Jayne Dowle: Why you must join crusade to Save Our Sons

It certainly isn’t six-year-old Lizzie. She is already sussed. She tells me she wants to go to university, that she thinks she might like to spend some time living abroad and she won’t be having babies until she is “at least 30” because she wants to be sorted before she becomes a mummy.

If this is what she is like at six, what’s she going to be like at 16? Ready to take on the world.

Oh, I’m not daft. I’m sure there will be teenage traumas. But I know in my heart that Lizzie will be OK. She sees a goal and she can already work out the steps she needs to undertake to achieve it. She’s proof of the official evidence that girls are outstripping boys.

A recent report for the Office of National Statistics confirms that young women in their twenties now earn on average 3.6 per cent more than young men.

It’s easy to see how this has come about, especially when you factor in the stats that more than half of all new doctors, lawyers and accountants are now female.

Add to that better exam grades – a staggering 85 per cent of white working-class boys fail to achieve five basic GCSE passes – and the chance of getting a job at any stage in their lives, and it doesn’t take much more evidence to wonder why I worry about boys like our Jack.

So that’s why I am launching a new crusade. I’m going to call it Save Our Sons, and here’s why it is so important. We were watching the news the other night and a chap I went to university with came on. He’s a big cheese at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and I pointed out to Jack that despite the suit and tie he hasn’t changed a bit since I knew him 25 years ago.

“You’re good at maths,” I said to my son, who was prone on the sofa, both his hoodie and his feet up. “Perhaps when you’re older, you might study economics or something and get a job like him.” Jack looked at me, rolled his eyes, shrugged his shoulders and muttered: “I don’t want a geek job. I want to do something cool.” Those 12 words summarise the challenge we parents of sons face today.

Jack is nine. If he has already dismissed anything that involves studying and hard work as a “geek job”, what is he going to be like when he is 16? His ambitions, should he fail to make it as a professional footballer, are to become a brickie or to run a pub. To be honest, I don’t have a problem with any of these.

But although he does have genuine sporting ability, the chances of him turning football into a full-time career are pretty miniscule, so we have to be realistic. And seeing as he has never so much has picked up a Lego brick in his life, unless under duress at school, I think the brickie idea is something of default option. So that leaves running a pub, assuming there any pubs left to run when Jack reaches adulthood.

He’d be great behind a bar. Friendly, chatty and strong for lifting all those barrels. But he’s going to need arithmetic skills, computer skills, and writing and reading skills for all that paperwork. Not to mention drive and ambition and the ability to plan ahead. And this is where I really worry.

The problem with boys is that so much of their lives are lived in the here and now. It’s all about instant gratification; the goal they just scored, the target they just zapped on the PS3, the tin of Christmas sweets they scoffed without even realising it. And the bigger problem is that while we have all been so busy making sure that their sisters get an equal chance at life, we’ve left them to it.

While we’ve been promoting strident role models as diverse as Margaret Thatcher and Madonna to our daughters, our sons, largely, have been left to fend for themselves. And who have they found to look up to? The overpaid brats of the Premier League. Sexist rap stars fawned over by coteries of adoring bikini-clad girls. Imaginary superheroes in computer games. And sometimes, if they are lucky, fathers who all too often, fight every day to keep their downtrodden heads above water in jobs they hate but have to carry on with to keep food on the table.

Try selling the virtues of a “geek job” to lads who are growing up like that. Try telling lads like that they will be respected for who they are, whatever they do.

So that’s why none of us, parents, grandparents or teachers, can afford to be smug. It’s why we shouldn’t underestimate the nurturing and guidance these boys are going to need to grow up into responsible adults. And it is why all of us should join my crusade to Save Our Sons.