What are your greatest challenges as a parent? Which skills do you think are the most important for your son to learn? Are there ways you would like to behave differently but you aren’t sure how to change?
The goal of nearly every parent is to give their children the tools and experiences they need to become adults who are fulfilled, capable and comfortable with who they are, but the best ways to do this aren’t always clear. There are plenty of conflicting opinions about what to prioritise and how to achieve these outcomes, often from people in your life as well as experts with varying experience levels.
There are no perfect approaches to parenting or scientifically-informed consensuses on the best skills to teach your children and how to do this. But there are common tools that can benefit people of all ages. The most prominent of these include emotional regulation, empathy, grounded self-confidence, and self-awareness. (These were discussed in last month’s article, which you can read here.)
But these tools can be in parents’ blind spots for boys. Potentially without realising, they tell themselves that boys don’t need as much help and encouragement to understand emotions, learn self-control, or develop a strong awareness of who they are.
You can help your son learn these skills by teaching him about the different emotions exist while creating an environment where he’s comfortable discussing what he’s thinking and feeling while teaching him to take responsibility for his actions. This is often easier for people who are resilient so when he does make mistakes, he can recover from them. Throughout this process you will be acting as a role model for your son, so it’s important for you to practice the same types of behaviours you’re encouraging him to adopt.
Teaching your son these skills can be intimidating, especially if you feel that you yourself lack them, but parents – as well as other important role models – can learn them and experience their benefits as well.
Making any type of personal change is challenging, and modifying your parenting style can be especially difficult given how demanding parenting can be. But the benefits that can come from building important emotional tools often makes it worth the effort, not only for your son but your entire family.
Strategies for parents
What types of conversations do you and your son typically have? How do you respond to your son when he’s made a mistake or is struggling? Are you and your son comfortable sharing your thoughts and feelings with each other?
Parents are always teaching their sons lessons, even when they don’t intend to. Children absorb values, priorities, and beliefs about what is and isn’t acceptable from their parents throughout their childhoods and potentially even as adults.
What they learn plays a strong role in the type of person they will become.
By considering what you’re teaching your son while also asking yourself if there’s anything you might be neglecting to teach him, you can help him grow up into a happy and enjoyable person.
Helping your son develop important skills and abilities, like all other approaches to parenting, can require making changes to how you treat him as well as your beliefs about what is best and how to accomplish it. Adopting different parenting strategies often means giving up long-held beliefs, learning new skills, encouraging different types of behaviour, changing your reactions, and more.
This can be challenging; the way you’re currently parenting, especially if it resembles how you were raised, can feel instinctive and is all you know so it doesn’t take strategy. Choosing behaviours and responses that don’t come naturally can be difficult, particularly during challenging interactions with your child.
There are many ways to be a good parent and a perfect approach doesn’t exist. aiming for good enough while enjoying yourself is almost always better than becoming stressed and burnt out because you’re striving for a standard that’s impossible to meet.
But being a secure base for your son is, for many parents, achievable and meaningful for their sons.
A person who acts as a secure base offers comfort, compassion, and encouragement when it’s needed. They don’t judge you for your mistakes or try to take control when you’re struggling – although a parent may have to do this when it’s necessary – but they’re willing to support you and give help when you need it. They will speak up and potentially intervene if they think you’re going to do something dangerous, but they don’t stop you from taking chances and having experiences that will help you learn and grow.
When people have someone who acts as their secure base, they’re more likely to feel confident exploring their world and their abilities without fear because they feel supported, both when things work out and when they fail.
To be your son’s secure base, he has to feel safe and accepted with you, even when he fails and is hurting. This is easy when children are very young but parents can be less accepting of their sons as they get older, sometimes without realising it. They can stop opening their arms to their sons when they’re upset – literally and figuratively – so their sons don’t feel comfortable coming to their parents with their struggles and receiving guidance.
Being a secure base is an incredibly important role for parents in their son’s lives, because it empowers boys to grow their independence and what they feel capable of, while feeling loved, safe, and accepted.
What your son needs from you to think of you as his secure base and how you can meet these needs in a way that is genuine will depend a great deal on personal factors, although the majority of children benefit from the following:
Let boys experience their emotions
It’s very important for children to feel capable of experiencing and connecting with their emotions so they can understand what they’re feeling, control themselves when they get upset, and learn from their emotions to improve their situations.
Parents play an important role in how children react to their emotions, whether this is encouraging children to reflect on what they’re feeling and being comfortable recognising their emotions, or ignoring and suppressing them.
Because boys can be told that they don’t need to, and maybe even shouldn’t, explore their emotions or need to control them, it’s important for boys to receive this message at home.
If your son is very young so he hasn’t yet been conditioned to hide and suppress his emotions, this will likely be easier as you just need to stay out of his way. When your son is emotional, don’t try to quickly calm him down by insisting he shouldn’t be feeling this way and/or distracting him. This isn’t the same as allowing him to be unkind or hurtful when he’s upset, but emotions themselves shouldn’t be treated as problematic.
If your son is older, however, he may have internalised unhealthy messaging about emotions in men that need to be reversed.
To encourage recognising emotions, normalise them at home. As his secure base, it’s important that he feels comfortable talking about what he’s feeling with you. You might not need to make any changes to encourage this, but consider if your relationship with your son makes it easy for him to be open. Unless you’re comfortable with your son’s emotions and willing to discuss them, it’s unlikely that he’ll be willing to reveal them, so be calm and approachable when he wants to talk.
If he doesn’t open up himself, ask him how he’s feeling. This can be through regular check-ins, especially after challenging life events and big changes, and recognising when he seems off and asking about it. Even if he says he doesn’t want to talk, this likely isn’t true – and could even be a way of testing you to find out if you care enough to be persistent – so give him a few hours or days then bring it up again. It’s possible that he doesn’t think he should be feeling a certain way so he doesn’t want to share, but prodding can help him realise that these feelings are acceptable because you want to know about them.
When he’s ready to talk, listen non-judgementally. Accept that what he’s feeling is real to him, even if you think he’s overreacting and stay as calm as possible if you’re shocked by what he’s thinking about. However, avoid giving advice, unless he asks, as this can make him feel criticised and that your goal is to improve him in the ways you find best rather than accepting him as he is.
Getting your son to regularly share his emotions without a great deal of prodding will almost certainly require to start sharing your emotions as well, especially if you’re a father or other important male role-model.
Without over-emphasising it, start talking about how you feel. This could be saying during a drive that you’re worried about your next performance review. Give details and share information that has the potential to make you feel vulnerable: you’ve had good reviews in the past but you’re worried that as you’re getting older your performance is slipping without you even realising. You can also share age-appropriate stories from your past that are relevant to some of the things your son is experiencing.
When children feel capable of expressing their emotions because they have parents and/or other role models who want to know what they’re feeling and share their emotions as well, they can be better emotionally developed, which has many advantages at every stage of life.
Teach boys about the different emotions that exist
Having meaningful conversations about emotions is only possible if children know about emotions and what they feel like.
Children are never too young to start learning about emotions. If your son is still a baby or a toddler, you can you can tell him what he’s feeling when he’s emotional. Use simple vocabulary, such as saying “You love being in the bath” or “You’re really angry because you can’t have a biscuit right now”.
As he gets older, you can start asking him how he was feeling in different situations, both positive and negative. Begin with encouraging him to identify the most basic emotions and gradually introduce more complex emotions as he gets older.
You will likely have to start out with asking very leading questions, such as “You seemed upset when I picked you up today. Is that how you were feeling?” or “Math is so frustrating!”. As he gets older, he should be increasingly capable of understanding what he’s feeling for himself and determining if he should share it to feel better or not.
Because young children haven’t developed abstract thinking, teaching emotions is often more effective when you use visual representations, such as pointing out how the characters in a book are feeling or asking him which emotions he thinks different characters in a show are portraying.
Older children often learn the most about emotions through observing others, including their parents and other authority figures as they lay the groundwork for what is normal and acceptable. So by considering how you express emotions, both when you’re calm and when you’re upset, you can be intentional in your reactions because you recognise that they’re acting as lessons for your son.
What your son thinks of as acceptable and expected reactions to emotions will shape how he behaves as he grows up.
Encourage taking responsibility
Taking responsibility means acknowledging that something happened because of your actions, even if it wasn’t what you thought would happen or intentional. You can feel bad and regret doing what caused it, but you still take ownership.
It’s important for children to take responsibility for their actions, yet many children struggle with this. They can feel guilty or ashamed because of things that weren’t their fault and out of their control, or believe that they’re never to blame, even when they’re directly responsible.
It’s easier to take responsibility for your actions, especially those that are driven by intense emotions, when you’ve built the skill of reflecting on your emotions to understand them so they’re less likely to control you. Children who can do this are more likely to understand that they’re responsible for their actions, even when they were upset. Instead of blaming others and/or their situation for their reactions, they recognise that they made the decision to act in a certain way.
To help your son take responsibility for his actions, don’t stop him from making mistakes or fix them for him unless it’s strictly necessary. Use natural consequences to reinforce the outcomes of his actions as much as possible: if he wants to play roughly with a toy, you can inform him that it will likely break, so when it does it can stay broken, unless he wants to fix it.
You can advise him how to avoid unfavourable outcomes but as often as possible, you shouldn’t feel responsible for making sure he makes the right decisions, especially as he gets older.
However, this doesn’t mean staying completely uninvolved. Talk through events after they happen to help your son understand his role and consider ways he can fix his mistakes, including making amends with others. If he keeps making the same mistakes, such as yelling at friends when they disagree with him, you could talk through why he gets upset and come up with alternative ways of reacting together.
People who feel responsible for their actions are more likely to pause and reflect on what could happen before reacting. This is a valuable skill that can help people of all ages from behaving in ways that have harmful consequences.
Let your son fail to develop resilience
Children need to experience failure to develop the invaluable skill of resilience.
Resilience is the belief that you can withstand and overcome most challenges. It’s built through experiencing difficulties, finding solutions when possible, and accepting your situation when it can’t be changed. Resilience is highly beneficial because it gives people the confidence to take on challenges without being too afraid of failure.
However, many well-intentioned parents prevent their children from developing resilience. They can fix their children’s mistakes, not let them try things they might fail at, and attempt to prevent their children from feeling emotional pain through distracting and minimising, so they don’t learn how to endure challenges, recover from mistakes, or manage failures themselves.
Repairing your son’s mistakes can feel like a natural aspect of parenting. You were completely responsible for caring for all of his needs when he was a baby so letting go of these responsibilities can be challenging.
To help your son build resilience, let him take on challenges and fail without rescuing him, including emotionally, or making him feel that he was wrong to have tried something he wasn’t certain he could accomplish. If he asks for help, you can encourage him to try again, suggest alternative approaches, or step in as minimally as possible. This can be hard as a parent, but it’s harder on your son to not the develop confidence in himself to cope with failure.
Children can’t develop resilience without experiencing failure, so not all children are given the opportunity to learn how to cope with challenges that build their resilience, which makes life more intimidating for them.
Remember that you’re one of your son’s most important role models
All children need role models to turn to for guidance in developing their character and how they behave. Both parents have very important roles to play, although these may vary depending on their gender.
For most children, but certainly not all, their most influential role model is their same-sex parent. Boys naturally turn to other males for examples of how to become men and approval that they’re on the right track. However, men are often conditioned not to share their emotions, admit to their mistakes, be empathetic or vulnerable with friends, or show weakness.
If you’re a father, you might not have all of the skills and emotional tools you would like to teach to your son, but you can learn them as you encourage your son to develop them as well. Boys can learn a great deal from fathers who are willing to show them that men can have rich and rewarding lives when they’re willing to reject many of the limits that culture can place on men.
Mothers also play very important roles in their sons’ development.
Boys can be more comfortable discussing emotions with their mothers since they can feel safer being open and less performative than they do with their fathers, who they can believe are measuring them up as men.
Additionally, how boys treat their mothers is often indicative of how they’ll behave towards women as adults. Even if they don’t realise it at the time, mothers are often teaching their sons how to treat their future partners, friends, and colleagues through what they expect and tolerate.
Remember that how you behave strongly influences what your son will think is normal and acceptable, so lead by example. Show your son empathy and let him see you being empathetic to others. When you hurt your son, even if it was unintentional, apologise to him and take ownership. He may have had it coming but if you overreacted, recognise this. And talk about how you felt in different situations so discussing emotions is normalised
There will certainly be times when you act in ways you aren’t proud of, but it’s helpful to remember that children are always watching their parents for insight into what they can and should be like as an adult. So recognise when you wish you had behaved differently so you can try to do better the next time.
By considering important areas to help your son grow emotionally,you can give him the opportunity to develop skills that can help him flourish as an adult.
Take on the challenge of changing yourself
Are there any changes you think you’ll need to make in your parenting style to help your son with his emotional development? Will you need to learn new skills as well? What do you think your greatest challenges will be?
You can make changes to your parenting style, but if you’re unwilling to change any of your foundational beliefs, not only about parenting but what is necessary for being a happy and fulfilled person as well, this will likely be challenging and largely superficial.
Through potentially no fault of your own, you could possess beliefs that will interfere with your ability to honestly encourage your son to emotionally develop. This is especially common for men; if you grew up with emotional development and personal reflection being discouraged, you’ll likely need to build these skills as well.
But even if you have a great deal to learn yourself, don’t think that you have to wait before you can begin making improvements with your son. If parents are willing to change themselves and understand the benefits of what they’re attempting, they can be in an ideal position to encourage their son to do the hard work with them.
Making these changes can be difficult, especially if you’re attempting to parent in ways that bear little resemblance to how you were raised. If you’re concerned that this may be too challenging, you could consider working with a professional. Trained professionals can help you identify the thoughts and behaviour patterns that could be keeping you in unhealthy habits, suggest more meaningful alternatives, and develop techniques for relating to your son that utilise your natural skills and strengths.
Wanting to improve as a parent doesn’t mean that you aren’t already doing a good job; plenty of parents would like to make at least some changes to how they behave and treat their sons. When you understand some of the more common areas where parents can struggle and boys can need more help, you can be better equipped to make changes to your parenting style and what you think is important for boys to learn.
Parents of boys can help their sons thrive by considering how they approach important but often under-emphasised areas of personal development.
Boys are often not given as much support as they need to learn skills relating to emotions, accountability, and self-awareness. But if you understand their value and have created an environment where he feels comfortable practicing these skills, he can learn them while appreciating their importance.
You can’t make your son change his beliefs or behaviours, but you can encourage healthy attitudes that lead to ideal behaviours through how you treat him and what you expect form him, as well as what he sees you doing and how you behave towards him and others.
Parenting comes with a seemingly endless number of challenges and difficult situations. But when you have a home where everyone feels safe, accepted, and given the support they need to discover who they are, then your children can feel capable of exploring the world with confidence and growing into the best version of themselves.
If you’re a parent and would like to teach your children important emotional tools but you feel underqualified, I encourage you to reach out to me. As a trained counsellor with years of experience working with families, I can help you identify unhealthy belief patterns, consider ways to make the changes you think are necessary, and feel capable and comfortable in your role as a parent.
