Who doesn’t recognize these adorable kids? But how will being the star of a viral video change their lives?
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“Aren’t they precious?”
That was my first thought when I watched the “You Poked My Heart” video after it showed up on my Facebook wall for the umpteeth time.
And they are precious. Watching these little ones wrestle with the difference between “sprinkling” and “raining,” based on the inarguable statements of the one authority they know to always be right; their mothers, we smile, remembering a time we didn’t doubt a word our mommies said either. Watching the two little girls, both trying to convince the little boy that it is, indeed, raining, we can’t help but want to scold the bossy one, or pat the little peacemaker for trying to take a softer approach. And watching the little boy, cheeks flushed, eyes wet, turn away to protect his poor, poked heart, we want to scoop him up and reassure him that hearts heal, even when they’ve been poked.
Almost immediately after watching that video I came across a reference to a book by Dan Kindlon, Ph.D. and Michael Thompson, Ph.D., called Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. This phrase jumped out at me from one of the reviews: “… therapists Kindlon and Thompson argue that boys desperately need a new standard of “emotional literacy,” showing how our culture’s dominant masculine stereotypes shortchange boys and lead them toward emotional isolation.”
So I wonder if the boys whose pictures and videos are making us smile today are going to suffer through their tomorrows because everyone, including their peers, has seen them cry.
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“Emotional isolation.” I can’t imagine a darker kind of hell. But I know how cruel kids can be, to each other, and to themselves.
My imagination fast-forwarded about eight years. To when these adorable kids would be poised on the verge of teenhood. Are the girls now known as “the bossy girl who poked his heart,” and “the little peacemaker who tried to comfort him?” And what about the little fellow, is he now known as “the wuss who cried because some girl poked him in the chest?”
As Kindlon and Thompson point out (I grabbed the Kindle version and had a hard time putting it down long enough to write this) boys are rewarded for stoicism, toughness, the ability to NOT show emotion. What’s adorable to adults is fodder for taunting if you’re a teenaged boy. The authors refer to a “culture of cruelty” and the “tyranny of toughness,” and the book links these social norms to statistics for suicide and violence in adolescent boys.
So I wonder if all the little boys whose pictures and videos are making us smile today are going to suffer through their tomorrows because everyone, including their peers, has seen them cry. Or if they’ll become tough enough, and stoic enough, to live down the innocent emotions that were shared and preserved on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, twitter, and blogs and websites around the world.
I wonder too, if it doesn’t fall to us, since we’re the ones benefiting from the heartwarming smiles that their childhood vignettes inspire for us, to educate ourselves about what this little boy, and all the other “precious” boys in pictures and videos gone viral, will go through as they become young men. I wonder if it isn’t our social responsibility, whether or not we are raising boys of our own, to create a world where emotions are honored, where tears are accepted, and where poking hearts is, in fact, a serious offence.
Photo: Youtube/Ty Wooley