REBELS WITH A CAUSE
"This book might just save America from itself."
- Lisa Arrastia, founding director of the Ed Factory and associate professor of education at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
About Niobe Way
Dr. Niobe Way is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH; pach.org), co-founder of agapi.kids and the PI on the Listening Project. Dr. Way was the President of the Society for Research on Adolescence, received her B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, her doctoral degree from Harvard, and was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at Yale in the psychology department.
Internationally recognized NYU developmental psychologist Dr. Niobe Way has spent nearly 40 years conducting empirical studies with teenagers, particularly boys and young men from diverse backgrounds. Her social science research, which focuses on social and emotional development and how cultural ideologies shape child development, as made her a go-to expert on friendships, loneliness, teenagers, gender stereotypes, masculinity, and the roots of violence. In her pioneering new book, REBELS WITH A CAUSE: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture (Dutton | July 9, 2024), Way draws a direct line from her subjects’ insights — and suffering — to a much wider crisis that is impacting us all, but is in our power to change.
Rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness and suicide are soaring, particularly among young people. Mass violence seems almost commonplace, and virtually all of it is committed by young men. Experts across fields are pointing fingers at various causes and surefire remedies for all this suffering. But as Way reveals in REBELS WITH A CAUSE, if we listen carefully to what boys and young men have to say, we learn that these are all symptoms of a pressing societal problem: a culture that prizes the hard over the soft, thinking over feeling, stoicism over vulnerability, when we are all naturally both and need both. This “boy” culture — so called because it is based on a caricature of a boy, not because it accurately reflects them — is killing our boys and harming us all.
Dear Reader:
This book is not about boys. It is about what boys and young men from diverse ethnic, racial, and social class communities have taught us about them, us, and the “boy” culture we live in that is killing them and us. It is a book about what it means to be human and what has gotten in the way and led some of them—and many of us—to act like monsters. It is also a book about how to solve our own problems and stop the violence. This book is a call to action—to rise up and care, listen with curiosity, value our friendships, and recognize our common humanity. Once we create a culture in which all humans are seen as equally human and both sides of our humanity (the "hard" and the "soft") and all of our intimate relationships are equally valued, we will have joined the cause of the boys and young men in this book and rebels from around the world. Once humans begin to act like humans, we can get down to the business of living a meaningful life that is not defined by how much money we make or how many toys we have but by how much we care, listen, take individual and collective responsibility, and act accordingly.
Niobe Way
New York City, 2024
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“Rebels with a cause is magnificent! Full of thick stories and deep insights -- all brilliantly expressed! Way builds beautifully on Carol Gilligan's work to reveal profound truths about the human condition and highlight a path forward that bypasses moral injury and leads to the meaningful connections we need -- individually and collectively -- to heal and thrive.”
–Judy Chu, Author When Boys Become Boys, Lecturer Stanford University
“Rebels With a Cause is a key intervention — as a developmental psychologist of immense experience, Niobe Way is uniquely positioned to unravel the very notions of (masculine) development that bind our society as a whole into structures of violence, exclusion, and isolation; in the often painful testimony of boys and teenagers, she also finds a compass to show us the way home.”
—David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
“A thoughtful, well-informed look at contemporary boy culture and its many inherent problems.”
—Kirkus
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In REBELS WITH A CAUSE, Way thoughtfully expands on the insights from her previous works, including The Crisis of Connection and Deep Secrets, the latter of which was made into the Oscar-nominated film Close. She delves into human nature and how it conflicts with our culture, shares her latest research-driven insights, examines the latest social science research, and weaves the voices of young men throughout. As we understand the true and often-obscured nature of boys and young men, all of whom crave a sense of connection, we begin to understand just how disconnected “boy” culture is with them, and ultimately with us all. Way also offers solutions to this societal crisis which, remarkably, are also built upon the insights from the boys and young men from her research. Her subjects know instinctively what the research also bears out: that friendship is crucial for humans to thrive, that qualities typically considered “feminine” like empathy belong on equal footing with the so-called “masculine” qualities like logic, and that our innate capacity for curiosity is a superpower we must cultivate to save our boys and ourselves.
To create a culture that aligns with human nature, we must first value and foster our deep need for connection, Way shows. To connect with one another, we must listen to one another, exercising our innate capacity to listen with curiosity. Schools provide one venue for this shift, and Way outlines two powerful academic programs with strong results that help create this sense of connection among students and with teachers. She shares how workplaces can foster the wider cultural shift — and make employees both happier and more productive — by encouraging connection and cooperation. Way also offers strategies that we can use in our homes and our daily lives to build and exemplify positive bonds with our loved ones, especially our boys.
Changing the culture, Way argues, also involves unlearning harmful cultural practices such as treating mental health problems only at the individual level, as in by relying on therapy or medication. To succeed, we must also reject the stereotypes like “boys will be boys” that presume certain behaviors are the result of nature rather than culture, because they’re not. Once we create a culture that recognizes that all humans are equally human and that values the hard and soft alike, we will find that our world feels less depressing, anxiety provoking and lonely.
With REBELS WITH A CAUSE, Way offers a new story about what it means to be human, what is getting in the way of our humanity, and how to solve our own problems by drawing from our natural capacities to care, listen with curiosity to each other and take responsibility.
