As a single mother raising a son now in his well-adjusted twenties, I read Dr. Niobe Way’s research as more than academic. We unpack the developmental psychology behind the loneliness epidemic.

I raised my son pretty much alone. There was no resident co-pilot during puberty, adolescence, and beyond to compare notes with at the end of a hard day, no second set of eyes to catch what I might have missed about how he was really doing with his friends. So when I first came across Dr. Niobe Way’s research, I didn’t read it as an academic—I read it as a mother watching her son grow from a boy who talked openly about everything to a young man who, like so many of his peers, learned to keep things close to the vest. Some of what she describes, I recognized instantly. Some of it, I’m grateful my son never fully absorbed—in large part, he tells me, because of the team (or family of choice) he found in the pool through water polo.

He’s in his twenties now, well-adjusted, and partnered with a gem of a woman. To this day, he is close to the friends water polo gave him from junior high through college—and I don’t take that for granted, because Dr. Way’s research makes clear how easily it could have gone the other way.

We’ve all seen it happen. A twelve-year-old boy tells his best friend “I love you, man” without a flicker of self-consciousness. Five years later, that same boy can barely make eye contact with his closest friends. What happened in between isn’t a mystery—it’s a documented pattern, and Dr. Niobe Way Research has spent decades tracking exactly how it unfolds.

As a leading voice in developmental psychology, Dr. Way has interviewed thousands of adolescent boys, and what she’s found upends the tired stereotype that boys simply aren’t wired for closeness. In reality, we’re looking at boys who crave intimacy, articulate it beautifully at thirteen and fourteen, and then watch that language get stripped away as they approach manhood. She calls it a “crisis of connection”—and we think that phrase deserves to be part of the national conversation about mental health.

This isn’t an accident of nature. It’s a cultural project—the kind of conditioning that has given rise to the now-familiar phrase “toxic masculinity.” Rigid masculinity norms teach boys that emotional need is weakness, that vulnerability is feminine, that a “real man” is self-sufficient to the point of solitude. But Dr. Way’s work pushes us past the buzzword and toward something more useful than a label: an honest look at what’s actually happening inside boys’ friendships and what it would take to move beyond toxic masculinity rather than just naming it. So boys do what any of us would do under social pressure: they retreat. They trade “I miss you” for a fist bump. They swap depth for banter. And this is where the world we call the “brosphere” comes in—that whole ecosystem of group chats, gaming lobbies, gym crews, and Sunday sidelines where so much of male social life now happens, governed by unwritten rules some call “bro code” and softened, occasionally, by the closeness of true “bromance.”

The brosphere isn’t all bad. At its best, it gives men a shared shorthand for loyalty—showing up to help someone move, sitting in comfortable silence, having each other’s backs without needing to narrate it. There’s real bonding in that, and plenty of lifelong bromances are built inside it. But at its worst, the brosphere runs on bro code as a muzzle rather than a bond. It polices vulnerability, mocks tenderness, and quietly enforces the idea that a locker-room joke is safer currency than an honest conversation. Boys learn to perform toughness with each other precisely when they need each other the most.

The consequences are showing up everywhere we look. Social isolation among men has become one of the most under-discussed public health crises of our time, and Dr. Way’s research on boys’ friendships connects the dots directly: the emotional fluency we train out of boys in adolescence becomes the isolation we’re now scrambling to explain in grown men. We are, quite literally, watching the roots of the loneliness epidemic get planted in middle school hallways and locker rooms.

The hopeful part of Dr. Way’s work is this: none of it is fixed. Boys don’t lose the capacity for closeness—they lose permission to use it. Which means the antidote isn’t complicated, even if it’s not easy: give boys and men explicit permission, language, and models for connection that don’t require irony to survive.

Looking back, I think the moments that mattered most in my own son’s life weren’t grand interventions. They were small, ordinary permissions—being allowed to say he missed a friend, being allowed to be soft before he had to be strong. He’s told me, in his own words now, how much the tight-knit friendships he built through water polo—from junior high all the way through college—shaped who he became. Those teammates weren’t just people he competed alongside; they were the boys and then men who saw him at his most exhausted, most frustrated, most human, and stuck around anyway. As a single mother, I couldn’t hand him a father’s example of male friendship to model himself after, but I watched a pool deck and a locker room do some of that work instead—at their best, offering exactly the kind of built-in brosphere where loyalty didn’t require anyone to perform toughness. What I could do was refuse to let “man up” be the only message he heard at home. Dr. Way’s research gave language to something I’d only ever known intuitively as a parent: that connection isn’t a given for boys; it’s something we have to actively protect—and sometimes, if we’re lucky, something a sport and a team protect right alongside us.

We sat down with Dr. Way on the podcast to talk through what that looks like in practice—for parents, for partners, and for the men in our own lives.

Like what you’re reading? Want more consciously prepared brain food?

Listen to this Harvesting Happiness episode: Beyond Toxic Masculinity: On Boys, Friendship, and Mental Health with Niobe Way, PhD, Part I or wherever you get your podcasts

Enjoying this theme? Be sure to also check out Part II of this discussion: The Connection Crisis: Decades of Research on Friendship and Belonging with Dr. Niobe Way, PhD, Part II

Resources for Further Exploration

• Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection by Niobe Way (Harvard University Press)—the research at the heart of this conversation, drawn from hundreds of interviews with teenage boys.
• Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture by Niobe Way—her newest work on reshaping the culture boys grow up in.
• The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solutions, co-edited by Niobe Way—a broader look at the science behind the loneliness epidemic.
• The Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH), founded by Dr. Way at NYU, is dedicated to research and education on human connection and empathy.
• Film: Close (2022)—the Oscar-nominated film inspired by Dr. Way’s research on boys’ friendships.

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