Our boys are crying out for help through destructive acts in rural areas like Jonesboro, Arkansas, in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, and most recently in the suburb of Littleton, Colorado. Over the last decades, we have watched our boys become the most violent and incarcerated population of adolescent boys anywhere in the industrialized world.

As I help people understand the Littleton tragedy, I fear our culture will miss yet another opportunity to do right by its sons. I fear we will either demonize or neglect the true emotional and moral struggles of these young men.

Our boys are four times as likely as our girls to commit suicide, ten times as likely to be victims of violence, six times as likely to be diagnosed with a brain disorder. Our boys constitute the majority of our mental patients and those diagnosed as emotionally disturbed; they get 70 percent of the D's and F's in school but 40 percent of the A's. Our boys are also the least likely children to talk to us about their emotional, academic and physical problems.

They are isolated, lonely and confused. I have studied 30 cultures worldwide and lived in six. Nowhere have I seen a population of young males who have less emotional bonding and moral development than our own. Let us change our culture, and do it now.

• Spend at least twice the amount of time with your child that you do now.
• Take the TV out of his room and don't let him have unsupervised Internet access until he's sixteen-help him spend time with real people instead.
• Treat all stimulants-video images, movie stars, Internet comrades-as family members; would you want that person, that chat room buddy, that image in your family? Only allow it in if you would.
• Compel every school to deal with the culture of cruelty that exists among adolescent students who are simply supervised too little in classrooms with too many students and too few teachers.
• Find or develop a spiritual community for your boys and participate in it with them.
• Provide immediate consequences for irresponsible actions-boys need discipline, structure and responsibility. These are a key form of love.
• Provide constant moral debate and training for and with your boys.
• Know what your boys are doing, especially between 3 and 6 in the afternoon, which is when they get in the most trouble.

  Let us do these things rather than demonizing the boys or forgetting them again and "moving on" to other things.