The urgent message coming from boys and young men
By Jean Rhodes
On Thursday at noon, the Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring and MentorPRO will be hosting a webinar with Niobe Way, Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. She is also the former President of the Society for Research on Adolescence and the author of the new book Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture. This event will be helpful for mentoring program staff and others who are dedicated to fostering authentic connections with boys and young men.
This talk comes on the heels of an excellent new article in the Wall Street Journal by Rachel Wolfe, which has drawn new attention to the struggles of boys and young men in the U.S. As Wolfe notes, in homes across America, a troubling trend is emerging. While data for young women are gradually improving, many of their male counterparts are struggling to find their footing. This disparity is reshaping the landscape of American youth and raising concerns about the future of an entire generation. It also has implications for mentoring programs. Social isolation has also become a significant concern. Young men aged 18-30 spent nearly 20% more time alone in 2023 compared to 2019, while averaging just 6.6 non-sleeping hours daily. This isolation has profound implications for mental health and social development.
The challenges facing young men are further underscored by the alarming rise in “deaths of despair” – deaths due to suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease. These deaths have disproportionately affected men, particularly those without a college degree. The opioid crisis has played a significant role in this trend. In 2016, the apparent opioid-related death rate in Canada was highest among males aged 30-39 years (Belzak & Halverson, 2018). According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (2020), “Men are more likely than women to use almost all types of illicit drugs (Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality, 2013), and illicit drug use is more likely to result in emergency department visits or overdose deaths for men than for women.”
Likewise, Scott Galloway presents additional data showing, the depth of this crisis.
As he notes, “boys start school less prepared than girls, and they’re less likely to graduate from high school and attend or graduate from college. One in seven men reports having no friends, and three of every four deaths of despair in America — suicides and drug overdoses — are men. I’ve written about this at length here, and about how it relates to declining birth rates here.
Alienation and disaffection drive despair and violence. By age 27, high school dropouts are four times more likely to be arrested, fired by their employer, on government aid, or addicted to drugs than their peers who graduated. We face declining household formation, reduced birth rates, and slowing economic growth just as baby boomers enter decades of nonproductive retirement.
The lack of an open dialogue about these issues has created a void filled by voices espousing thinly veiled misogyny, demonization of vulnerable groups, and a vision for masculinity that wants to take non-whites and women back to the fifties and Old Spain, respectively. The good news is the dialogue has become much more productive recently. There’s a growing recognition of the size and severity of the challenges facing young men, and we can now turn our focus to solutions.”
Recent research adds a depth of understanding to the roots of this crisis. Way posits, “The crisis we are facing is not a crisis of boys but a crisis of society’s ideas about masculinity” (Way, 2024, p. 45). This emotional disconnection contributes to the struggles many young men face in navigating adulthood. Part of the answer then, is to foster connection, and mentoring programs are especially well positioned to do so. So let’s hear from Niobe herself about her research and its intersection with mentoring and (below) a Q & A
By Niobe Way
Matching boys with caring mentors should be the goal of any mentoring program regardless of the sex of the mentor. My research with Black, Latino, White, and Asian American boys over the past two decades indicates that boys want close relationships with peers and adults. They want relationships in which they can share their “deep secrets” and in which they can be heard. Eighty-five percent of the hundreds of boys we have interviewed from early to late adolescence have expressed such views. Yet many boys find, especially during late adolescence, that it is hard to find the relationships that they want. As they grow older, boys feel pressure to disconnect from other boys and from caring adults in order to appear manly and be independent. Yet they continue to want close relationships with peers and adults. Research, including our own, finds that boys who stay connected to peers and/or adults beyond adolescence fare better in all aspects of life, including academic achievement and living longer lives. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, and mentors, both female and male, can greatly assist in helping boys thrive.
While many argue that boys need male role models and mentors specifically, the research does not support the assumption that male mentors are better than female ones. Boys need caring adults in their lives who can have healthy and trusting relationships with them. Women, in fact, are often better able to engage in such relationships with boys because they are not socialized to disconnect as they grow up to the same degree as men. Females are more likely than males to be socialized to care for others and to have intimate friendships than are males. Thus, they are more likely to have the skills necessary to properly mentor boys or give boys what they want – relationships in which they can be cared for and be heard. This gender difference in socialization patterns is likely, at least in part, the reason why there are more female mentors than male mentors and why females are more likely to enter the service professions than men. Thus, not only should there be no concern about the prevalence of female mentors for boys, we should celebrate the relationship skills that many female mentors bring to their relationships with boys and that benefit them in all areas of their lives.
Niobe Way is Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University. She is also the former President of the Society for Research on Adolescence and the author of Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press).
By Samantha Laine Perfas
Harvard alum Niobe Way , author of “Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection” and, most recently, “Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture,” is less interested in what boys and men can learn from the culture than what the culture can learn from boys and men.
Following the lead of Carol Gilligan and other Ed School mentors, Way, now a New York University development psychologist, has made it a point in her work to talk directly to young men about their experiences. In “Rebels with a Cause,” these moments reveal a deep desire to build rich relationships with others. Way talked to us about the research behind the book, and the argument at the heart of it, in a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length.
SLP: Early in “Rebels” you distinguish between “thin” stories and “thick” stories. What’s the difference and why does it matter?
NW: A thin story is a story we tell that exists on the surface. It’s the difference between asking, “Do you want to know what I think or what I really think?” It’s what we say when someone first asks us a question. But the thick story takes into account our context, the power structure, and what’s valued in the culture as a way to understand what we think and feel.
So when boys say, “I don’t care, I’m not emotional,” you don’t take it as simply a fact of how they feel, but as a reflection of a culture that doesn’t allow — in the case of boys — space for tender feelings without feminizing them. Or — in the case of girls — to have tender feelings without viewing them as lame or overreacting. We oftentimes find thin stories about culture — what people wear, how they talk, what they eat. But culture is also patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, and the predominant power structure. And within those power structures, we have values that we promote.
Here’s another example: When you first ask boys about friendships, they will oftentimes say they have lots of friends. They hang out, do things, play basketball, and everything is great. But when you start to ask deeper questions, like to share a time when one of their friends hurt their feelings, you will start to hear an entirely different story. They will step out of what we call the mask of masculinity and start to tell a more complicated, nuanced human story.
SLP: Why is it damaging to believe thin stories?
NW: It’s so interesting to me that we tell so many thin stories when we know oftentimes they’re not true; and it’s really because we think they are true. These stereotypes start to perpetuate themselves. I don’t generally like to use the word “toxic” because I think it’s overused, but thin stories are toxic because they get us to believe in stories that are not true.
SLP: Why does “boy” culture perpetuate the myth that it’s not natural for men to express emotions? Where did that idea originate?
NW: One thing to clarify is that “boy” is in quotation marks because the culture doesn’t actually represent real boys. It’s a stereotype of a boy who only values his hard side, and there’s no such thing. Friendships are critical for men. There’s a whole history of men writing intimate letters to each other as friends. If you go to many of the other places I’ve lived — like France, Abu Dhabi, the Middle East, China — they value men’s friendships and boys’ friendships (although that’s starting to change as they’re getting more influenced by American culture).
One point of the book is to have us wake up and see the waters in which we swim. We’re all swimming in “boy” culture, privileging the hard over the soft. The solution is disrupting it. We’re a deeply immature culture in that we’re not recognizing our individual responsibility to take collective responsibility for the damage we’re doing to our children and to ourselves.
SLP: A lot of the boys you interviewed for the book had contradictory things to say about masculinity. On one hand, they would acknowledge that emotions are healthy, but on the other, they would struggle to actually express those emotions or allow themselves to be vulnerable. What is that telling us about the tension boys are feeling?
NW: We do have boys saying that they don’t talk about their feelings, but they also know another story — they just have to have a safe space to be able to articulate the “thick” story about themselves and what they desire, which is deep connection. We raise our children to believe that being sensitive to another is “overly sensitive.” We study emotional regulation, but we don’t study emotional sensitivity. We’re a brutal culture, and boys speak that contradiction. Sometimes this conversation gets oversimplified by saying it’s about giving boys permission to cry; that misses the point. What both “Deep Secrets” and “Rebels” reveal is that boys and young men have remarkable emotional and relational intelligence. They can see these contradictions, they can articulate them, and they’re able to speak to their natural desire for connection. We are born so stunningly emotionally, cognitively, and relationally intelligent, but when we grow up in a culture that only values part of us, we become less intelligent.
SLP: How can we love our boys better?
NW: I want to reframe that question: How do we love our children better? Because we’re now seeing girls and women suffer too. We love our children through valuing their sensitive, tender side from day one, as well as valuing their ability to hold it together and be stoic. It’s not prioritizing the soft over the hard, but valuing the two equally. When they say tender, beautiful, emotional things, rather than saying, “You’re overreacting” or “You’re being too sensitive,” say, “Tell me more about why you feel that way.” Have conversations about feelings and thoughts, with your son, husband, brother, sister. We have to start asking questions and talking about things that are meaningful to us. Talk about your friendships with your kids. Talk about the struggles you have had to find a good friend with your kids. We need to see the full humanity of our children, and by nurturing their full humanity, we nurture our own.
