00:13:57.960And, um, yeah, I, so we, we actually still went to the same school for a while.
00:14:04.400And then eventually he, the school found him unfit to work in their curriculum.
00:14:11.960And so they sent him to a very big public school and, you know, him being like an antisocial kid, I knew probably wasn't the best thing for him.
00:14:22.140And so it like made me worried about how he was going to feel there.
00:14:27.960and um yeah I was pretty sad about that because that was like the only interaction we got and
00:14:34.700I guess sometimes I'd see him at lunch and I'd be like oh hey come to lunch with me and my friends
00:14:40.380and then he'd be like all right and then he'd start walking out the door and then I'd like
00:14:45.780turn around and he was just gone and like he just he like at all possible costs he would avoid me
00:14:51.240which was difficult but yeah I mean I kept in touch with his mom and my dad who is very close
00:15:03.480with that family um just um asking how he was doing if he was all right how he was doing in
00:15:13.080school if he didn't make any new friends it was just like nice to hear that he was okay you know
00:15:19.220and for me my main thing is his his mental safety and he's been the type of person who's like
00:15:26.300asked me like what's the point of life like why are we here like what why does it matter why can't
00:15:32.000like I just kill myself now and like everyone would forget about it kind of thing and for me
00:15:39.100I just really want him to be mentally stable to like a point where he can be comfortable not just
00:15:45.720comfortable but like safe within himself you know and so hearing that he's made a new friend or
00:15:52.540he's doing good in school or you know his meds are helping him a lot is very helpful for me
00:15:58.560it is sad that I don't get to see him but I think that one day he's gonna realize that
00:16:07.060maybe he can't do it on his own or that it was foolish of him to try to do it on his own and
00:16:13.080reach out again that's kind of my hope and I don't want to keep pushing because
00:16:17.480you know if I keep pushing then he's going to move out of the way
00:16:21.180and I just want him to like have someone to fall back on rather than forcing him to
00:16:29.400have me in his life so yeah it's just very it's very nice knowing how he's doing
00:16:35.400I don't know what I can do at this point you know because he obviously thinks that he has
00:16:43.020to go through it on his own and all I can do is let him know that I'm here to help I don't want
00:16:48.580to force him to talk to me or to hang out with me because I feel like um that'll be very difficult
00:16:55.840for him earlier on he said he was like a rock there was no words you can use to describe why
00:17:01.860I loved him at this point he's saying I'm so afraid of pushing too hard because I'm afraid
00:17:07.200that if I do, I'll lose him forever. I just want him to have somebody. I don't want to force him
00:17:13.520to hang out with me because I feel like that would be difficult for him. So he describes this
00:17:17.720close connection and the tremendous sense of loss that he feels. And yet in the end,
00:17:23.520what's still underlying his words is compassion, gentleness, caring, empathy. That's love.
00:23:23.260Boys care deeply about their friendships,
00:23:26.120and Niobe's research has shown that for over 30 years.
00:23:30.060In that, I began to hear boys, and this was at a school for primarily low-income, working-class kids in Boston.
00:23:43.900And I expected to hear a lot of stories about school problems or girl problems or family problems.
00:23:52.360But what I ended up hearing almost consistently is struggles with friendships, wanting friendships, wanting close friendships with other guys, and there seemed to be a whole friendship story happening in these counseling sessions.
00:24:09.580And it totally surprised me because I realized that our whole, this was in the late 1980s,0.53
00:24:16.360that we never talked about boys' friendships outside of just that they didn't want intimate friendships as much as girls did.
00:24:23.760And that the terrain of emotional intimate friendships was sort of a girl thing, not a guy thing.
00:24:31.300And I realized that they were blowing away those stereotypes in the sessions that was having with them.
00:24:40.600And I then became fascinated by what was going on, why we weren't telling that story,
00:24:47.720and whether their experiences were similar to other boys from other backgrounds as well as just in general.
00:24:54.020It's true for a lot of boys, but it's true for the boys I was seeing.
00:24:58.180So I began, I switched into a doctorate program out of counseling and into human development,
00:25:04.400and then began research that then has lasted me all the way up to now,
00:25:09.700looking at the development of boys' social-emotional development,
00:25:16.840and specifically looking at their friendships and what shapes their friendships and their desires
00:25:22.060and their struggles and what happens to them.
00:25:25.040And because I'm a developmental psychologist, I was interested in how those friendships change through adolescence.
00:25:32.740And it was in my research, which formally started in 1995 when I arrived at NYU as a professor,
00:25:41.120I began to look at longitudinal studies of boys from ninth grade to twelfth grade,
00:25:48.240and then expanded that a little bit from middle school through high school.
00:25:53.160A longitudinal study, in case you don't know, is a study that follows the same participants for a significant period of time.
00:26:02.220I am not a psychologist, so that's kind of just, you know, my basic understanding of it.
00:26:07.060What this means for Niobe's research is that she was able and is still able to identify patterns,
00:26:13.040shared experiences of connection and disconnection among, I think she said it was 80 to 85% of the boys that she worked with
00:30:05.620Which to me means that this matters just for that.
00:30:09.360like that's that's all you really need to say but it also matters because for the boys who
00:30:14.500have lost or shifted away from those close relationships the stakes can be really really
00:30:19.080high that's something that i constantly remind myself even uh a couple days ago i was talking
00:30:26.700to a young man about this that in these conversations we're not just talking about
00:30:31.100like boys and boys emotions or friendship i have enough experience with suicide and violence
00:30:38.080to know that we could literally be talking about life and death
00:30:42.500for boys and for the people in their lives.
00:30:46.920And then you saw, and then I began to look at the larger body of literature on teenagers
00:30:53.580and discovered that right at the age when the language shifted,
00:30:58.14015, 16, towards a more angry or sad voice,
00:31:01.860was exactly the age that boys start to commit suicide five times the rate of girls.
00:31:10.120It was previously two or three times the rate,
00:31:12.680and then it moved up to about five times the rate at 15, 16.
00:31:17.440And I also was privileged to be able to read two journals of boys who had committed suicide,
00:31:25.260and that confirmed what I saw suggested in my data and in the national data on suicide,
00:31:31.040which is that a lot of the talk in the journals from these two boys
00:31:36.940were feeling like they couldn't find people, and boys in particular,
00:31:41.340the boys who sort of understood them, saw them, you know,
00:31:44.660would allow them to be fully human in their friendship.
00:31:50.400And so then I heard the struggle, and then the consequences of that struggle,
00:31:53.640which is the suicide and the violence, all the mass violence that you hear about,
00:31:57.500including the reason I'm with the kid in Texas.
00:32:01.040They're all the same age. They're all between 16 and 25, with few exceptions, and that's exactly the age when you hear the boys, even in my studies, start to speak in the I don't care, it doesn't matter, it's a sort of angry voice of being expected by a culture to disconnect from the very thing they need the most.
00:32:22.720listening to specific boys stories is impactful and inarguably i mean it's
00:32:28.920sort of the purpose of this whole podcast but it's important to remember that
00:32:32.080within these individual stories this is also a conversation about culture the way niobe puts it
00:32:39.880is the boys are telling us a story she says this story has two parts firstly that boys have
00:32:47.340incredible emotional skills. And secondly, that it is our culture that devalues and destabilizes
00:32:53.080those skills. Our society feminizes emotional connection for the most part. You know, there's
00:33:00.220specific times and places that boys are allowed to be emotionally connected. Like I think of
00:33:06.020athletics. You know, that's one special thing about being on a sports team is having a shared
00:33:10.060emotional experience. But again, for the most part, emotional connection is seen as feminine.
00:33:15.440And in a patriarchal culture that devalues the feminine, that limits boys.0.89
00:33:45.440gay, when I'd ask the question. And I would say, but I'm not asking whether you're gay.0.98
00:33:51.260I'm asking whether you have close male friendships. And they would interpret it as a question
00:33:56.520about their sexuality. And of course, it sparked me a culture that interprets intimate male
00:34:01.820friendships as an issue of sexuality rather than an issue of basically a human need. And
00:34:07.740so they would have these phrases of no homo and even referred to having close male friendships0.90
00:34:15.960And that language really came in in middle to late adolescence,0.88
00:34:19.300and now, unfortunately, I think we're becoming actually more, ironically, more homophobic.
00:34:25.100And you're hearing it a little bit younger than I did a decade ago.
00:34:32.560But the whole thing is that a basic human need of friendships and closeness gets interpreted as, you know,
00:34:39.900suggesting a sexuality and a gender rather than just a core human need is a particularly thing
00:34:49.220about not only masculinity but American masculinity that comes in and tells these boys, you know,
00:34:55.420in a homophobic and misogynist culture, tells these boys that to want that and to focus on that
00:35:02.040makes them not, you know, not a so-called quote-unquote real man. And that's really the
00:35:08.020bottom line is what the boys have taught me over almost 30 years is that we're raising our boys0.97
00:35:15.440in american culture in particular and all cultures like ours to go against their nature
00:35:20.360um which is to be social emotional human beings and and then they some of them you know not all
00:35:29.920and certainly not even the majority but many of them grow up uh if you ask them boys to go against
00:35:35.740their nature, they grow up and they're angry, and they act out in their anger in all sorts
00:35:43.720of ways, by being abusive to other people, to themselves, et cetera.
00:35:49.160So it really is, to me, a story about how we raise our boys in American culture, where
00:35:55.800we equate core human capacities and needs, and we give them a gender and a sexuality.
00:36:02.140And it's not just any gender and sexuality, it's a gender and sexuality that we demean in American culture as well, as a result of American masculinity.
00:36:10.720So we give it a gender and a sexuality that we demean, and then we're surprised that boys and men, gay and straight, by the way, you know, struggle, struggle.
00:36:23.860And I'm not saying girls and women don't struggle too, they struggle also.
00:36:27.080So, but the pressure is in this particular domain around intimacy and closeness with other boys is unique to how we see, you know, what we prohibit against with boys.
00:36:38.680So anyway, so it's this whole story of the two-part story, which I'd want to be an important part of your podcast is the first part, which is that you don't need to teach boys social-emotional skills.
00:36:54.920You hear them if you listen to boys when they're four and five in Judy Chu's work.
00:36:59.560She writes beautiful work on boys at four and five that speak in beautiful language.
00:37:04.960A boy who says to his mother who's going through a bad divorce and at four years old says to his mother, who he appears, he says, Mommy, why do you smile when you're sad?
00:37:18.940Basically noting the fact that she's faking an emotion that's at four years old.
00:37:22.860um and uh the point is is that boys are just like girls are incredible leaders of the emotional
00:37:30.620world and that they already have these gorgeous skills um and then we as they get into adolescence
00:37:37.740we start to demean them and uh make those skills into soft skills and we don't value soft skills
00:37:44.520so uh so then we create our own problems by getting boys to disconnect from the core parts
00:37:51.300of their humanity, and then we're shocked that, you know, you get the extreme examples
00:37:56.460of boys killing each other and killing themselves, and, you know, and assaulting girls and all