What Teenage Boys Teach Us About the Roots of Mental Illness, Loneliness, and Violence

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If boys are lonely, aggressive, and stoic, it's because society is lonely, aggressive, and stoic. If boys are suffering from a lack of meaningful connections and relationships, it's because society is suffering from a lack of meaningful connections and relationships.

That's the view of NYU Steinhardt and Abu Dhabi developmental psychology professorNiobe Way, who finds that the saying "boys will be boys" isn't as much an accurate assessment of boys as it is a reflection of a narrative that is harmful to everyone. In her new book,Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture (Dutton, 2024), Way outlines what boys and young men teach us through their words and actions about the cultural roots of people's suffering-as suggested by soaring rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide, and violence. To counter this harm, Way issues a call to action to implement a practice of "listening with curiosity" to address feelings of alienation shared across genders.

How does this new project build on your previous work?

The previous book, Deep Secrets, shares the findings of my longitudinal study of 150 boys that I followed over time-primarily boys of color from working class communities. They taught us that boys, especially in early adolescence, want close friendships and that these friendships are key to their mental health. As they go from early to late adolescence, they start to have a crisis of connection-they start to disconnect from their friendships or give up on their search, and pretend they don't care. And the reason for this crisis is living in a culture which values all the things we stereotype as masculine and derides all things that we stereotype as feminine or "girly" or "gay." In the new book, I reveal how what they teach about themselves is also true for all of us and explains why many of us are suffering from depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide, and violence. We're all suffering, to different degrees, a crisis of connection defined as a disconnection from ourselves, our own humanity, and the humanity of others.

Can you define "boy" culture and describe its impact in the US?

It is a culture that privileges one half of our humanity over the other-the hard over the soft, thinking over feeling, stoicism over vulnerability, independence over interdependence, the self over others. It's also an immature culture that values having fun and having a lot of toys rather than taking responsibility and thus acting like an adult. "Boy" culture doesn't just affect boys, it affects all of us as it's the dominant way of thinking in cultures that are dominated by rich people. Does it affect the social and emotional lives of boys and men more than girls and women and non-gender conforming people? Of course, because manhood and maturity are wrapped up together in "boy" culture. In my research, boys say things such as: "it might be nice to be a girl, because then I wouldn't have to be emotionless," or "I'm mature now. I don't need to share my feelings." And the consequences of their suffering (i.e., violence) makes all of us suffer to different degrees depending on where we are situated in the power structure.

Your research has mostly focused on boys and young men of color, including Black, Brown, and Asian American, and boys from poor and working-class communities. Why do you focus on these populations?

The reason I do is because they are often better able to see the societal nature of the problem as they are situated on the outside of the center of power and thus have suffered the consequences of living in such a society to a greater degree. And since they are better able to see the nature of the problem in society, they also are better able to offer solutions.

Mass shooters are struggling with mental illness, but that's not the reason why they are violent as there are many mentally ill people who never commit acts of violence. They are violent because they are living in a culture that doesn't value their full humanity, and thus they feel disconnected from their own humanity and everybody else's humanity as well. In many ways, boys and young men who commit crimes are the sirens alerting us to the consequences of raising our children in a "boy" culture that clashes with our human nature and our social and emotional needs.

In your book, you present a potential antidote to counteract "boy" culture: "listening with curiosity." Can you explain what that means?

Listening with curiosity is listening to understand what the other person thinks and feels and how they make sense of the world. It's listening with the explicit intent of hearing how the other person thinks and feels rather than how we often stereotype them to think and feel. It's not listening to make a judgment or to see if you are right or to correct the other person, it's to learn from them, about them, and about yourself. "Boy" culture doesn't value listening to others or even interpersonal curiosity, or the natural questions we have about other people's thoughts and feelings. In such a culture, we only talk about ourselves and don't listen to each other.

To understand listening with curiosity, you have to channel your five-year-old self. We come into the world really curious about other people. We want to know what they mean, why, and how they're saying something, and why their face is scrunched up when they are telling you something or they have tears in their eyes or why they're smiling. Yet we grow up in "boy" culture and we become less curious about how others see the world and only focused on being right, and proving that we are right so that we can be on top of the hierarchy, especially in situations in which we hold different views than the other person. We are not curious about why they have those views in the first place. We naturally say things such as, "what do you mean by that?" But by the time we become an adult, we stop asking such fundamental questions and we start assuming we know the answer without asking. That leads fundamentally to our crisis of connection with each other, but also with ourselves as we stop asking what we mean by the words that we commonly use such as love, belongingness, trust, desire, safety, loneliness etc.

When you start really listening to people's experiences, you learn how they define those things and how you define things. And once we start to learn from other people, we will see them better, but we also see ourselves and start to see ourselves in them. In my book, I outline my practice of transformative interviewing that I created with Dr. Joseph Nelson, Holly Van Hare, and others that includes nine practices of listening with curiosity, including asking open-ended questions, asking contrast questions, getting a specific story, and getting the who, what, when, and where. This process of listening with curiosity not only builds connection with others, but does so through breaking down stereotypes and allowing the other person to be seen as they see themselves rather than as you stereotype them to be.

How do you carve spaces for this kind of listening?

You impose it. As an educator, the way you really bake it in is by bringing it into schools, whether they are law schools, business schools, undergraduate education, or high schools. You reframe education to nurture natural curiosity with the basic premise that everybody has something to learn and everybody has something to teach. You build it into leadership training for executives. Workplaces are already changing to try to address social-emotional needs-they're just sometimes a little bit misguided in how to do it. But it should be easy in classrooms and workplaces because people are so hungry for this. The crisis of connection is so real that people are eager to actually figure this out so that people feel better about themselves and each other. If you tell people that it's normal to want relationships, then suddenly people ask how you build them, and then you tap into their natural curiosity. If you want to connect with someone, ask them a question. I've had hundreds of students say "whoa, that was so easy!'" You can also start this in your home. Ask your kids questions. "Who do you follow on TikTok? Why do you follow them? What's interesting about them to you?" Do it without judgment and see what happens.