Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection
ISBN: 9780674061361
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Male friendship; Emotions in adolescence; Emotions in children;

Way's (Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers) new book offers a surprising glimpse into the hearts of American boys, revealing a group of lonely young men who crave acceptance and belonging and deeply miss the friendships of their childhood. "The very social and emotional capacities, needs and desires that are associated with being female and gay are not only the very same skills that are at the foundation...of our survival as individuals and as a species; they are also capacities, needs, and desires that boys themselves have..." In what must be one of the more compulsively readable Academic books on psychology in recent memory, Way recounts the hundreds of interviews her team conducted in American high schools. The voices present are heartbreakingly authentic in revealing a pattern, a gradual drift away from "emotionally intimate same-sex friendships" with other boys and toward a destructive stereotype of manliness that perpetuate the false notion that "boys are only interested in one thing." Way, a professor of Applied Psychology at NYU, and director of the Ph.D. program in Developmental Psychology, clearly makes her case. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Niobe Way is Professor of Applied Psychology at New York University and director of the Ph.D. program in Developmental Psychology.