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I've been thinking lately about boyhood and masculinity and emotion. There's this anti-trope in US society - by which I mean it's a trope that was formed to combat another trope. The trope is, "boys shouldn't cry", or sometimes "real men don't cry." I'm going to keep talking about boys because I'm specifically thinking of my teenage kid. But this trope is like the number one example in any article about toxic masculinity. This trope is seen as making boys repress their emotions and not allowing a healthy emotional life. The anti-trope is, allow boys to express their emotions. Encourage them to be sensitive and talk about their feelings and develop emotional intelligence.
But...what about anger? As a parent, I worry all the time about my kid. He's got some neurodivergent issues, we're seeking treatment for it. But one thing that's really started to bother me lately is his interactions with his school. I get a call at the snap of a finger, the minute he loses his temper or has an emotional meltdown or refuses to work on an assignment. "Ms. Prydain, please talk to your son." Every incident requires an incident report and a committee meeting and a notation in his permanent file.
Oh, he wasn't totally cooperative today? He had an understandable reaction to being disappointed or anxious about something? Oh no, have I failed as a parent? /s
And I mean, I get it, I do. They have a school to run and can't be spending all their time on the neediest kid. But I do worry at the message that he's getting. "It's not okay to be anxious." "It's not okay to get angry" - or at least not in a way that anyone can tell. Keep those feelings bottled up, young man, and only express them in socially acceptable ways. Otherwise, grit your teeth and get with the program.
What is a socially acceptable way to express anger? Is there such a thing when you're a child in school? For all the talk about how all emotions are healthy, I think it can't be denied that some things are okay to express, and some things will get the psychiatrist called in.
And yes, it's good to have emotional intelligence and it's good to learn some emotional regulation, I just think it's kind of weird that amid all the talk about how toxic masculinity discourages boys from expressing emotion, I'm not sure that doing it this way is much better. Is he actually learning healthy strategies to regulate his emotions, or is he just learning to mask and not express how he feels or that something bothers him?
This is already all over the place but I thought of this quote from a character on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel:
So as the mom of a sensitive, creative, intelligent, and conscientious teen boy, what am I missing here and how could I be doing better?
I agree with the comments below that older boys and men can rarely give unfiltered expressions of emotion, particularly anger and particularly to women, without their being misconstrued. Often swallowing one’s emotions is the right answer. The teen years are the right time to learn this, but if your son is on the autism spectrum he’s going to have trouble.
I would try to get his dad’s input if you can, even – perhaps particularly – given his dad’s struggles. You might also consider asking a male teacher for his perspective; if he has a male teacher who hasn’t called you I would consider him first.
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Hi! I also enjoyed The Black Cauldron. :)
Welll my first reaction to your OP, before I even scrolled down to see "AuDHD," was, "Another day, another 'gifted kid is unhappy, must be autistic'" soo... And warning, treating for autism with a kid who isn't actually autistic just makes things worse / the child angrier.
But that said, individuals I've known who were both gifted and actually autistic have been helped by Good Intentions Are Not Good Enough by Winner and Crooke (for adults about the workplace), and The Asperkid's (Secret) Book of Social Rules by Jennifer Cook. Winner and Crooke also wrote Socially Curious and Curiously Social: A Social Thinking Guidebook for Bright Teens and Young Adults, which I haven't seen but hey, same author and for teens.
In particular, Winner and Crooke have a thing about "People have an idea of what counts as a big deal and what doesn't, and if you react super strongly to what they think should be a small deal, they'll see you as unpredictable/crazy and treat you badly."
Which is true. But oversimplified. And doesn't account for like actual differences and justifiable stronger reactions. After all, different people are different and how is it fair that one group gets to just dictate what is and isn't a big deal? (As many of your responses pointed out.) (I'd add that giftedness can be the sole cause of "over"reactions. Or can just be a partial cause with autism and/or ADHD as the other part(s).)
Enter idiosyncrasy credits / "weirdness points".
--once established as a generally trustworthy person / good friend, then you can stand up for your interpretation of the situation where it is so a big deal. (Being innately different, even solely due to giftedness, means you just are disadvantaged in this. It forces you to use up more idiosyncrasy credits on basic needs. Unfair but true fact of life.)
Based on your description, he's stuck in the opposite situation: He's already established as "the one who always overreacts." Uphill battle there; from a solely social perspective would be best to switch schools. The new dx will, socially, operate as a "well he's defective so he gets a pass for his constant overreactions." Might or might not make the situation tolerable for him ("You see, the autism means that X thing that doesn't bother most people really bothers him, so be kind to the defective and don't do it"), but that's never gonna be as healthy a situation as a new school where he started off on the right foot (and got established as "the overall good guy who cares weirdly a lot about X, we like him so we'll respect that").
See also Stephanie Tolan's A Time to Fly Free (about a preteen but still). And Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook.
(Ran this by one of the diagnosed AuDHD+gifted people I know and he cosigned it.)
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My 16 year old is in boxing 3x a week and the gym with me 2x.
He needs to get his ass kicked and accept his place in society in a safe and very manly environment.
Aren't you worried about receiving too many hits to the head at that age?
No.
Yes if he was doing actual boxing boxing.
They do cardio, technique, footwork, hand work, and very, very light sparring.
Even then, I would recommend a kid take a few to the head in a boxing gym rather than not.
It forms important understandings as a kid imo.
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In my time, it was listening to angry music (rap or metal, with the two being pretty mutually exclusive; the metal-listeners would generally turn out to be more successful for reasons that I had a whole teenage pop psychology theory for that these margins are too small to contain), playing first-person shooters, or getting into internet flamewars (my palliative of choice). I don't know about acceptable ways that can be used right there, in the moment, in a social situation, that go beyond giving the target a death glare and maybe clenching a fist in your pocket; bottling anything that can't be dissipated with just that up for later is a life skill that just needs to be practiced.
Don't tease us like that. I, for one, would love to have my musical tastes flattered when you have the time.
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With enough verbal intelligence, you can also get away with quite some veiled ridicule or malicious compliance, while maintaining enough plausible deniability that shouldn't get your parents called. We had a class clown that got very entertaining when angry... I'm sure it made him feel better (especially in public with people laughing), although raising your kids to be obnoxious little shits might not be exactly advisable.
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As a guy, my experience is also that nobody actually wants men to show their real emotions, least of all publicly. Male anger or horniness is scary. Crying or anxiety is pathetic.
The good news is, this includes the men themselves. At least from my PoV, the toxic masculinity talking point is to a large degree the inversion of reality; there is a grain of truth, but there is also toxic femininity that tries to get men to open up more, expecting them to show emotions that accommodate the feminine worldview, in a female-friendly way, and then punishes them for having wrong feelings the wrong way, aka their actual male feelings.
So, yes, unironically this. It's not necessarily about simply ignoring or bottling up your feelings - it's that managing your own emotions is your own business, or at most to a minor degree that of your closest confidants who are giving you helpful pointers. If strangers or acquaintances can read your feeling in a way you did not intend, you screwed up. Some amount of screwing up is perfectly normal. And contrariwise, deliberately showing even anger is occasionally the correct course of action for the purpose of whatever your goals are. But losing control of your emotions as a man and openly & fully showing them to anyone but your closest friends will always be unpleasant for everyone involved (and often even then).
On the topic of managing emotions, anger is easy; Sports or competitive games generally do perfectly fine, depending on his inclinations. Anxiety is more difficult, and usually includes thinking hard about what you are really anxious about, and either convincing yourself that it is irrational or finding mitigation strategies, and then ideally exposing yourself to the thing you're anxious about, so that your strategy is proven correct (in reasonable limits, of course).
Is it generally okay to reply to sort of old posts?
I think that emotions are more appreciated than what is commonly claimed, but that it matters a lot which emotions are shown, and when. Any show of emotions which envokes greed or reliance on others tend to reduce ones value (which is basically because you let your problems become other peoples problems).
We can learn the "real" preferences of people through fiction. Most will tell you that women don't like masculine traits, but if you read a novel for women, you will find that some of the "attractive men" in these stories have both masculine and feminine traits. In fiction, you will also see a lot of strong emotion, often, even from the lead male characters that women thirst for. What's important is how and when the emotion is shown. One description many women seem to like is "hard on the outside, soft on the inside". It's a skill. Or if done unintentionally, a result of the right experiences in life and the right upbringing.
It would be nice if there was more research on these things, but I haven't found any which approaches the topic in the same way that I am
I notice this even in famous literature for men. Surely, say, the Iliad is a work that is in large part about men expressing emotion? Achilles sulks, he rages, he cries, and he generally bares his heart. If I think about cinema, men showing their emotions seem like some of the most beloved moments: Vito Corleone mourning his son, for instance. If you watch, I don't know, Breaking Bad, it seems to me that there are lots of emotions on display; Jesse in particular is very open with his feelings. The most iconic moments from that show - Walt's despairing laughter at his money being stolen, Walt crashing to the ground in devastated grief, Jesse's angry-crying "he can't keep getting away with it!", etc., they're often explosions of emotion. If we get more lowbrow, men love, say, Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, and the last I checked their male casts are quite emotive.
It seems more complex to me than just the rule that men shouldn't display emotion. I think the rule is that male emotional displays must be appropriate. A man who reacts emotionally to a small stimulus shows himself over-sensitive; a man who does not react emotionally to a large stimulus shows himself inhuman.
When compared to women, I think there are maybe three things going on.
Firstly, the kinds of emotions appropriate for men and women are different. Men are meant to react to some experiences that women do not, and vice versa. For instance, it would be appropriate for men to cheer, cry with joy, or hug each other if their sports team won the grand final, whereas stereotypically women might not react to that. Emotional reactions to competitive activities in general seem to code more masculine. By contrast, something like nurturing or tenderness codes more feminine and therefore is appropriate for women in a wider range of contexts. So each gender may have differently-shaped spaces of acceptable emotional expression.
Secondly, the modes of emotional expression appropriate for men and women are different. Take the sports example again - it's okay for men to cheer, dump containers of gatorade on each other, whatever, whereas that would look a bit more odd from women. If a woman is very happy, though, she has her own script for how to express that. Likewise for things like sadness or anger - a woman might go and cry in the bathroom, and a man might head out back and kick a rock, and those both seem like expressions of emotion, even though one is feminine and one is masculine. If you are only looking for feminine forms of emotional expression, you'll see that women do them and men don't, but that doesn't mean men aren't expressing themselves. They're just not expressing themselves in that way.
Thirdly, the line of appropriateness is in a different place. Above I talked about small and large stimuli. What's the line between them? Plausibly the threshold for acceptable emotional expression for a woman is lower than it is for a man; this would also mean women tend to express themselves more frequently. But once the threshold is exceeded, men can express themselves as well, and if they don't, something is wrong with them.
They might not do so, but is there really any social convention dictating that it's somehow unbecoming of them as women to do so?
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Generally true, but I note pop music with lyrics by men isn't a complete disaster, surprisingly. Gangster rap has high appeal even though it's men expressing anger and horniness, for example.
I wouldn't call most of it positive or anything but it's a fun time.
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Two things I might offer.
a question. You mention he is "neurodivergent." That could mean many things, and you do not have to tell me any of them. But do you suspect this is what's the root of the issue, and that his anger is an artifact of this? That he is acting out anger in inappropriate ways due to an overreaction to stimuli that a less neurodivergent person would react to differently ? If so, that's a tougher issue.
Dad is a model of manhood, for better or worse. Many men I know consciously try to be UNlike their fathers (in my mind they fail mostly). But I for example try to be a lot like my dad in terms of temperament. I can remember what would set him off and when. He never really lost his temper--where I have regularly lost mine. I have shown anger in front of my sons in ways he never did, but I have his model to sort of steer me back to how I would like to be. But if 1) is the issue my 2) might again be less relevant. If your son is overreacting to benign stimuli that's going to take more work. I will say that you as the mother are not the model, so there's that. You're more the model of how he will view women.
Heavy exercise is great, sports are great ways to exhaust the body and vent. I agree with whoever already said that. I have two teenage boys.
Finally, I can't comment on your school system in any way but the most vague generalizations, but school has been in some ways always stifling of boys, to varying degrees. Your write-up isn't specific enough for me to know if that's what's going on. I'm pulled back to the word neurodivergent however and wonder if there's more going on.
AuDHD. Interesting you mention the father thing because he's exactly like his dad, which is what scares me sometimes. We're divorced because he couldn't reign in his emotions. They both get extremely frustrated when there's a task they're having trouble with.
Society doesn't seem to have the right model for it. "Oh, he's an abusive husband because he yells and throws things, he's using his emotions to control you." I don't think it was that calculated (and for the record, he never laid a hand on me). I would describe his outbursts as panic attacks - just really accelerated breathing and heart rate and this kind of spiral of escalation that he seemed unable to break out of.
Anyway with the teen, we're trying to figure out the right mix of medication and talk therapy approaches. His school has a 504 with him and we're working on an IEP. Overall they've really tried to work with us. I just have some discomfort around the idea that we're pathologizing what to him is a normal emotional reaction, and making him feel somehow broken. But it does need to be addressed because living with his dad was volatile and unstable. I hope Junior can find a better way to manage it all.
I 110% respect your insight here. Modern society is quick to lump unlike things together and label them all abuse.
Given the circumstances, I would encourage you to explicitly communicate your respect for this and to thank him if you haven’t already. I bet it will mean more to him than you think.
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Thank you for responding. You bring up a good point--when I mentioned that dad is the model, I did not mention or consider (though it is relevant) the idea of genetics. In some ways I see my wife in both our sons--my oldest seems to have no concept of how to be on time, for example, which is a trait my wife (though she is Japanese, thus against stereotype) has, while I am nearly always very early for everything.
So in your case Junior is a chip off the old angry block?
Again, the vagueness of your description makes the advice here very reddit-y (i.e. useless) because no one here knows what's going on. Reading the tea leaves and pattern-matching to our own experience can only go so far. It's true, as others have said, boys need outlets, boys need male role models (see my earlier post alluding to my What Would Dad Do? tendencies) and if your son doesn't have any that's something you should consider--though much of modern mainstream society tells us lesbian couples and villages of women are perfectly capable of raising non-toxic males who will wash the dishes, never raise their voices, and help mom replace the carburetor and caulk the bathroom tiles when needed (I'm showing my age referencing carburetors), I would bet large amounts of money that this is a myth. A boy needs some sort of male figure in his life and on a regular basis, preferably way more than one. (This could be uncles, or even trustworthy neighbors, coaches, youth pastors, older brothers, etc.) Usually life takes care of this on its own due to family juxtaposition, or--at least when I was in school--the way boys are filtered into groups of boys doing sports and girls into girls doing sports. I have no idea what happens now. (Do girls play in shirts and skins games?)
I am not suggesting to throw him back in with a man you consider volatile and unstable (again, I'm relying on your adjectives, no one here can truly read your situation. You could be either an over-reactive shrew or a knowing Cassandra, you've a small comment count so it's hard to know.) But it's something @Iconochasm has already suggested: male role models.
Is this going to be an insta-fix? Probably not. Good start, though. I'd agree that even the very best-case scenario with medication and a lot of caring female souls around him would be that you create a docile male who stays home a lot, has para-social relationships with Youtubers he never meets, and will double check with you if he's wearing the right shirt, at age twenty. Which, hey, I think a lot of women want that. I'd argue that that's not an ideal outcome.
Is he interested in any sports? I'm not saying throw him in football if he's 130 pounds, but even someone at 130 lbs can run track or play tennis or pickleball or join the swim team. You'll see a difference if he's regularly exerting himself physically. Again, though, mom needling him "Get up and do sports!" is a recipe for a backdraft explosion. Ideally he would have dudes who are friends joining sports teams. Parenting can be hard.
I had to look up AuDHD. From what I am reading, this is not actually considered a clinical diagnosis? It was referred to on one website as an "unofficial but popular" term. This bears consideration, as unofficial but popular smells of making-shit-up. (Though I am not a medical doctor or psychiatrist.)
Made up shit likely because of poor understanding of the underlying substrate and map/territory issues.
Something like about 75% of patients with autism meet the criteria for at least one other mental illness and of the pot of mental illnesses something like about 75% meet the criteria for ADHD.
So it's not everyone but pretty close enough.
That said, I state "meet the criteria for" instead of "has the disease" which usually isn't very important but is instructive in this case since it is very possible that the underlying cause of the symptoms is not the "problem with the brain's hardware and software that causes the majority of ADHD symptoms in individuals with no other mental illness" and is instead a sequence of behavioral deficits better explained as caused by the same underlying issues as the autism which does a lot for explaining the prognosis* and high degree of comorbidity and at the same time just means that the person is going to get the same treatment as everyone else.
Psychiatric formulation is mostly a kludge used to jam something that resembles the medical model in place for purposes of billing and ease of communication.
Needless to say from my rant you aren't likely to catch much clinical conversation using AuDHD unless its more word bad less word good type situations.
However most of the wild type implementations of AuDHD are likely to pattern match to people identifying with their mental illness and trash tier social media engagement about health.
Sorry recently triggered by a soccer mom.
*I'd have to do a lit review to be sure but I'd hazard that spontaneous remission rates in pure ADHD patients are higher than in the ADHD with comorbid AUD population however this would be likely be hard to research.
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Hey, appreciate it. Mostly I was just feeling low and felt like venting about how sucky life can be sometimes. I agree with all the advice (sports, role models) but it's so hard to put into practice. I can't magic male role models out of nowhere. He does see his dad a couple times a week, for what that's worth. The sports thing has sort of been a perennial struggle because the boy really digs in and gets resistant as soon as I suggest something "organized". When he was younger he would run and play on the playground and climb everything in sight, but he freaked out when I wanted him to do an actual parkour class. Wrestling or boxing or track might be something if I can find something age appropriate.
I was being flippant about the AuDHD - he has been formally diagnosed with ASD and ADHD. The ASD is more recent so I'm still navigating what it means and how it should change my parenting approach.
Is there some variety of tutor/coach you could hire that suits any (special?) interests of his? This is about as close as it gets to magic, if it's an option financially. College students work pretty cheap. Math, piano, programming, personal trainer?
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I resisted anything suggested by my parents. It had to be organic, something I arrived at on my own. Perhaps a bit of mentalizing him without being direct. And it wasn't just because of parental pushing, or that it was organized. (In fact I liked organization.) It was a paralyzing fear of being around a bunch of people I didn't know. Again, who knows if that's key. But there are again ways of easing him into social interaction.
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AuDHD is a combination of Autism and ADHD.
That's what my brief look-up said, and it also said what I mentioned, e.g. that this is not a clinical term.
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Seems a little extreme to jump straight to talk therapy and medication. Have you tried heavy metal and a personal trainer?
But yes, you have correctly identified an issue. His emotions are an inconvenience to virtually every woman on the earth (which includes most of his teachers, administrators, therapists, and IEP-professionals). The call for him to express himself is somewhere between solipsistic ignorance and a cruel, Mean Girls lie.
This is unfair. There is no systematic solution. The closest you can get is to stop asking other women to fix him (be wary of feminine men here, too). My own teen son is very well-adjusted, and I still have frequent issues where his grandmother freaks out over his being "moody". Whereas I can tell that she's just utterly incapable of reading his moods and either working around them or overriding them. He needs male role models, male peers, and acceptably pro-social outlets. Sports would cover all three, but if he's not that kid, then at least try a gym membership with a trainer and a Dream Theater concert.
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He is a teen and he is having tantrums and meltdowns in school? That doesn't sound like a case of a school overreacting to normal male behaviour.
Whether something like this is "normal to him" doesn't really matter. This is unacceptable behaviour and he will have a really hard time if he doesn't learn to manage this.
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Many such cases. My advice stands, he must learn to stuff his emotions.
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What is he angry about? Is there an alternative to his current setting that's feasible, and where he wouldn't be angry? Sometimes there isn't, but also sometimes there is. Anger is often meant to spur people into action, to change their circumstances. Teenage boys are often physically stronger than their teachers, and really can't express anger towards them. It will certainly get him fired quickly from many jobs. But, also, the extremely restrictive prison like environment of many schools, where they can't even leave campus for lunch, isn't inevitable.
I went to community college instead of high school -- technically I was "duel enrolled" as a homeschool student, but I wasn't really studying anything in particular other than the college classes. I was angry or shocked a couple of times, so I left, sat under a tree grumping for a while, complained to my parents, and then came back a couple of days later for the next class. As long as I did my work, nobody much cared.
I also taught at an alternative high school in a small town. The teens often just didn't come to class, probably two days a week. If they were angry that day, I wouldn't want them to come to class, they were better off going for a hike in the woods or something.
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I'd say the best thing to do is get him into a physical activity where he can release the anger. Martial arts, some sort of weightlifting, even boxing or chopping wood or just a punching bag or something. Some physical release where he can productively channel the anger.
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Man, I donno. Girl Dad to Boy Mom, I don't envy raising boys in this environment. All the same, if he's gonna grow into a man that doesn't want to end up a professional pariah or in jail, he's is going to have to learn to stuff his anger into the seeds of a cardiac event. Just a man's lot in life. Best advice I ever got is "When you have to eat shit, take big bites".
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZcMuWdsLRuA
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