On JAMA Podcast, Professor Niobe Way Talks Boys' Friendships and Mental Health

“Boys are not loners who don’t care about having friendships. They’re just defended and don’t want to fess up,” says Niobe Way on a JAMA Clinical Reviews podcast, How Adolescent Boys’ Need for Friendship Affects Their Mental Health, released on November 4th. Way, a professor of developmental psychology at NYU Steinhardt, has spent her professional career studying adolescent boys’ relationships with each other. On the JAMA podcast, she discussed interventions that can help boys understand their needs for intimacy and how it impacts their relationships, as well as their mental health.

Way is the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity at New York University (PACH), and the author of  Everyday Courage: The Lives and Stories of Urban Teenagers (NYU Press, 1998) and Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press, 2011).

 Her co-edited volume, The Crisis of Connection (NYU Press, 2018) was the subject of David Brooks’ “Two Cheers for Feminism!”