The Battle for Expression We Can Win for Our Children

Recently, a mother on Twitter posted this:

Yesterday a male teacher openly mocked my son for turning back at the school gate to wave goodbye to me. Today my son said he wants to stop waving from now on. This is how it starts.

It’s a heart felt message and a terribly common experience, parents watching in real time the slow and ugly encroachment of a more disconnected, emotionally detached version of gender taking over our young sons’ lives. In her book, When Boys Become Boys, Judy Chu’s research shows how masculine culture is already impacting boys in a pre-K class. Four year old boys are already hiding their emotional acuity and taking on the stoic performance of masculinity our culture demands of them.

Hear Judy talk about her work with boys on the Remaking Manhood podcast.

This is Man Box culture, the rules of our dominance-based culture of masculinity, being enforced right before our eyes.

But we don’t have to feel helpless.
We don’t have to passively accept what’s taking place. This is a battle we can actively fight for our kids, the battle to protect and grow their connection in the world.

How do we do this? The answer is simple and elegant. We grow boys’, girls’ and non binary children’s relational intelligence. Put simply, we stay in conversation with our children. That’s it. That’s the solution.

We stay in conversation with them, asking them questions, holding space for them to deconstruct what they are seeing all around them in our culture. In the case of a teacher like the one described in the opening of this article, we might ask, “Why do you think your teacher did that? What do you think his home life was like when he was little like you are?”

Conversations at that level might seem like a lot for a little girl or boy to take on, but understand, they are already taking it on every single day, out in the larger culture. Very young children are quite able to begin engaging these kinds of questions in age appropriate ways. If we fail to be in conversation with children to help them make sense of things, Man Box culture will successfully suppress our sons and daughter’s full range of expression. It will train them out of revealing their whole selves, their authentic ways of being in the world.

It is in the process of relating, in the back and forth of little daily conversations with us, our children’s full authentic selves continue to be vital and emergent. We can start these conversations in age appropriate ways when our kids are as young as 3 or 4, inviting our children to consider the emotional frames of others. “What do you think she was feeling?” or “I saw what you did for that boy, tell me more about that.” Conversations like these take place in the little moments, walking home, getting dinner ready. Once we start asking our kids to offer their observations about the world, it’s powerful.

Our job as adults, as parents, teachers, coaches, scout leaders, ministers, family members, as adults on any community, is to create a container for children where we host their whole selves and make absolutely sure they feel seen and heard. The emotional connection this more human way of being creates in contrast to the isolating experience our bullying culture at large gives children, provides clear, felt experiences about what works for them and what does not. Eventually, children reach a tipping point of ever increasing agency and authentic connection, where the brittle cardboard caricatures of the gender binary will hold no appeal for them. They’ll choose connection, because they were born creatures of connection.

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Want to learn more about how to have these conversations with your kids?

Dr. Saliha Bava and I have authored The Relational Book for Parenting. It’s full of fables, stories, games and ideas for growing our kids relational intelligence. Help yours learn how to create and care for healthy, authentic relationships.

“As we are shaping them, they are shaping us.” -Dr. Saliha Bava

Learn more in our brief video:

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This post was previously published on Remakingmanhood.medium.com.

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