Love your boys

Boys should be tough! Boys don’t cry! Boys don’t talk about their feelings. Our culture teaches young men that they will be valued for their toughness. Many parents, especially fathers, feel it is their duty to toughen up their boys in order to prevent them from being thought of as soft or weak. They don’t give the same affection, or freedom to feel, to their boys as they do to their girls. Those parents are wrong. Boys need all the same love and emotional freedom that girls do, and without it, their psychological development will be incomplete. So many of those “toughened up” boys grow up to be insecure men who are unable to exist peacefully and productively in this world. Jails and prisons are full of them. Loving your boys teaches them that they are worthy of giving and receiving love themselves. And that is the greatest gift a parent can give a child.