Dear Editor,
I remember speaking with a teenage boy who told me he had never once cried in front of anyone. Not because he had nothing to cry about, but because he had been told, over and over again, that crying was not something boys do. He said it with a kind of pride. And it broke my heart.
We have spent so long telling our boys to toughen up that we forgot to tell them it is okay to fall apart sometimes. That asking for help is not a sign of failure. That the boy who can say “I am not okay” is often the bravest one in the room. Instead, we hand them silence and call it strength.
At ChildLink Inc, this is something we cannot ignore. The boys we work with are carrying weight that nobody talks about, and they are carrying it alone because they believe that is what they are supposed to do. That has to change.
Not in a policy. Not in a programme. In the way we speak to them at the dinner table, in the classroom, and on the street corner. If we want boys who grow into healthy men, we have to let them be human first.