Recently, I was speaking with a senior lady about second and third-generation devotees (who were already born from devotee parents inside our movement). She made the observation that generally speaking the girls are doing much better than the boys. She observes that girls get involved in different services or different preaching activities, or get settled in life and start their own Krsna Conscious families, while the boys are frequently confused, without finding their place in the world. Many get involved with drugs or other bad habits, and so on.

When we have a son we usually have great expectations for him, imagining that he will be a great preacher, a sannyasi, or at least a responsible householder. For girls, frequently, the expectations are lower, and often parents are less careful about their education, considering that they will probably just find a husband and get settled into family life. If anything, girls have usually fewer facilities than boys. Why thus they often do better?

I believe this is connected with a point made in a previous article. There is an important psychological difference between men and women and this directly influences the way they progress in life.

Women have a natural propensity to follow authorities. Thus, it is more natural for them to accept a spiritual master and be guided by seniors, including responsible parents, and when they do that they flourish in spiritual life. Ladies can easily advance by accepting a dependent position, and this explains why many of our girls do so well in their spiritual practice.

Men on the other hand operate in a different way. Men can grow by accepting responsibility and performing their duties. To flourish, they have to accept responsibilities, be it as a proper renunciant, or as a householder. A man who is reluctant to accept responsibility gets usually stuck and becomes thus incapable of advancing in any esphere.

It happens however that is easier to follow someone than to become a proper leader. By definition, a leader has to have higher qualifications than a follower. In a marriage, for example, the husband is supposed to be more emotionally mature and more in control of his senses than the wife is, for example.

To take birth as a man is thus a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there is greater potential in terms of the development of intelligence, the potential to practice austerities and control of one’s senses, but when this potential is not realized, one can end up falling pretty low.

When men are not able to learn to control their senses and become reluctant to accept responsibilities in life, their growth is stunted and they become confused, having trouble dealing with their desires and struggling to find their place in the world. This is something we can see all over the world nowadays, in both Western countries and in India, but it seems especially prevalent in our movement. One possible reason is that our philosophy puts a lot of emphasis on renunciation (especially on the part of men), but the teachings are frequently misunderstood and used as a tool to avoid responsibility.

In the scriptures, men are recommended to become renunciants in the final part of their lives, after successfully going through family life and learning their lessons there. Some are able to do it earlier, but these are the exceptions, not the rule. There are many important lessons one is supposed to learn in family life, and such lessons make a man grow from a boy into first a responsible householder and then into a qualified renunciant. In other words, one grows by successfully accepting responsibility, first as a diligent student, then as a responsible householder, then as a dutiful renunciant, and finally as a qualified spiritual teacher.

Unfortunately, we often see boys successively failing in all these stages, being undisciplined students, and then becoming reluctant to accept responsibilities as householders (although simultaneously having trouble in controlling their senses) and often ending up becoming show bottle renunciants.

How to avoid that? That’s a tough question because producing a proper man is not easy. It requires a combination of proper training and motivation, proper social structures, and a generous dose of personal effort, which is the main ingredient. It starts with the parents valuing their spiritual practice cultivating the proper consciousness to attract a qualified soul into the womb, and them properly caring for this child and giving the proper example for him to follow, followed by the efforts of qualified teachers and eventually from a qualified spiritual master. None of that is easy.

This is a problem that we eventually will have to solve if we want our movement to have a future. As societies in the world become more degraded it will become progressively more difficult to find balanced people to accept responsibilities inside our movement. In the future, most of our leading devotees will have to come from devotee families, learning to be balanced human beings from the beginning.

Our girls may be able to find some good men outside and gradually make them devotees, but it would be far easier if we could also properly train the boys to fulfill their roles.