Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture

From NYU professor of developmental psychology Niobe Way,
an in-depth exploration about what boys and young men teach us about themselves, us, and the toxic culture we have created, one in which we value money over people, toys over human connection, and academic achievement over kindness. Based on her longitudinal and mixed-method research over thirty-five years, Rebels with a Cause is a true call to action to change the culture so that we stop the vicious cycle of violence and blame.

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.

Dr. Niobe Way is a professor of developmental psychology at New York University. She has published nearly a hundred peer-reviewed journal articles and eight books, including Deep Secrets. The Listening Project, her current project with Joseph Nelson, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, David Kirkland, and Alisha Ali, aims to foster curiosity and connection in and outside of middle school classrooms across New York City. Way created and teaches a core course for undergraduates at NYU called the Science of Human Connection. Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, among others. She is a former president of the Society for Research on Adolescence. Rebels with a Cause is her first trade book.