What Teens Are Trying to Tell Us: The Crisis of Connection and Masculinity

Introduction to Masculinity

0:00what are we and the society we live in telling boys about how to be a man and why do so many seem to be struggling with masculinity well today's guest has been asking adolescents what they really think for 40 years and she has some answers for us you're listening to teenagers untangled the audio hub for parents going through the teen and tween years where we combine research by experts and practical tips to make modern parenting much easier i'm rachel richards journalist mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters and my guest to help us explore today's

0:33topic is naive way a developmental psychologist and professor at new york university her research is so valuable because she actually listened to boys over time rather than assuming what masculinity looks like she wrote the groundbreaking book deep secrets that inspired the academy award nominated film close and more recently the book rebels with a cause welcome to the podcast thank

Research Background

0:55you rachel i'm so pleased to be here this is this is my kind of podcast uh this is this is my kind of person yeah yeah yeah i'm so excited to be here okay how should we get started go ahead well i want to say first that i am such a fan i'm thrilled that you've taken the time to be with us today i originally discovered your work when i researched one of my earliest episodes for this podcast which was about boyfriendships i'm going to put the link in the notes so that people can see some of that but for the people who don't know you should we just go back and start with deep secrets because i think this kind of there's been a whole narrative hasn't there yeah um and what did you reveal in that

1:28book that struck such a chord okay so first of all i want to go back a little further from when i

Interest in Boys Friendships

1:34started become interested in boys friendships uh because it goes back to all the way back to 1988 i was a doctoral student at harvard university i was in a phd program called uh human development and psychology so that's a whole field and oftentimes called developmental psychology and i was working in high schools and i was listening to young people this was just i was interested in social emotional development and i was just listening to young people and what was most striking this is 1988 because i'm still hearing the same themes rachel 40 years later when boys would talk about their

2:05friendships they talk about struggles and friendships wanting to have close friendships

Boys Talk About Struggles

2:09being betrayed by guys and all the pain that came from that and i was blown away i was blown away rachel because first of all it totally had nothing to do with what i was reading in my textbook about adolescence in graduate school i was reading about high-risk behavior and about you know teenage pregnancy and i was reading all these things about teenagers that had nothing to do with what teenagers especially teenage boys were talking about so i became fascinated by why the mismatch between the stories we tell about teenagers and actually what teenagers say and rachel i'm just saying that is

Mismatch Between Stories

2:43still the case this is going to sound like an exaggeration it's not an exaggeration it has nothing to do what teenagers really care about and what they're all about and what they need to thrive it has nothing to do with it what we what the stories we tell so i became fascinated by the mismatch but i also became fascinated by when people would talk about boys when i would say you know i started at nyu in 1995 as a professor and i started to do federally funded research longitudinally which is great thank you for doing that in my introduction i'll explain to your audience what longitudinal means it means i follow the same kids over time so hundreds and hundreds of kids we follow the same

3:17kids over time and had we not done that as a research method it's common in developmental psychology

Longitudinal Research Method

3:22i wouldn't have heard the themes that i'm about to tell you are the four themes that you hear in deep secrets because it's about the shift that happens from early adolescence uh which is about 11 12 13 14 uh to late adolescence which is about 16 17 18 and you hear it because it's the same kids every year hundreds of kids the same kids every year being asked the same questions and then rachel that's the genius of my work i just have to say because nobody else has that data nobody has that data so that you actually have the same kid give very different stories at 13 and then 16 totally

Findings on Boys Friendships

3:56different stories when you ask them about friendships okay now let's get to the findings basically i'm summarizing obviously thousands of kids you know it's it's it's 40 years so it's a lot but there's four major themes that are talked about in deep secrets and then in rebels my new book i talk about how those four themes are relevant actually to all of us not just to boys and young men um okay so the first thing is that deep desire for what boys call deep secret friendships and by that they mean friendships in which they can share their feelings be vulnerable uh with and not be laughed at we're not talking about necessarily deep dive into the meaning of their relationship with

4:30their mother right when they say deep secrets but by being able to talk about for example their parents divorce with someone that's a very common topic they want to be able to talk about the fighting that's going on with their parents and they don't want to talk to an adult about it they want to talk to a male peer about it and not someone not dismiss it as like they're overreacting or they're being too you know girly in their feelings about the pain that cause that parents oftentimes cause their children um so they want deep secret friendships to be able to talk about things but this is the second

Desire for Deep Secret Friendships

4:58part of that first finding which is so important to me they reveal in these in their narratives when you hear their language that they use and rachel you saw this because you've read deep secrets the language that they use it's so emotionally and relationally intelligent they talk about how they cover over their feelings but they really feel angry but they cut they really feel hurt but they cover it over with anger they talk about incredibly sophisticated ways about what goes on in their friendships particularly in early and middle adolescence they are incredibly relationally and

5:29emotionally intelligent and you hear that in their language okay so not only in the first theme do they want friendships um deep secret friendships but they have the capacity to have them okay second theme this is a very powerful one this is still early to middle adolescence right these are the themes

Mental Health as a Symptom

5:43that we heard in 12 13 14 year olds approximately second theme is they very clearly identify that mental health is not the problem it's a symptom of a social health problem it's not the problem it's not the problem it is literally a symptom of the of a social health problem and they've told me that since 1988 and that is something rachel we are still not listening to we still think mental health is the problem it is not the problem it is what comes from being naturally social right now we're social

6:14animals we know that from social neuroscience too rachel you know that um we're social animals we grow up in an anti-social culture a me me me culture it's all about me we don't value relationships we value autonomy or relationships thinking over feeling i mean we're intensely anti-social in our values so if you grow up in a culture like that what's going to happen is that our social health uh like vivek murthy says the former surgeon general suffers and how i know that we are an anti-social culture is we don't even have the concept of social health in our public health discussions we have mental health and

6:49physical health social health doesn't even exist okay doesn't even exist as a construct yet when you ask fifth grade this was a couple weeks ago i asked a group of 120 fifth and sixth grade boys and so for a european audience that's 10 11 year old uh i asked them basically before i began giving my findings i always do this i asked them the main research question and so i said to a whole group of 10 and 11 year olds what's the predictor of mental health i just you threw it out there in the beginning of

7:20how interesting and and and a fifth grade boy raised his hand he said how you're treated by others and and then i said i started laughing because i i said you know why i started laughing i said i have spent a career making millions of dollars uh to make that insight and then and then all the kids totally started to laugh and then they said but it's so obvious you know the way you get treated by your friends it makes you feel bad about yourself rachel what i'm trying to say is they say what you know the boy said in my research interviews but all you got to do is ask a group of 150

7:5210 year olds and they say the same thing and what's incredible to me rachel and i'll get to the third theme in a second okay i'll go i'll walk through it but the second theme what's incredible is that the adults are fundamentally not listening it's a duh to them i mean i know does from my generation not theirs but it is a duh it is a duh insight for them and they couldn't believe this and and just to say that these are kids across the spectrum you are covering you are not just in one particular type of school no no no these are first by by now we do by the way studies in china we do studies all

8:24around the world it's in you know all sorts of kids rich kids poor kids middle class kids white kids black kids asian kids chinese american kids i don't care what demographic you're talking about i've interviewed them um and so and and quite frankly you know kids who don't identify as gender binary so i mean across the board young people know right they know i mean we knew this rachel we knew this when we were younger yeah the way you're treated by others affects how you feel about yourself and the fact that in a culture that we don't even acknowledge that underscores our antisocial quality

8:58okay so now i'm going to get to the third thing the third theme is what i a lot of i've been interviewed

Crisis of Connection

9:03a lot about and i've written a lot about and david brooks has quoted me from the new york times many many times on this remember it's the same boys over time as you hear their narratives go from when they're 13 and they talk about their desire for deep deep secrets for deep secret friendships 14 and then by 15 16 you start to hear them what i say go underground with what they feel so they start to say they start to sound like stereotypic boys meaning it doesn't matter it's okay but they also start to say things about how sad they are how frustrated they are and sometimes how angry they are

9:35that they can't find the friendships that they're looking for um and i called that a crisis of connection that boys are experiencing a crisis of connection during adolescence and then what it turns out that actually when you look at the data on girls by the way just for your parents um girls also experience a crisis of connection and i can i can answer the question how their crisis looks different uh if we get there but just so you know there is a crisis of connection for both for both genders uh but it looks different okay so the crisis of connection for boys is a disconnection from others to sort of in the name of manhood but also this is the fourth thing cultural ideologies

10:11by cultural i mean modern culture i don't mean american i don't mean english or british whatever i mean modern culture modern culture that basically defines now i'm gonna i want your listeners to hear this because it's so important we define manhood maturity success and modernity exactly the same way it's about being self-sufficient autonomous right stoic we define it the exact same way right and what i say in my new book rebels with a cause it's evidence that we privilege the

10:42stereotypically masculine it's not masculine it's just human right over the stereotypically feminine and if i'm going to put it bluntly we give gender identities to thinking and feeling and that's where we go wrong because ultimately what boys teach us right is that we think and feel i mean we're all you know we all we want autonomy and we want connection we want right we want we are able to be stoic and we're able to be vulnerable and we oftentimes are both at the same time and so the idea is that the problem is the fourth theme is cultural ideologies hierarchies and stereotypes i write that in my new book

11:19for harvard called our social nature and an anti-social culture a five-part story the anti-social culture in my rebels it's actually i call it boy culture because boy in quotations mean it's a cartoon character of a boy that only has a hard side and that's our whole modern culture defining maturity manhood success and modernity the exact same way which is basically manning up for everybody and so when when we live in a culture that only values our hard side and doesn't value our soft sides um it causes hell for us because we are naturally soft and hard we are naturally social animals and

11:57we're also cognitive animals right i mean we are we are a mixture of in in chinese philosophy it's the yin and the yang right we're naturally the yin and the yang in terms of who we are um and and chinese philosophy gets that by the way because it's all the about the integration of the yin and the yang and not separating it out so anyway so the so the point is so the four themes the fourth theme response to the question of the third thing which is the crisis of connection why is there a crisis of connection and it is growing up and the answer is according to the data it is growing up in a culture that clashes with our nature and that leads to basically a crisis of connection it leads to

12:31depression anxiety loneliness suicide and in the most severe cases obviously suicide but also violence um you know committed mass shoot you hear this in the mass shooters net manifestos the same themes um they are angry uh they are angry at that we are in a society that doesn't care about them but also doesn't care about each other they talk about a mass shooter said in one of his manifestos before the night before he he stabbed his roommate 96 times he said this is against all you humanity who's let me rot in my own loneliness so the point is is he didn't blame his loneliness he blamed all humanity which

13:07means the culture right he didn't blame his mother he didn't blame his peers he said all you humanity that's let me rot so he gets it and a lot of the mass shooters get that that it's a cultural problem it's the waters in which we swim that leads us away from what we need what who we are and then gets us to hate each other right and gets us to neglect each other and not care about each other so that is the sort of the four themes that boys teach us and um they also teach us which is not a theme but i want to end on it so it doesn't sound so depressing because it's actually not depressing

13:39no no really i'll tell you why because they they teach us the solutions the solutions is going back to the first part of the story our social nature we already have the skills within us to solve our own problems they're five-year-old skills and if i ever did a podcast my podcast would call be called how to act like a five-year-old um because ultimately yes because five-year-olds look at each other and look at us with wonder and they want to learn they want to know why they want to know why you do this why it's actually learning from each other and so the idea of curiosity interpersonal curiosity

14:12which i want you to ask me questions about that because that's the secret sauce that boys and young men have taught us creates connection and now we're seeing it in our survey research across nyu students and we're now doing a lot of research on young adults um and we see the same theme that interpersonal curiosity which we don't even value rachel because it's a we see it as a feminine skill so we don't even value we don't even study it in my field we study intellectual curiosity but not the soft version which is interpersonal curiosity and think rachel i'm going to end with imagine living

14:45in a culture as social animals that we don't value our natural curiosity in each other we don't value that and we don't nurture it right and we think connection we think connection we're so disconnected we think connection is just talking about ourselves to somebody else right being vulnerable with someone you look at leadership training programs you look at sel programs i tell you they all give the same message it's all about you talk you talking about you know about yourself and sharing and

15:16being emotionally sensitive right nothing about actually being interested in the thoughts and feelings and experiences of another person isn't that incredible and that's how fundamentally antisocial we are i use the word curiosity all the time on this podcast as as something that we need to develop because of exactly these sorts of things you're talking about i want to come on to that just before we move on i want to a couple of things i want to ask about is it just a weird culture things that just the western because you you're crossing different cultures no no other cultures getting this right yeah yeah no no no and this is why because in this globalized world

15:52uh i hate to say it to a british person i'm going to say it american ideology dominates the world um it dominates the world right i mean so whether you like it or not i've been living in i've lived in china i've been doing a study of 1200 families in china for 20 years my dad was a china scholar um the fact of the matter is you see the introduction of an american version of masculinity you know the hard over the soft the masculine is playing sports it's you know not it's not thinking

16:23it's just being good at sports and being fit i mean and you see the homophobia of american masculinity something that was never that so gay which is a very american phrase you are seeing it uh my ex-husband is from berlin you are seeing it in germany you're seeing it around the world that's so gay has entered into the conversation since about the 80s and 90s um uh because that is literally the american version of masculinity which is i'm going to define that what i mean by masculinity it's an amer a masculinity

16:55that doesn't value our stereotypically femininity and most cultures around the world most traditional cultures um you can say you know they're more sexist or they're not more sexist or whatever you want to say but most cultures around the world actually have a history of valuing the stereotypically masculine and the stereotypically feminine and that's true in china that's true in all sorts of countries in africa all sorts of countries in europe that there's a whole history of valuing our hard and soft sides

17:26the united states doesn't have that history we've never valued truly we've never valued truly our soft sides i'm not saying we've never valued poetry and the arts etc we obviously have uh but we've more valued it in terms of you know the bourgeois elite you know who who has their cultural institutions and we value that we don't value it fundamentally our sensitivity you know how i can prove it also uh our sel programs which is a 90 of our our schools in the united states it's social emotional learning

17:58programs they emphasize emotional regulation which is regulating your emotion that's a hard skill uh they don't ever include emotional sensitivity and think about how interesting and how equally important nurturing your natural emotional sensitivity is to other people's feelings right that's the first time i've heard that i know i know i'm just saying nobody's talking about this and the reason i'm talking about it and the reason i'm talking about it is because boys are you kidding me talk about talk about a group of kids that are emotionally sensitive i mean carol gilligan who's done a lot

18:33of work with girls and women she even said when she read deep secret she's written for 50 years on girls and young women she said when she read deep secret she said it's such a boy's book and i said why she said because their emotions are so raw she said girls cover over all the time they cover over they fake it they fake it so in some sense the soft the sensitivity of ourselves i have learned from listening to boys and young men the importance of the emotional sensitivity oh my goodness they're they're looking for that in their friendships they are rich i'm gonna repeat that okay they're looking

19:07for that in their friendships the emotional sensitivity and we don't even see it as a thing because we feminize that skill and we think it's only necessary for girls um and in fact we accuse girls of being overly sensitive constantly 90 percent of the girls young young women i work with say they've been accused that their whole life and i will say and they'll start getting tears in their eyes i'll say your emotional sensitivity is your superpower um and don't ever lose it and they can't believe i'm saying that right that actually lean into your emotional sensitivity because that is your your human superpower right is to be able to feel the feelings of other people but also feel

19:41your own feelings right feel your own feelings and you talk you talked about how when boys are are sort of first entering your kind of investigations they talk about their relationships and it sounds more like something out of love story i mean but that was that's the most shocking i mean you see that in in the movie close that you know it was based on deep secrets what's amazing in lucas don't's film um and it won by it was nominated or won something like 120 awards around the world it would clearly hit a nerve deep secrets clearly hit a nerve around the world he takes the finding from deep

20:12secrets and then he makes it into a fictional story about two 13 year old boys but what he captures in that which was so moving to me i mean i literally you can imagine rachel i cried when i watched the movie is he is he captured the emotional intensity between boys um the emotional expectations the disappointment when the other boy doesn't come through and the emotional intensity that's not that girls don't do that obviously they're just as sensitive as boys there's not a gender difference there's an emotional sensitivity but i'm just saying in some sense this is gonna now this is an

20:46interpretation this is not actually directly from the data this is an interpretation there's a way it makes me think that because boys aren't nurtured to be emotionally sensitive certainly more like girls are that they actually um in some ways they're more honest with their feelings because it's just how they feel girls learn you know girls get nurtured to be emotionally sensitive to somebody else's feelings and then they learn how to fake it when they when they actually don't feel sensitive to someone's feelings because they're hurting their feelings so in some sense i think we nurture boys going

21:17underground but i think we also nurture girls faking it you know like so that's what you mean by the disconnection that girls experience yeah well this is what this is the disconnection i'll quickly summarize it because we can get off us on another topic but i'll quickly say it boys crisis of connection is centered around disconnecting from others girls crisis of connection is centered around disconnection from the self so girls will say in the data as they enter adolescence they will start to say i don't know right they knew if you ask them questions at eight nine and ten they'll just give

21:48you a direct answer they're truth tellers by the time they're 12 and 13 they'll do that weird thing where they'll say i don't know and then they'll say something you know they i don't know i don't know meaning they're going underground with what they know right and they silence themselves in relationships and i've been teaching this the girls work for 30 years and i have women around the world weep every time they read carol gilligan's work on this on the girls because they all resonate with it the taking yourself out of relationship for the sake of relationship right and boys take the other out

22:18of relationship for the sake of the self you get you got follow what i'm doing yeah so the crisis of connection for boys is sacrificing the other for the sake of the self and for girls it's sacrificing the self for the sake of the other but the point is the point is um you can't have a relationship if either one is sacrificed there's no relationship if either one is sacrificed so the solution is to not sacrifice either side in a meaningful beautiful connection and that's what boys are asking for in my data and girls are asking for in the girls and women young women's data and so this this idea that

22:53in a culture that doesn't you know doesn't even value friendships doesn't even value relationships we don't have these conversations we don't have we don't have these conversations about emotional sensitivity is your is your human superpower and we wouldn't survive as a species according to charles darwin by the way if we didn't have this emotional sensitivity do you know he does studies of his children he wrote a journal about his children and he he notes in the journal i have it in in the rebels book i quote him a lot actually from his journal he talks about the sensitivity of his

23:24sons and his daughters and he's struck by it he's struck by it how emotionally sensitive they are um and then i'm also finding it i sat in a four-year-old classroom for a year and um you just see the four-year-old the five-year-old the capacity to care and cooperate and be curious with each other it's remarkable how social we are in the first years and then we lose it because we grow up in a culture that clashes with our nature and that's what's so wonderful about your books you have so many stories that you can draw from that bring everything to life yeah and i want to talk about curiosity i

23:54also want to talk about there's a few other things i'd really like to talk about yeah absolutely so and you talk about hard and soft values what do you mean by hard and soft soft values in a way that listeners can understand i should frame it as stereotypically hard because obviously you know math skills is not actually harder than writing a complete essay right uh but we stereotype it as stereotypically hard so by hard i just literally mean uh cognition thinking math and science those

24:24are a hard profession so-called hard professions um uh you know autonomy stoicism all the things that we associate with stereotypic masculinity um the soft skills the soft values the soft professions nursing teaching right i mean all the things that involve caring uh the feelings relationships connection me you know i mean like everything we've stereotyped as feminine as girly girly or gay as the boys say uh in my data um is is is deemed lesser than or not important or actually getting in

24:58the way of the hard stuff so to me it's the problem i'm going to say something that's you're going to be surprised by rachel but it really is coming from the boys the problem is not masculinity the problem is a culture that values only one side of ourselves and not the other and when we right when we are naturally hard and soft so i'll give an example i'm going to give a concrete example for your listeners let's say imagine rachel you're telling me about a very difficult experience and you're crying you're starting to cry and uh i'm trying to be i'm your friend and i'm trying to be empathic

25:30and i feel like crying right but i'm not going to cry and that's my stoicism i'm in my name of sensitivity to your feelings i'm actually going to be stoic because if i start to cry you are then going to feel like you have to care for me um and so i know that if i start crying i need to actually just focus on why you feel sad and supporting you not to start crying and then make it based on me that's an example of where you're using your stoicism and your sensitivity at the exact same time and i

26:00could give a million examples of where we're looking in relationships we're looking for autonomy and we're looking for connection at the very same time we want to say our views right our open views that's autonomy girls saying what they feel and boys right want to say what they feel too uh and what they think and know and at the same time they want the connection and in the best well-connected relationships i'm going to give now uh relational advice to the parents it always entails autonomy and connection it always entails autonomy and connection in a relationship to be a healthy relationship

26:32when i value rachel what you truly think about something that's valuing your autonomy and i do it in the name of wanting to connect to you right so yes so it's the whole splitting of this so-called hard and soft which is not hard and soft it's just human needs human needs and capacities that we deemed hard and soft because we think in a very gender binary way um and then we've given these gender identities that's really hurting everybody it's hurting everybody yes and one of the things

27:04we talk about a lot on this podcast is about the importance of allowing some autonomy with your kids rather than trying to control them and that trust does involve them being more connected to you rather than less and i think a lot of people find that very stressful okay rachel let's repeat that because that is the one thing parents are not hearing is that ultimately when you set boundaries when you set limitations as well as when you intervene and say things like that's gaslighting to your child to help them understand what's happening at school by somebody else that is actually nurturing their autonomy

27:37uh in the name of connection and that setting boundaries setting a clear syncs of what they should accept with others but also what you're going to accept with them that is connection that is saying i love you i love you and we're both equally important in this relationship and right and as i've said repeatedly and this is what boys and girls teach us healthy relationships involve neither side being sacrificed so the mother's not sacrificed the father's not sacrificed the child's not sacrificed

28:10you are figuring out how to work out so the mother let's use mothers because we're both mothers uh the mother can express what they know and feel and they also allow spaces that the daughter can express or the son can express what they know and feel and they also know that with many sons mothers talk to me about this all the time their sons don't express their feelings um that's fine there's no there's no rule that said boys should express their feelings to their mothers and if anything i have a son who never

28:40really expresses feelings to me he didn't want to it's not his personality it's just he didn't want to uh we have a very close relationship uh we are very very close um i think he's a really good boyfriend to his girlfriend um but he basically had friends he had you know he played on a soccer team he had friends good friends he's still friends with his friends from high school he's 25 um he's a healthy kid um but and my auto my sort of desire for his autonomy right is allowing him not to feel pressured

29:11to tell me about his feelings give them autonomy to express their feelings whoever they want to express their feelings to and if it's not me mom it's okay it's okay that's that's giving them so should we say to them because we'll come on to this curiosity now but should we be saying to them i hope you've got someone that you can talk to ultimately they know that already you know i mean 13 year old boys know that they're actually smarter than us we grew up in an anti-social culture all of us did and so we've actually become in the data shows us by the way not my data national data

29:44uh shows we become less intelligent less cognitive intelligent less emotionally intelligent we become less intelligent in perspective taking isn't that shocking rachel we are less able to do perspective taking so i'm just saying our kids are smarter than us when it comes to relational and emotional intelligence so they already know that you don't need to say that what i would say is engage with your child that they if they're not someone that shares with you and i can relate to it because my son in some ways really never did um uh engage with them on their level meaning asking them you

30:15know the details when he would play uh play a soccer game asking the details of what i thought he played well at what he his opinion that he played well what did he struggle with what did he think about how the team played together so i'm i'm engaging with something that's important to him and that's a form of closeness because i'm letting him lead the the direction of the conversation i'm not doing the thing that i tortured my daughter with and i'm not understating how much i tortured her i write about this because i still feel guilty i tortured her with this one question every day because she was uh less focused than my son did you do your homework and do you have a test no i mean you know

30:50that's what i did i did for four years could you imagine machel being a young woman in this culture and your mother asks almost every day done that we've all lost the wrong questions i'm not beating myself up i i'm beating myself a little bit but but i'm just saying the point is is we're asking our questions these questions to our children we're torturing them basically psychologically and then and then we're asking for healthy children it's like you got to meet them where they are so if you start asking i'm going to now talk about anything let's pick a behavior that you don't like in your children they're always on tiktok um engage your curiosity on tiktok what are they

31:24who are they following why are they following that person honestly even if it's andrew tate i don't care who it is just say oh you know i'm actually listen with curiosity why are they following andrew tate and maybe they'll say something horrible that maybe they'll say because i hate girls i don't know um and then say well let's i'd love to see what you're following i mean basically open your mind be curious about your children what are they following who are they following even if you disagree that is irrelevant that is irrelevant in talking about them what will inevitably happen when you talk about it

31:54they will come to their own values because they were raised by you right so they may be rejecting their your values at the moment but if you start to have a real relationship with them that's about what they're interested in what they're doing they will come to trust you and guess what was going to happen naturally i've seen it happen many many times they start to adhere to the values of their parents because they feel they trust them their their parent is actually taking them seriously and saying you know it seems like a really difficult site like andrew tate for example it seems like it would

32:26be a really toxic site what my student is finding which is fascinating she did her thesis on this actually there's a lot of pro-social behavior going on on andrew tate it's so interesting where they're mocking andrew tate people are getting on and then mocking his comments uh and she was she she's writing a paper about it there's a lot of pro-social of the men and a lot of older men too by the way mocking andrew tate and the immorality of his statements and andrew tate never responds of course he just posts uh but the point is is that actually i was shocked how much but you know people

32:59if you talk to teenagers which is one of the things i find absolutely fascinating because i did an entire episode where i just talked to my daughters about what they do on social media yeah um they said the first thing they do is go to the comments so actually these people posting comments on andrew tate's timeline have quite an influence but that's what we realized in doing the study the other thing is you find interesting things so my daughter used to follow someone who teaches you know women how to apply makeup and when she was like 14 and it drove me crazy that she watched her and then i said i i asked

33:32but then i finally you know i finally woke up and smelled the coffee and i said um so why do you follow her like what's what's interesting and it was so interesting i just remember this she's 14 she said mom she has a really soothing voice and it it makes me relax it makes me relax listening to her so she said i don't really follow like her makeup advice but she said the way she talks it's like it makes me feel super relaxed and i thought that was so beautiful that she found a way to basically de-stress

34:03by listening to this person talk about something it's not going to be tested on she's not going to have to know it she's just talking and she also thought she was really pretty which honestly that's great okay you know so it gave her sort of a sense of relaxation and it was that moment when she talked about that i thought oh we we parents have it all wrong just engage with our children even if they are talking about their emotions with us engage with their children at their level so that they come to see you as interested in them getting them to have your values or getting them to behave the way you

34:34want them to behave you know which is what all parents that were so anxious that we're just determined to make sure our kids do what we want them to do and that leads to the crisis of connection right that's one of the really challenging things i remember talking to your mom just recently who said i would i was great with younger kids i'm finding this so tough and i said that's really interesting why is that and she said because they're forcing me to grow i'm having to listen to them and try and work things out but but it's also i have to say very now i'll get a little bit more intimate i have to say it's also very hard because we were raised in an anti-social culture too

35:06so you know my my have you done your homework the reason i forgive myself massively is that that's the culture i was raised in that if you didn't do your homework and you didn't do you know and you didn't obsess about your tests every day that you weren't going to be successful um and ultimately in this world you know it will make it more challenging for you to be successful in terms of making money um but you know i never it never occurred to me to nurture her relationships it never occurred to me until i started until i wrote that book deep secrets and by that time she was

35:40already 13 uh but it never occurred to me that actually i think the i'm going to say something big here i would say that the only after 40 years of listening to young people and being a mom and a and a of two a 26 year old and a 23 year old i would say the most important task of all parents is help your children have healthy relationships that's it that's i love that yeah that's just that's the that's the only that's the only goal you should have and and that means that's going to be this can be hard for moms and dads to hear this you have to model healthy relationships you have to model

36:14them so if you're if you're married you have to model that if you're not married or just you know as i say unencumbered um you have to model healthy friendships you have to model healthy friendships even when you are married right you have to model your own autonomous friendships that are separate from your husband or your wife you know you have to model healthy relationships you have to model healthy relationships with your own mother right in your relationship with your mother even if you fight even if she does horrible things you have to model for your daughter and son what is it

Repairing Relationships

36:44Repair. Right. What is it? How do you repair relationships that are going through a hard time? You have to model the repair. Thank you for using that term. You have to model the repair. And so ultimately, to help your children have healthy relationships, thank you for bringing that up, Rachel. It's so important. It's not just about the good things. It's about betrayal. It's about people hurting each other's feelings. It's about saying something offensive to your best friend and they're being hurt and then refusing to talk to you.

37:15It's about the hard things that happen in relationships. And how do you work when you love someone? I even say this to people in marriages, whether they're gay or straight. It just matters to me. If you love each other, you have to figure out how to repair, right? How do you repair so that nobody gets sacrificed in this relationship? Because they're not going to have healthy relationships if you are modeling. You hurt my feelings, Rachel. I'm done with you. I'm done with you. You did this. There's a lot of that. Yeah, there's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. You didn't do this.

37:45I'm done with you. I'm not going to deal with that. It's good when it's obviously this toxic dynamic going on. But I'm just saying that whole sense of the value of repair. Edtronic says growth is about learning how to repair. That is what growth is. It's learning how to repair relationships that have been misattuned or misaligned. One of the things I want to say about it is I think we don't talk enough about interconnectedness. Interconnectedness means that when we go back into a situation and say, actually, this was

38:18really painful for me because of this, you create a situation where you can both grow. You have to assume the other person is able to grow from getting feedback rather than saying, you exhibited this toxic behavior and I'm done with you because clearly you can't grow. And I think it's that growth mindset that we need to be much more clear about with our kids and with ourselves to accept that we're going to make stupid mistakes, do things wrong every day and that we have to be prepared to go, okay, I think we can do something with

38:48this. Yeah. No, I couldn't agree with you more. In addition to what you said, not instead. In addition, I want everyone to remember that we're all swimming in toxic waters of an anti-social culture. So emphasizing repair of relationships is so down on our priority list of what we value. You know, we're fundamentally a culture that values, I don't care how you think about capitalist society. We are a money over people society, global economy that's money over

39:18people. That makes it very hard for our tender selves, social selves to have healthy relationships. So I don't want anyone blaming themselves for not doing well in this culture because no one can do well in this culture. But what you can try to do is at least stay focused on what you can do with your kids or your friends or your partner to try to nurture their hard and soft sides and nurture your own hard and soft sides. But ultimately it is only until we recognize as a collective, which we're starting to with shows like this, Rachel, we're starting to, we are starting to recognize it with

39:53movies like Close, right? We're now recognizing in the United States, there's a problem, right? There's a problem. So when I say an anti-social culture, I don't need to prove it to anybody in the United States, right? This is a clearly a time in which we are so anti-social. We are hating on each other in a way that I've never had in my generation. So at that moment, we are actually rising above. We are actually having conversations about how do we create social infrastructure in cities, social infrastructures in neighborhoods? How do we build community? I mean, there's so much good

40:24work happening. Vivek Murthy is talking about social health. Nobody's ever talked about it. He was, he called it loneliness. I want to call it social health so that it's more positive rather than negative. But the point is states are now working with governors who want to bring social health into the public health discussion in their state. I'm working with Utah and California. Both of them are interested in bringing social health. People want change. They don't want life to be this. I always say in my book, Rebels with a Cause, their cause of young people, Rachel, is to care. They want us to care, not just about them, but about each other. That's what their cause

40:59is. Because we're naturally caring animals and they're looking at us and saying, what are you doing? Right? You're teaching me not to care. I have a fifth grade quote. I have to set the scene quickly. She's, I'm at a cafe in San Francisco. I'm writing my book for Harvard, Our Social Nature and an antisocial culture. And a girl and what looks like her sister and her friend are sitting at a cafe. And I always talk to people. It's like, I'm the embarrassment of my children. And so I went over to their table and they had the name of their school on their sweatshirt.

41:31And I said, I'm a professor and I'm writing a book. I'm just curious about, tell me about your school. So the older girl makes, she's in eighth grade. She makes a face. Yeah. She said, there's some good teachers or some bad teachers. And then the thick ass fifth grader, her sister says under her breast something. And I said, what, what did you say? I didn't hear what you said. She said, my teacher teaches us to be selfish and not to care about others. What? Yeah. She said that. And I literally got the, I just got the chills. She called it.

42:04She called it. And I, I literally went like, I literally did exactly your reaction. And I was like, what? And then I looked at all three girls and I said, oh my goodness. You know exactly what she's talking about. The teacher that says, focus on your own work. Don't focus on other people. Focus on yourself. I'm not blaming teachers. I'm just saying that's part of the culture is that you focus on yourself. You know, don't care so much. Yeah. Individual. Don't care about what other people think and feel. We tell our children to do that all the time. Sometimes it's for good reason, right? Some, when you're getting bullied and stuff, but oftentimes we tell them, even if it's not for

42:35good reason, we just want them to focus, right? These are 10 year olds. You ask them questions and they are truth tellers and they tell you exactly what I've been studying 40 years doing research on. And it's stunning to me that 10 year olds know and adults don't know. Isn't it amazing? And actually I've got one kid who's the truth teller and she's the hardest kid to parent because she'll just tell me like it is. And it's like, oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. I want you to talk quickly about the listening projects. Yeah. Oh, good. Because what an interesting thing that is. Yeah. Yeah. Good. So we just started, by the way, I do want to let your

43:08audience know, because I know you get a lot of listeners, that we just started something called the Social Health Institute, where we're going to be training in the framework and method of the Listening with Curiosity project around the world. So we're training leaders and educators and young people. We have a team of 12 trainers. It's called the Social Health Institute. The first of its kind. And we've done lots of research showing the effectiveness. So what it is essentially is I realized that there was a method of interviewing that I had been doing for decades with young people, with my team, that was hearing the story underneath the story. You get what I'm saying? So that ultimately

43:40kids will say, do you want to know what I think or what I really think? I realized I had a method. No, no, really. Because they know they fake it. They know they tell you the story that you want to hear versus the story that they really think. So I realized I had a method. This is about 2010. I realized when people kept on asking me, how did you get boys to talk like that in Deep Secrets? Like girls ask me that too. You know, like, how did you get them to talk like that? And I realized it wasn't just me. It's my whole research team. But I realized I was training them in a method that gets at what young people really think. And there's a method to it. And I realized basically

44:15that I didn't want to just teach it to doctoral students and people doing their dissertations and their research. I wanted to teach it to 10-year-olds, you know, so they would do it with each other. So we went in. And we all need it. Yes. Yeah, we all need it. But I just wanted to teach it to children so they could do it with each other. You know what I mean? Yes. So in 2015, I went in to begin to train it and to develop a curriculum. We created with a group of seventh grade boys, which again is a little older than 10. It's about 12. And we created an entire curriculum based on working with 12-year-olds. And they were much better

44:48than the doctoral students at the method because they're much more connected to their natural curiosity. So I'll give an example of a 12-year-old when you open up their curiosity. This is a room full in the Lower East Side of New York, which is a mostly immigrant, children of color, low-income neighborhood. It's our first day of training and listening with curiosity. And I say, okay, so the first thing we're going to do is you guys are going to interview me and you can ask any question you want. But if I don't want to answer, I'll say I don't want to answer. So you can ask

45:19anything you want. You have to imagine 22 12-year-olds, right? 22 12-year-olds. Boys. Oh, sorry. It's a boys' school. It's a boys' school. So it's 22 boys. And so the very first question, which I just thought was hilarious, is are you married? Which I just thought was like totally random. I thought they were going to ask a question like, are you a teacher? You know, whatever. Who are you? They said, are you married? And I said, I told them I'm going to mess with them in terms of I'm not going to be, I'm going to be a hard interviewer because, interviewee, because I want them to work at it. So they said, are you married? And I said, no. And then they said,

45:52have you ever been married? And I said, yes. And they started laughing. And that's because, right, is for all of you parents that forgot, that's relational intelligence because they understood I was messing with them, right? I wasn't just saying no, yes, but I was messing with them by giving them one word answers. So they started laughing. And then the next question was, I've had this so many times, but this is one story that David Brooks from the Times keeps on telling because it's powerful. They said, do you still love your ex-husband? That was their next question. And then it was, does he know? How does he know? These are all questions from across the classroom.

46:27Do your children know? How do they know? I mean, I'm just telling you, when you open up the fountain of the curiosity of even young boys, right, young boys from working class communities that get heavily stereotyped in such negative ways, when you open up the curiosity of young people, your jaw is going to drop because we've been now doing it for 10 years. It's not the curriculum. It's the whole reorientation of not what I can teach you, but what I can learn from you about you,

46:58but also about me, right? Because guess what happens when the boys are asking me about, do I still love my ex-husband? What are they learning about? It's not just me. What are they learning about? Rachel, just tell me what they're learning. When they ask the question, when I answer the question. How relationships work, love. They're learning about love. They're learning about what happens in love. And can you still love someone when you break up? And boys are learning about themselves. And then this is the beautiful thing. Every time this happens, I'm very emotional, as you can tell in your interview with me. And so oftentimes when I get interviewed by young

47:31people, boys and girls, non-gender binary, it doesn't matter, by young people, their questions are so powerful that I get teary-eyed, right? I get teary-eyed because their questions are so amazing. Like I've had young girls, the bad girls in the classroom, when I took them out of class and I said, okay, you're going to interview me because they were being bad. Their first question was, where does your name Niobe come from? And you may think that's a boring question, but nobody ever asked me that, Rachel, ever. And then they said, how did you name your daughter? And did your name Niobe shape how you named your daughter? I mean, these are 12-year-old bad girls, right? I mean,

48:04I'm just saying, when you open up the curiosity, this is what happens. We call it transformative interviewing, and this is why. It not only transforms how you see the interviewee, but it transforms how you see yourself. Because all of a sudden you have the bad girls at 12 and boys at 12 thinking that they are powerful question askers. And you even got a grown-up lady to have tears in her eyes, meaning you're a powerful, you know, you have powerful relational intelligence. And you could see the look on their faces. I had the girls come back in the room for that

48:36example. And I told the whole class what a brilliant job they did interviewing me and how they got to the depths of my identity by asking me about my name. And that you could have seen the pride on their faces, right? That they had actually gotten me, right, to tear up, that they had actually made an impact on my life. We had an NPR interviewer talk about her relationship with her mother, with a group of boys. And she said, it was like therapy, Niobe. Their questions were so good.

49:09It was like therapy. And she really did. She said, being interviewed by a group of 12-year-old boys was like therapy. Because I'm just saying, and that's what I sit there and I listen to these questions. I've been doing it for 10 years. Even the stereotypically kid who only is on his computer and blah, blah, blah, will ask, where are you safe when you ask him, what's your thick question? So when you start opening up their curiosity, you cannot believe that we don't value it. You mentioned thick. These are terms that you use, thick, then. What do you mean by that? Only adults ask that question, by the way, Rachel. Only adults.

49:41Oh, really? Yeah. Like I'm, okay. No, no, no, no. I'm just saying that. Starting in college all the way up, college and all the way up, people ask. For those under 18, I would say actually 15. For those under 15, they don't ask, which is amazing to me. They get it. It's your question that feels real. Your real question. You're a thick question. You're not your thin question. So I'll tell you one quick story. Over during COVID, we were on Zoom and we were training a group of 12 years old. 12 years was

50:12such a magical period. It was boys and girls, et cetera. And there was a boy sort of who, he'd never turned on his camera. And he had a sort of, what is those transformer robot things on his screen? You know what I mean? So it was like stereotypic boy and he never would turn on his camera ever. And I finally said in the end of the session, I said, okay, we're going to go around the room and everybody's telling me the thick question. And I didn't define thick. I wanted to see if they would ask me. And I said, everybody's going to tell me your thick question and I'm going to call on you and we're going to do it. And I was thinking with this kid, I was thinking he's never

50:42going to do it. But I went around the kid and then I finally got to this kid's name. Let's make him Michael. And I said, okay, Michael, what's your thick question? And I couldn't see him. And I hear him say something. And I said, I can't hear you. Like say it a little louder. And he's mumbled it again. And then I say, okay, Michael, we really want to hear your question. So can you say it one more time and say it louder? He turns on his camera and you see this beautiful boy, little longish hair, totally beautiful boy. He puts his face really close to the camera like that.

51:16And he says, I want to know where you feel safe. And he says that and you hear, look at all the kids and all the kids are like, like they're all, they're all like that. Like here's little Michael who never said a word. That's just the question. I was flabbergasted. I mean, I was just silenced. And then he says beautifully. Yeah, that's my question. Oh God. Oh, this is just incredible. So incredible. Think about how much we do, how much damage we do to our kids that we don't tap

51:49into this. We don't get them to ask thick questions. We don't get them to engage with each other. We don't get them to reveal. Finally, one last study. There's so many studies. We asked college students what questions they would like to be asked by other people, friends, mothers, fathers, teachers. Great question. So first of all, do you know what one of the most common questions were? It's amazing. What do you value? What do you care about? Right? And why? Right? That was the most common question they wanted to be asked. And when we asked them, this was her idea to do the follow-up

52:23question. When we asked them, why do you want to be asked that question? Okay, you ready? This is the finding. It's a major finding. They said to be seen as I see myself, not how you stereotype me to be. So what we learned is that question asking is a way to break down stereotypes. Because once you start asking questions, you cannot see the person in a stereotype any longer. But you cannot see them that way. And college students know that. So they want to be asked really basic questions. Not they

52:55don't want to be asked, what's your major? Where do you live? They want to be asked, what do you care about? What do you value? Why do you value that? You know, they want to be asked about their first name. That's incredibly common. They want to be asked whether they like their first name. And then why? Because they see their name as part of their identity. Even if their name is Michael. They see it. They have a relationship with their first name. They want to be asked these basic questions to be seen, to be seen and listened to. And what's incredible is that nobody feels seen. And it's because we're not asking questions. We're just assuming, Rachel, because you look

53:29a certain way that you must think of a certain way. That's what we're doing with each other constantly. And we're blabbing on about ourselves. You know, I think this, I think that, I think this, without saying, hey, Rachel, what do you think? It's interesting, isn't it? Because when I've been trying to help my girls learn about how to make friends and, you know, when my daughter, she's just started university this year. And, you know, my top tip has always been just ask questions. I just ask people questions. And I think the difficulty they have is they're always like, well, is that too personal? Or is that an awkward

54:01question? And that's where we've made it difficult for them because we don't teach them how to ask thick questions. We're kind of superficial in the way we work with them. But also we don't value the kind of questions that young people want to be asked. We're not talking about intrusive questions like, you know, do you have a boyfriend? Basically things that probably are intrusive if you don't know the person, right? The questions about what do you value? What do you care about? Nobody thinks that's intrusive, but we don't think of that as a real question. We think that's like, why would you ask that? Well, well, duh. It's because we've

54:33privileged certain types of questions that oftentimes are rude. Things that have a judgment implicit in them, right, are our questions. We place judgment and curiosity. And we ask thick questions, which means they don't have judgment in them. It's wanting to learn from you. It's never rude to ask a question that comes from curiosity. I'll give one more example, finally. I keep on saying that, but I have too many examples. I love it. I love it. We were speaking to a young woman. She's African-American. She had beautifully braided, beautiful hair. One of the Chinese-American young person in our team

55:03was with her in the teacher's lounge. She said, do you like your hair? And of course, all the adults in the room panicked that she was suggesting a judgment, right? We immediately tried to cut it down. It was just a question. Do you like your hair? And the girls looked at us like we were crazy. I mean, the African-American girl. And she said, yeah, I really like my hair. And then she started to explain. And then the young girl said, cool. You know, like basically cool. She just, it was a genuine question. But what was so striking to me, even me, I did the same thing. I assumed there was

55:38a judgment racist implication, you know, coming from, I was stereotyping myself, right? An Asian-American person talking to a Black-American person about, do you like your hair? I assumed it was a judgment. And it wasn't. We impose the judgment, Rachel. We impose the judgment. And sometimes it's judgy and it's awful. Kids can be assholes, just like we all can. But I'm just saying, oftentimes when you create a space of asking questions, the questions are always genuine.

56:09When we actually ask questions about what they value, rather than telling them what we think about something, we're moving away from judgment. Because you can't really ask a good question if you're judging. I always say it's not a question. It's basically confirming that I'm right or wrong or that I'm good or bad or whatever it is. It's not a question. A question comes from a five-year-old space filled with wonder. It's judgment-free. I have a mole under my eye and I always get this question for little kids on airplanes when they see close up. And they'll say, why do you have that thing underneath your eye? And the parent always shuts them down.

56:40Because parents see that's rude. And I'll say, no, no, it's not rude. I said, it's actually an interesting thing why we get things on our faces and why it happens and why it's underneath my eye and stuff like that. We impose the judgment. And I want parents to hear that too. If we're going to get our kids to really connect to their curiosity, they have to connect to their curiosity, not judgment. I really want to know why you're watching this TikTok follower. Why are you following this person? I follow people that are kind of silly now when I look back, but they gave me a great source of pleasure. Right. Naibi, what an amazing conversation and some incredible help there.

57:14And I love all the questions. I love the encouraging us to be much more curious. What we'll do is we'll just put all the links in the episode notes and I'll put them on my sub stack so you can easily find Naibi Wei. If you found this useful, ping somebody right now. Just send it to anybody you know who you think might benefit, whether they're a teacher, another parent, a teenager, anybody. And you can contact me on teenagersuntangled at gmail.com. You find me on my website, which is teenagersuntangled.com and my sub stack, which is teenagersuntangled.substack.com. And we'll have all the notes and all the

57:47information there. That's it from us. Thank you so much, Naibi, again. Big hug from me. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.