• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Becoming a Soulful Parent

A Path to the Wisdom Within

  • About the Book
    • A Care Package for the Soulful Parent
    • Editorial Reviews
  • About Dasee
    • Contact Me
  • Workshops
    • Becoming a Soulful Grandparent
    • Becoming Soulful at Home
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Media

Cultivating Our Sons’ Emotional Lives

June 16, 2021 by Dasee Berkowitz Leave a Comment

I love hearing my kids talk about their future selves. My daughter will wonder aloud, “How many kids do you think I will have?” I catch my son saying sometimes, “I am going to be a good dad one day.”

With Father’s Day coming up, in addition to celebrating, honoring and elevating the role of the fathers in our lives, I am thinking about how fathers model what it means to be “a man” especially for our sons.

While Men’s studies is an emerging field, with many books and articles written on the subject, one piece that struck me was a New York Times article from 2017 entitled, “Talking to boys the way we talk to girls.”

It shares studies of how parents use language of accomplishment like “proud” and “achieve” with their sons while speaking with our girls in a more analytical way and with words that express shadow emotions like sadness. While as infants and toddlers boys are empathic by nature, as they grow boys can learn stoicism as they act and interact with the world around them.

As fathers and mothers, how can we become more aware of how we speak to our boys to build on their natural empathy? How can we nurture their emotional world to help them lead more resilient and healthy lives?

Dr. Susan David, a Harvard psychologist, shares that we need to let, “boys experience their emotions, all of them, without judgment — or by offering them solutions. This means helping them learn the crucial lessons that ‘Emotions aren’t good or bad’ and that ‘their emotions aren’t bigger than they are. They aren’t something to fear.’”

Asking them questions like “How are you feeling about x?” and “I see that you are angry/frustrated/upset, what’s going on for you?” can be a step toward bringing their emotions out into the world and indicate to them that they have a place in your home and in your relationship.  As my 8 year old reminds me, “Don’t keep your feelings in your heart, your heart is not a machsan (storage closet.)” It sounds better in Hebrew!

Standing by, witnessing, and holding their sometimes stormy emotional lives is one small step that fathers and mothers can take to help our boys experience the range of their emotions and become more fully evolved people, partners and the fathers of tomorrow.

Blessings for the journey,

Dasee

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Filed Under: Jewish Wisdom, Parenting Tagged With: Father's Day, Parenting, parents, soulful parent, Spiritual

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To see other Ayeka Programs visit the Ayeka website at www.ayeka.org.il

Ayeka is a 501c3 recognized US non-profit.

Learn more

Like Us On Facebook

Facebook Pagelike Widget

© Copyright 2020 Kasva Press · All Rights Reserved ·