Are we teaching children to disconnect from feelings?

"It's the essence of traditional masculinity that you can run from shame, helplessness, powerlessness. We teach them (boys & men) to disconnect from their feelings, to disconnect from vulnerability, to disconnect from other people."

Terry Real, Family Therapist in Beyond Men and Masculinity

I was watching Beyond Men and Masculinity on Netflix and I was so grateful to see (in a mainstream channel) that we're finally understanding how much harm we've done to boys and men by teaching them to disconnect from their feelings.

In this documentary, which I highly recommend, men open up and share how they feel inadequate, how their fathers' scorn becomes their own voice, how they suppress their feelings in the name of independence and being strong. They talk about feeling shame and the relation between running away from your feelings and male violence.

Why am I talking about this and what does it have to do with Aware Parenting?

It is widely accepted that Trauma has physical effects, books have been written on how the body keeps the score. What is less widely known is that teaching children, even inadvertently, to not feel their feelings, also has an impact - on their bodies and on their sense of self which in turn affects how they relate to the world and one another.

The film mentions how by age 4 or 5, boys have internalised that crying or showing their feelings is bad - or for girls. Yet there are some studies that this process starts even earlier - men reported feeling more uncomfortable hearing a 3 month old baby boy cry, as opposed to a baby girl. Research has also been done on how we respond to boys crying by jiggling them more. Is it any surprise that in our culture young boys seem to be "always on the move" or "busy bodies", if that's how we show them to deal with their feelings?

In Aware Parenting we understand that distracting babies from feelings leads to children who develop coping mechanisms to deal with those feelings. And we know this starts from very early on (maybe even from birth), often without being aware that we are shutting down their feelings.

Have you noticed the ways in which we tend to distract babies and children from their feelings?