Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash
Having a front-row seat of preteen behavior can break your heart some days. Especially the way children speak to each other - the cruelty of their comments and insults. Knowing that many of these phrases are simple repetitions of what they’ve heard or seen doesn’t make it hurt less. I believe the greatest factor that will continue to encourage a lack of empathy (and therefore decreased emotional intelligence) is our cultural belief that ‘boys don’t cry’.
I know our generation was certainly raised on this philosophy, successfully creating a generation of men (and often women) who learned from a very young age to stuff their emotions. The only problem is that we cannot selectively suppress or numb emotions. If we swallow our tears or try to ‘drown our sorrows’, we cannot experience the full range of joy, pleasure, or gratitude. And suppressed emotions always find another way to the surface. Anger, passive aggressiveness, projection, or pride (to name a few).
This creates a cycle of boys who become teenagers who (in their attempts to hide any signs of perceived ‘weakness’) become experts at also hiding their shame, fears, and vulnerabilities behind the limited series of socially acceptable options available to them - often leading to substance abuse and addictions of many kinds. ‘Boys don’t cry’ becomes ‘boys will be boys,’ and teenagers become young men who need no excuses for their widely accepted behavior.
The true test of our ability to emotionally regulate comes when we have children and with that the opportunity to break the cycle. Show me a man (or a woman) who can tolerate a crying infant or toddler, and I will show you someone who has done their work. We can simply not deal with other’s emotions if we never learned how to deal with our own.
The beauty is that it is not too late, and we are never too old to learn. We do not have to repeat generational cycles. We have access to teachers and mentors, tools, and resources. A real opportunity to intentionally change the narrative and become the kind of people we needed when we were children.