What’s the evidence that young men need more of our attention? There is quite a bit. Young men outpace every other age group in their criminal behavior, their substance abuse, their violence toward their romantic partners, and their rates of unemployment. They are the most likely age group to die from injuries due to accidents, and they are also more likely to kill or injure someone else. Ironically, they are less likely to receive mental health services designed to help them manage their emotions, build stable relationships, and stay out of trouble. It’s not just that they have less access to mental health services, which is a factor. They are also more averse to receiving help. Even when services are offered, many decline, not wanting to appear weak or hear a lecture about what they are doing wrong and what they ought to do instead. This is not to say that we think young men, if left to their own devices, will turn into marauding bands of hooligans. We do not think that. After all, we were once young men; we are the fathers of young men; and, as researchers, clinicians, and professors, we have worked with young men almost every day of our entire careers. We know that young men—and young fathers—can be tender-hearted and caring, deeply emotional and conscientious, committed and dependable. Like most people, young men are often more complex than they appear. Nevertheless, young men have always been viewed as a segment of the population that needed to be managed and molded. Some societies, like the Maasai in Kenya and the wealthy in England, sent their adolescent boys away and subjected them to rigorous training, hoping to facilitate their maturation. After teaching young men how to make constructive use of their time and energy, they are encouraged, through our institutions, to get married and become fathers. In some respects, fatherhood, along with marriage, has served as a natural antidote to the challenges of being a young man. What is relatively new in contemporary society is that many young men who are becoming fathers are also foregoing marriage. When we started this work, we were primarily interested in the youngest group of fathers, those who were 18 or younger. But this group shrank over time as the rate of teen pregnancy has drastically and thankfully diminished over the last 20 years. However, as the teen birth rate declined, the rate of unwed parenthood among young adults was climbing steadily. This trend was creating a new set of problems for children and for society at large. And so we began to expand our work to include those young fathers who were a little older. Readers are probably aware of the statistic that about 4 out of 10 babies are born to unwed parents, up from about 1 in 10 in the mid-20th century. As alarming as this may sound, it’s actually an understatement. Among young parents under the age of 25, the figure is closer to 8 in 10. This means that, in a relatively short period of time, one of the most effective ways for societies to formally solidify a man’s bond to his family has become far less compelling for a large proportion of the childbearing population. The fact that the trend toward unwed parenthood is greatest among those under 25 suggests that the rate of children born to and raised by unwed parents will continue to grow in subsequent generations. Later in the book, we address the question of why this shift away from marriage and toward unwed parenthood is happening.