrett recently put into words what many of us have felt for years — Jamaica’s most urgent demographic challenge isn’t falling birth rates. It’s the condition of the boys already here. But let’s be clear: this is not a Jamaican story alone. This is a global failure unfolding in plain sight, and we have been looking away for too long.
We Have Seen This Coming
In my earlier post, “Our Boys Are in Trouble. Do We Care?”, I traced a pattern that has quietly hardened across generations: Boys are being outperformed by girls at every level of education. Dropout rates skew heavily male. University enrollment tells the same story. Meanwhile, our boys are disproportionately represented in prisons, unemployment lines, and morgues. And beneath all of that is something harder to measure — the emotional isolation of young men raised in a culture that demands toughness but never teaches them what to do with pain. These boys did not choose this. They were shaped by systems, families, and communities that have largely failed to prepare them for the weight of manhood.
A Global Pattern, Not a Local Problem
The evidence is consistent across borders. In the United States, boys trail girls at every academic level, and millions of young men have quietly withdrawn from education, work, and family life. In the United Kingdom, working-class boys now rank among the most educationally disadvantaged groups in the country. Across Latin America, boys growing up without fathers or mentors too often find identity and belonging through gangs, violence, and rigid notions of manhood. This is not a cultural quirk or a regional anomaly. It is a global epidemic — of boys who are underfathered, undermentored, and underprepared.
What Must Actually Change
1. Fathers Must Choose Presence Over Performance
Fatherhood needs a new definition — not the man who pays the bills or shows up on weekends, but the one who stays in the room long enough to truly know his son.
Boys without consistent father figures don’t just miss guidance; they miss a mirror. They grow up without a lived example of how to handle anger, how to be accountable, how to lead with integrity. Practical step: Communities, churches, and employers must actively support fathers in being present — through flexible work policies, parenting education, and cultural messaging that makes engaged fatherhood a mark of strength, not softness.
2. Mothers Need a Support Structure, Not Just Praise
Single mothers raising boys deserve more than admiration — they deserve real infrastructure. Parenting a son into healthy manhood was never meant to be a solo mission, and no amount of love alone can substitute for the village that has gone missing.
Practical step: Establish community-based support networks that connect single mothers with male mentors, co-parenting resources, and peer groups specifically focused on raising boys. The burden must be shared.
3. Schools Must Be Redesigned for Boys, Not Against Them
Our current education system was not built with boys in mind. It often punishes physical energy, rewards passive compliance, and offers little connection to the real world boys are preparing to enter.
Practical step: Recruit and retain more male teachers at the primary and secondary levels. Expand project-based and experiential learning. Treat vocational and technical education as a genuine pathway to dignity and economic stability — not a consolation prize for those who couldn’t cut it academically. Boys are not defective students. They are students in a system that hasn’t adapted to them.
4. Give Boys a Map to Manhood
Nature abhors a vacuum. When we fail to teach boys what healthy manhood looks like, they find their own answers — and those answers are increasingly coming from hypersexual music, violent media, and the internet’s darkest corners.
Practical step: Formalize rites of passage programs in schools, faith communities, and civic organizations. These don’t have to be elaborate — they need to be intentional. Teach boys how to manage conflict without violence, how to be in relationship without domination, and that emotional intelligence is not a weakness but a leadership skill.
5. Every Man with Wisdom Owes Something
Government programs matter, but they are not enough. The most powerful intervention in a boy’s life is often a single consistent adult male who sees him, challenges him, and believes in him.
Practical step: Coaches, barbers, pastors, retirees, neighbors — any man who has navigated life with some measure of wisdom has something worth giving. Even one hour a week, over months, can alter the trajectory of a boy’s life. We need to build formal and informal mentorship pipelines and make them as normal as Little League or Sunday service.
The Real Question
Major Jarrett is right. The crisis is not that we are having fewer children. It is that we are losing the ones we already have. We will not build strong families, strong communities, or a strong nation on the broken foundations of men who were never properly shaped into themselves. And we cannot fix what’s happening to our boys by treating their struggles as a character flaw rather than a systemic wound. The question is no longer whether our boys are in trouble. The question is whether we care enough — and are organized enough — to do something about it. Let your answer be yes. And then let that yes lead somewhere.
If this message speaks to where you are in life, a MindSpa consultation may be the next step. Visit thesemajmindspa.com to connect.
