I'm Jill Anderson.This is the Harvard EdCast.Niobe Wei says boy culture and our inability to lean into our soft sides contributes to the rising rates of loneliness, depression, suicide, and even mass violence.It's something we need to fix.
She's a developmental psychologist who has spent decades studying the unique friendships of boys, masculinity, and what those things tell us about our culture.
Her research reveals as boys grow older, they become disconnected from their emotional selves and their close friendships.Not because of who they are, but because of the cultural norms that surround them.It affects all of us.
I wanted to understand how we became a society of gendered emotions and the role of boy culture in this crisis.First, I asked her what she means by crisis of connection and how it manifests in boys.
So in early adolescence, they talk about wanting friendships.Some of them have intimate, deep, secret friendships, talking about wanting to be able to be vulnerable with other guys, share their feelings without being laughed at, etc.
Then as they get older and the pressures to man up and the pressures to sort of tamp down their soft sides, to not be so-called girly and gay, or sound girly and gay.They started to disconnect from those feelings.They started to say, I don't care.
It doesn't matter.But they also started to express moments of real sadness.They can't find the friends that they want.They need them for their own mental health.They were very explicit about that.
But they start to not be able to find these friendships.I realized that what they were talking about with their crisis of connection as they got older in a culture that thought friendships was feminine.
They gave friendships a gender and a sexuality, which doesn't make any sense because all humans need friendships.Actually, it wasn't just a struggle that boys were having.
It was a struggle that all of us are having to stay connected to our soft sides and our desire for deep, intimate friendships with each other, regardless of gender identities.I realize this crisis of connection is not just for boys and young men.
It's with everybody where we're starting to disconnect from our emotional sensitivity, our need for relationships, our need for intimate relationships, not just with a romantic partner, but with friends as we grow older.And this is the kicker, Jill.
Even our notions of maturity is the same notions as manhood.It's about being independent, self-sufficient, autonomous, stoic, right?It's not about being emotional, being sensitive. being able to be mutually supportive with another person, right?
Maturity and manhood are sort of in cahoots together in modern culture, and I call it boy culture. Boy is in quotation marks.It's not a real boy.It's a stereotype of a boy, which means we privilege the hard over soft.
So we privilege everything we've deemed hard, thinking over feeling, and we've gendered things that are not gendered.Thinking and feeling are not a gender.They're a human capacity, a need.
So in such a culture, we're all facing a disconnection from ourselves.By that, I mean evidence of his depression and anxiety.We're disconnected from our own needs.So we think we need to
make a lot of money and get into Harvard as our only need, rather than also recognizing that we also want and need healthy relationships, we need our emotional sensitivity to have them, etc.
So we're disconnected from ourselves, and we see that in the soaring rates of depression and anxiety.Also, we are disconnected from each other.That's in the soaring rates of loneliness, suicide, and mass violence.
It's a crisis of connection that's leading to all these negative outcomes.And we keep on thinking it's an individual problem, not a cultural problem.
Right, because there's a ripple effect that falls out from all of these adult men, they get older, and they are unable to maintain any kind of emotional and it affects everyone.
We're finding in our data that women are now adhering to norms of masculinity, in some cases, even more than men.
So women have gotten the message that if you emphasize your hard side, your stoic side, that we get our foot in the door in terms of power.
So women are now starting to align with norms of masculinity and starting to show the same kinds of consequences that happens for boys and men when they put down half of their humanity, which is their soft side.
You have talked in your research a lot about how boys speak openly about their friendships.You just mentioned this, and then as they get older, it becomes more closed off.
When you read their commentary in the research, it's almost like a light switch, and it seems like it happens right around junior year of high school. It's just this common point and then they start to feel isolated.
There's a lot of lack of trust that seems to come out of nowhere and they just break away from the emotional closeness.Why is it happening at that sort of standard point?
This is the beauty of being a researcher and doing narrative research because it's in their language. So their language, as you read for 12, 13, 14, 15 year olds, for the most part, there's that tender language.I need him.I want him so much.
I can't live without him.Or I want someone like that.I mean, tender, tender language.If I didn't have a friend, I would go wacko.I'd want to kill myself.I mean, very tender, very real language.
Then as they get older, their language starts to become a sort of stereotypic language.It doesn't matter.It's all good.I'm fine. But then they'll start to talk about the cracks, right, in their narrative.
They'll start to talk about their sadness, their isolation.And they also start using language, what I call the no homo language.
All of a sudden, in their language, they have made it clear to me that friendships are no longer seen in their lives as human desire. meaning they're human too, but actually is girly and gay.
And for every listener who thinks that's an old fashioned thing to say and that it's no longer true, spend some time with 15 and 16 year olds, which I do almost every day during the school year.
In the spring of 2024, I sat with a group of 10, 15 year old boys.They sounded exactly the same as in 1988.The language becomes no longer are my desires human, but linked to a gender. and a developmental status, meaning not mature, immature.
It's immature to be emotional.It's immature to need other people.You get what I'm saying?It's shocking as a developmental psychologist.Maturity and manhood actually means the same thing.So no wonder, as boys become men,
And unfortunately, as girls become women and non-gender kids become adults, they're all aligning with this boy culture that puts down their soft, because that's seen as immature, girly, and gay.
Even kids who identify as gay don't want to be the stereotype soft person anymore.I'm not a feminist that's sort of saying we only need our soft sides.I love our hard sides.It's our autonomy, our ability to be stoic, our capacity to think complexly.
I mean, all those hard sides of ourselves are equally necessary, and they intersect, right?They're dependent on each other.When you're feeling sad, and if you were crying right now with me was something that was making you sad,
If I started crying with you, that actually wouldn't be helpful for you.I need to actually be stoic when you're being vulnerable so that you can be vulnerable without feeling like you have to take care of me.
So our stoicism is critical, but it's just when we only do one side, right, then we're in trouble.And this is what's so beautiful.
Boys and men remind us of that, remind us of our humanity, of what it means to be human and what's getting in the way of us acting like a human.
I mean, there was such a fear there of being perceived as unmanly or weak, and it really impacts the ability to interact with their peers and form connections. sensed a lot of just fears of the girlfriend in coming into the relationship.
Definitely.I have to say that young men feel the fear oftentimes more coming from girls not liking them if they reveal their soft side.But I'm saying girls do it with each other too.Every girl I know wants to be a kick-ass girl.
And that kick-ass girl is someone who doesn't give a, excuse my language, doesn't give a shit. And the idea of caring about other people's feelings, right, is considered lame in our culture, right?
It's considered lame to care about what other people think and feel.So if we raise our kids to do that, especially with our boys and our young men, if we feminize it, and thus in a culture that doesn't like the feminine, that creates a problem.
Imagine we're asking an entire gender, and now, unfortunately, an entire generation of young people to just use one half of their natural skills, not even to foster our natural interpersonal curiosity, our curiosity, Jill, about you.
We're so focused on telling our own story and having other people listen to us and having other people pay attention to us.And we pay almost no attention to listening to other people, to being curious about them.
And so no wonder there's a crisis of connection.
It's just, in essence, we're all in these boxes, right?We're very closed off.
Yeah.It's a toxic culture.It's the waters in which we swim that we're not seeing.And if we don't see the waters, we're raising our children to go against their nature.
which is to be sensitive and to be able to regulate their emotions, to be stoic and to be vulnerable, to think and feel.That's natural.
And we're raising our children to just think, to just be stoic, to just want autonomy, especially our boys and men.In such a culture, We disconnect from our own desires, our own needs, and the needs of others.And then we have a crisis of connection.
And some kids who are most isolated, right, that leads to suicide.And for some, it leads to violence.And mass shooters tell us this directly.I don't interpret their manifestos in this way.They tell us this.
The data shows that mass shooters are predominantly white males.I think it's like higher than 80% at this point.Why is that?And how can your work help us better understand and identify and prevent these acts of violence?
It's what mass shooters are saying in their social media postings and their manifestos.So the reason why it keeps on happening again and again is because we're not listening.
We keep on blaming the individual or now we're blaming the parents, God forbid, not blaming ourselves.We're not blaming the culture in which we are raising our children.
They tell us directly, and this is why they're white and mostly coming from privileged communities, by the way.It's not just white, it's social class too. they feel like they've been put on the bottom of a hierarchy of humanness.
And this hierarchy of humanness is embedded in boy culture.In the case of mass shooters, they feel like they've been put on the bottom.They expected to be on the top as white privileged boys.
And they feel like they've been put on the bottom and that nobody gives a damn and nobody cares about their suffering and nobody cares that they've been bullied.And they're asking two things.First of all, they say directly in the case study I have,
He talks about the hierarchy of human is not being fair, and that it's not fair that boys who play sports and who get a lot of girls are put on top. and he didn't play sports and he doesn't get a lot of attention from girls, is put on the bottom.
He said, it's not fair that they get friends and I don't get friends.He feels the hierarchy.The reaction is always from the adults.Somehow it's his problem.Whether he has a diagnosis or whatever it is, we pathologize the kid.
It makes you actually have mental breaks.I always say to my students, imagine you were being picked on your whole life.Nobody was talking to you.Everybody thought you were a weirdo, a loner, whatever it is. And you were being told, it's your problem.
It's your fault.Why don't you just try harder?And you knew that it was all these kids coming at you oftentimes with very toxic messages.
And you're having to switch schools a million times because, you know, it's all your fault and you have to start acting better.I think genuinely what they're sharing with us is it leads to a kind of mental break.
And then you see the mental break where they then become delusional and they're sort of, I'm going to shoot people.
because I want to get on top of the hierarchy and show them that I'm powerful and show them that I'm a man, show them that I can make you hurt because you've hurt me and I'm going to show you that I can hurt you.So they're trying to get on top.
And this is a horrible thing, Jill.We're all trying to get on top.They're trying to do it through violence.
But the fact is we're all trying to get on top of this hierarchy and being seen as a full human, especially women, people of color, you know, people who identify in different ways. are trying to get on top.And same with white privileged men, right?
They're trying to get on top.So in a culture where you're trying to get on top and you have this hierarchy of humanist and human qualities, that is the essence of boy culture.It produces violence.It produces depression.It produces anxiety.
Well, I think it comes up time and time again.Like every time this happens every few weeks, we always hear the same things because we keep on looking at just at the kid.
Why do you do it in the Trump case?Did he hate Trump?We're not asking the question.Why does it keep on happening?And what do these kids have to say about why they're doing it?
Why don't we listen to the kids of what they have to say about why they're doing it?They write about it.They post things.
A lot of people go to the mental health.It's a mental illness.
Exactly.Of course, it's a mental health problem.I mean, obviously, you don't kill people without having mental health problems.But the point is that we're not asking is why are they having mental health problems?
I mean, what's leading them to be that mentally ill?What is leading them to do that?What's causing that?
And why are so many young men at this point, because the numbers are almost every day that we have a mass shooting, why are there so many high numbers of young men, white privileged young boys, have mental illness?Why?
Once you start asking why, then you start seeing a cultural story of the way we're raising our children.And I'm going to implicate everybody, including me.
We are absolutely raising our children to go against their nature by only valuing one side, by valuing academic achievement over kindness.
The Harvard Center for Making Care in Common has a finding, 70 to 80 percent of parents valuing academic achievement over kindness. I mean, come on, Jill.
If you live in a culture that values academic achievement over kindness, you are going to have messed up kids.
So the only way to stop mass violence, the only way to stem the tide on suicide, to stem the tide of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, is to see it as a cultural problem and that everybody has to take responsibility for changing.
So once we see it as a cultural problem, then the second thing we have to do, normalize it.Normalize that boys want friendships, They have emotional intelligence.They have as much emotional and relational intelligence as all other humans.
When you listen to those narratives, Jill, you saw that.It's about recognizing the stunning relational and emotional intelligence of a 12-year-old, of a 10-year-old boy.
When our kids want to have healthy friendships, and that's all they care about in high school, I'm going to say this to all the parents, Value it.Don't say your homework is more important than your friendships.Never say that.
Understand that academics is very much linked to social emotional well-being.Start to be curious about your child rather than telling them what to do all the time.Start to ask them questions about why they like that influencer on TikTok.
rather than saying, get off TikTok, that's not going to work.Ask them, who do they follow on TikTok?Why do they like those influences?Not in a judgmental way, in a curious way.What's your child about?
Encourage your child's curiosity about other kids, about you, about the family, about your sister and brother.If I am not curious about you, Jill,
and you are not curious about me deeply, about what I can learn from you, about you, but also about me, we cannot have a connection.
So we need to, as parents, as teachers, as employers, all the adults in our lives in which we are working with people, we need to nurture our own curiosity and the curiosity of those around us to engage with each other in deep and meaningful ways.
Young people are, and I'm going to be very dramatic here because I've been doing this for a long time, they're starving for it.
I wanted to ask you about modeling this type of behavior among men, because I think that there's a good chance a lot of boys and even girls aren't seeing this. in their fathers, in their male relatives, they don't really see it represented too much.
So I was curious about whether seeing that in celebrities, I think about the football players, the NFL players, the Kelsey brothers, I don't know if you've seen them,
They are these big masculine men who I often see them being praised for being open and crying and sharing their love for each other, how they talk about the women in their lives and so on.
Obviously they aren't perfect, but I think about them and wonder, Do boys need to see more of that?Do girls need to see more of that?
Or does it not even matter?All of us need to see more of that.Not only expressions of emotions, but I really want to emphasize this curiosity, which I don't think you get in celebrities yet.You don't get that.
It's not just about me sharing my vulnerabilities.It's about me actually being curious about you.And we are naturally curious.12-year-olds are much more curious than doctoral students.We are so unbelievably curious about other people.
We don't have time, we don't have time, we don't have time.Not just about, did you do your homework?That's the question I asked for four years with my daughter.She wanted to shoot me.
But the other thing is, I'll give a quick story because it'll be helpful for your listeners.I'm in a classroom, it's about 22 12-year-old boys in an all-boys school in the Lower East Side of New York.
And they read a quote from my previous book, Deep Secrets. And it's a quote that says, I love him so much, I can't live without him.I know it's human nature, that one that I use all the time.And they read it and they start laughing.
So I said, why are you laughing?They wouldn't tell me, they wouldn't tell me.I finally said, come on, tell me why you're laughing, because it's not funny.So like, why are you laughing?And so finally, one kid says, well, the dude sounds gay.
And I said, I just want to let you know that I don't look at sexuality.So I don't know who's gay and who's not.I have no idea.I just ask people about their friendships.
Secondly, and this is the kicker, it took two seconds to change everybody in the classroom.I said, secondly, I hear those kinds of stories from over 80% of the teenage boys I interview.And these 12-year-old boys were like completely silent.
And then one kid said, I remember it so well, he said, for real?And I said, oh yeah, that's what teenage boys sound like.I'm telling them it's normal.
And within two seconds, I'm not exaggerating, they were all of a sudden revealing their own desire for close friendships.And two of the boys in the classroom, I mean, it got me very emotional, started talking about literally how they broke up
because the other boy had hurt his feelings and he didn't want to be his friend.And this is a group of 22 12-year-old boys having a discussion about the hurt that they've experienced with each other.
And all it took is me saying, oh yeah, 80% of teenage boys sound like that. And then they kick in and they sound like that.You know, whereas five seconds before they thought it was gay to sound like that.So it's not hard to change.
You just have to come into a room and say, I've done this for so long and say, Hey, listen to this.Everybody's saying that.And boys will say, who did you write the book for?And I said, I wrote it for teachers and parents.
I wasn't really thinking actually. And he said, why didn't you write it for us?Because then we would feel less alone.
You know, the whole sense is boys and young men and girls and young women and non-gender conforming kids are starving, starving for us to value
them and their full humanity, their desire and need for relationships, and we need to normalize it as parents.Don't turn it into the super sensitive kid.Don't ever call your daughter overly sensitive.There's no such thing as I tell my students.
Your sensitivity is your superpower to having positive relationships.So the idea is that you got to normalize it and then people naturally change.Am I giving a depressing message?I'm not.
at all because you're one of the few guests i've ever had on say this is something easy to do we are born radically emotionally or relationally and cognitively intelligent we are born with wicked intelligence and then we grow up in so-called boy culture and we become less intelligent
because we don't value half of our intelligence.Howard Gardner talks about multiple intelligence.I would simply say our intelligence is rooted in our thinking and our feeling, and stop dividing it.
Stop saying our thinking is somehow more prestigious and important than our emotional intelligence.I'm sorry, My emotional intelligence drives my cognitive intelligence.So we have to see we're born this way.So we don't have to teach it.
We just have to nourish it, nourish that natural relational and emotional intelligence.We don't even have a concept of relational intelligence in this culture.We don't even see it as a thing.
The other hopeful message is simply that young people are already changing the culture.They're already insisting that we value their friendships.They're being louder about
all sorts of beautiful things, their need for connection, their need to be able to share things and create radical spaces.
There's a beautiful group run by teenagers called This Teenage Life, which I want to do a shout out to, that's run by teenagers around the world to help teenagers connect with each other.
I'm creating an app for teenagers called Agapi.Teens that will be the first friendship app for teenagers, co-designed with teenagers. They're already determined to get us to start to listen.We just have to start listening, Jill.
That's fundamentally what I'm saying.Start listening to young people about what they teach us about us, them, but also us, and how we can create a culture that's more just and humane.
Well, thank you, Niobe, for coming on.There's a lot to think about here.And I have to say, it's really encouraging to hear a solution that's doable.
Yeah, totally.Do it today.Go out.The first person you see, ask them a real question.Thank you so much, Jill.It was really a pleasure.
Nyobi Wei is a professor of developmental psychology at New York University.She's the author of Rebels with a Cause, Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture.I'm Jill Anderson.
This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.
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