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On sale July 9, 2024
Rebels with a Cause
Niobe Way
Dr. Niobe Way has spent her career researching social and emotional development and finds that boys and young men desperately want and need the same thing as everyone else: close friendships. Yet they and we grow up in a stereotyped “boy” culture, one that devalues and mocks those relationships, rather than recognizing that they’re necessary for human survival.
In Rebels with a Cause, Way takes her message one step beyond her previous book, Deep Secrets, which was the inspiration for an Oscar-nominated film Close, to reveal how these “rebels,” as she calls the boys and young men in her research and in her classrooms, teach us about their and our crisis of connection, evidence of which is visible in our soaring rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide, and mass violence. They also teach us about the solutions to the crisis, which is to care, to listen with curiosity, and to take individual and collective responsibility for the damage we have done to them, to ourselves, and to the world around us.
Way provides us not only with data-driven insight into the roots and consequences of this crisis of connection, but also offers us concrete and empirically tested strategies for creating a culture that better aligns with our human nature and our human needs. Her book reminds us that “it’s not the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it’s the troubles that cause the rebels.” The time to listen to and act on what young rebels have been telling us for almost a century is now.
Niobe Way
Niobe Way is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (pach.org), creative advisor of agapi, and the Principal Investigator on the Listening Project. She was the President of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA), received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, her doctorate from the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, and was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at Yale University.
Way has been researching social and emotional development of adolescents for 35 years, and has authored or co-authored almost one hundred peer reviewed journal articles and seven single authored, co-authored, or co-edited books. Way is regularly featured in mainstream media speaking on the topics of boys, friendships, loneliness, mental health, teenagers, gender stereotypes, masculinity, the roots of violence, and the solutions including to the soaring rates of mass violence.
