Seven Ways Teen Boys Process Emotion
It’s easy to assume our teens process emotion the same ways we do.
However, they often don’t…particularly if you are a mom to a teen son. I found this amazing list in The Wonder of Boys by Michael Gurian a few years ago and suddenly I saw my teen son differently.
The action-release method. Boys process and release feeling in quick bursts of energy. They might yell, slam a door, hit something, or bury themselves in an activity.
The suppression-delay method. Men love to solve problems so it might delay an emotional reaction until after they solve a problem. Sometimes boys might not talk to their parents for a week or more!
Physical-expression method. Boys express their feelings more physically than girls do. They need plenty of physical space, disposable objects, and training in what is appropriate and what isn't.
The going-in-the-cave method. Boys on average do not process feelings as quickly as girls. The social anthropologist Jennifer James told me of a study that showed males can take up to seven hours longer than females to process “hard emotive data”—in other words, stimulation that requires complex emotive responses. Boys often feel overwhelmed by a mother’s swirl of feelings, sisters’ myriad verbalizings of feelings. They often need time away, just time in the cave of their room, or a fort, to get away from the stimulation.
The problem-solving method. Often boys do not invest as much emotive energy in certain low-level problems as we think they do or think they should. For boys, the solving of a problem often releases the emotive energy of the experience.
The talking-about-feelings method. Because the two halves of the male brain are connected by a smaller group of fibers—the corpus callosum—than in the female brain, we can expect males in general to have greater difficulty than females expressing feelings. So, we have to keep trying. We have to pick and choose the right moment to ask him, “How do you feel?” Or “How was that (experience) for you?” Timing is everything here. We may need to wait until he’s in a place where he feels emotionally safe. We may need to ask once, wait a few moments, then let it go—letting him come to us on his timing. Boys who are constantly asked how they feel will, for a while, feel good that their caregiver cares so much; but soon, if we just keep prodding the boy to talk about his feelings and he won’t, what he’s doing inside is building up resentment.
The crying method. Boys, by the time they are school age, will cry only under very stressful and very safe circumstances. As their brains form more completely and testosterone dominates them more fully, they feel unsafe in the activity of crying especially toward puberty. It is about the most vulnerable a boy can be. Boys process a lot more of their feelings through other methods than tears—through action, through problem-solving, through displacement. As much as possible, we need to help boys perfect these methods because these methods are natural to them.
Click here for a free PDF of this list. Go over it with your son and figure out which ones you both naturally use and discuss how you can respect each other when you are experiencing uncomfortable emotions.