REBELS WITH A CAUSE

First, we learn about the crisis of connection that not only boys and young men are facing but everyone else is, as well, regardless of their identities, as evident by the soaring rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide, and violence around the world. 

Secondly, we learn about the reason for our crisis of connection, which is a modern culture that is out of sync with our human needs and desires. We want, for example, meaningful relationships, including friendships, and we have the “soft” skills” (e.g., sensitivity, empathy, listening skills, curiosity about others) necessary to have them. Yet we live in a “boy” culture that doesn’t value relationships nor the “soft” skills necessary to have them. It is a culture that only values one half of our humanity, which is everything we have deemed to be “hard” or masculine, such as our need for autonomy, independence, and our capacity for stoicism, thinking, and emotional regulation. In a culture that only values one half of our humanity and devalues and even mocks the other half, we shouldn’t be surprised that boys and young men and everyone else is suffering to different degrees. 

The third thing we learn from boys and young men is how to solve their and our crisis of connection. The solution is to create a culture that values both sides of our humanity—our hard and soft sides—and value our relationships including our friendships. It also entails creating a culture that privileges taking responsibility over having fun and recognizes that money and toys are less important than caring about and listening with curiosity to other people within our own communities and across communities. The cause of the rebels in my book is for us to listen with curiosity to what they have to say, take responsibility, and act accordingly so that they and we have a better chance of survival and maybe even thrive.

That our society is experiencing a crisis is evidenced in our soaring rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide, and mass violence. I revealed this crisis from boys and young men in my longitudinal research on social and emotional development about a decade ago and now it is everywhere—as the Surgeon General notes regularly. What is called a “mental health crisis” or a “loneliness crisis” is, in fact, a “crisis of connection” in which we are disconnected from ourselves and others.

As part of my doctoral training in psychology at Harvard University, I was a counselor in a high school in the 1980s. The boys and young men with whom I worked often described their desires for male friendships and their struggles with finding such friends. I was struck by why it was that my doctoral courses did not focus on friendships or on boys’ desires for friendships and why there is and continues to be such a common widespread assumption that only girls and young women wanted such intimate same-sex friendships. After conducting many years of research on this topic, I wrote a book about boys’ friendships called Deep Secrets that was turned into an Oscar-nominated feature film called Close and into a documentary called The Mask you Live In. Following that book, it became obvious to me that the boys and young men in Deep Secrets were telling us a story not only about them but also about us and the culture in which we live and why we are struggling so much as evident in our mental health crises and our loneliness crises. That led me to write REBELS WITH A CAUSE. In the new book, I also write about what they teach us about how to solve their and our crisis of connection. 

The solution that they suggest is to change the culture so that it better aligns with our nature which means it treats all humans as equally human and values both sides (the hard and the soft) of ourhumanity. That means we value our emotional sensitivity as much as we do our capacity to self-regulateour emotions and that we value ourselves as much as others and that we believe that thinking is equallynecessary to feeling. A visitor from another planet would find it shocking that we spend so much of ourtime trying to convince each other that feelings and relationships matter while we never spend timeconvincing each other that the self or thinking matters. That reveals how entrenched we are into “boy”culture and we have to start seeing the waters in which we all swim and not just boys and young men.

Black feminist writer bell hooks has written extensively about how those at the margins of power are often best able to see what’s happening in the center of power. The boys and young men who take part in my studies are primarily, but not exclusively, boys and young men of color from poor and working class communities because they teach us something about what it means to be human and what gets in the way of our humanity that only they can teach us as they are not benefiting from the “boy” culture in which we live as much as their more privileged peers and thus they see it better. 

The first part of the solution is to see the hand in front of our faces. The problem is not social media or technology or talking about mental health too much or not having enough therapists but about a culture that is out of sync with our human needs and nature.

Once we begin to understand that the nature of our problems is cultural and not simply individual or due to a particular group of people exclusively. We can begin to create a new culture using the natural human skills such as our innate curiosity about the thoughts and feelings and experiences of other people to start to break down stereotypes we hold of ourselves and each other. This allows us to see our own humanity and the humanity of others. Once we do that, our culture will become less traumatic, depressing, and anxiety-provoking to live in and thus the rates of loneliness, suicide and violence will diminish.

Yes, of course. What young people teach us is that we humans already have the capacity within us to change our culture, including our innate interpersonal curiosity. So all we need to do is start tapping into what we knew when we were as young as five years old and we will begin to engage with each other differently and see each other’s humanity as well as our own. 

Structural change is essential. This includes changing our schools, our workplaces, and our institutions so that they foster listening and connection. I share several successful examples of how to do this within REBELS WITH A CAUSE. But without psychological change, as well, structural change will not be as effective. We must change the way we see ourselves and each other. We already have the innate skills to solve our own problems, as the rebels in my book teach us, now we just need to do it.

I created a course at NYU that is now a core course for undergraduates called “The Science of Human Connection” in which students read the science that backs up all that I share in REBELS. They also read about the work by practitioners as described in another book I co-edited called The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solutions (NYU press). The practitioners in my edited book describe the ways in which they are succeeding at nourishing our natural capacities to care, listen with curiosity, take responsibility and act accordingly in schools and communities around the world. 

With my collaborators Joseph Nelson, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Holly Van Hare, Laura Peynado, Crystal Clarke, I also created The Listening Project, a program that has now been running for a decade with support from several foundations. The Listening Project is a 26-lesson unit integrated into English and Humanities classes in middle and high schools across New York, in which we train teachers and students in our method—as described in REBELS, as well—of “transformative interviewing” to foster social and emotional wellbeing and academic engagement. Our evaluation research over the past five years indicates that The Listening Project fosters social and emotional wellbeing, and increases a sense of belongingness among and between students and adults in schools; it also decreases stereotyping and builds a sense of a common humanity. Its application beyond the classroom is being explored in several states, including in California with First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom.