"but How Do You Feel?"

One of the most destructive and permanently damaging things that anyone can do to a child is to make a child unable to feel.

This can take a number of different forms. In some instances it is considered "culturally unacceptable" for a person, a child, and especially a male, to even have, much less express, normal emotions. They are told such things as "Boys don't cry! Be a man!" occasionally peppered with ridicule, sarcasm, berating terms as "sissy," "lily-liver," "Mama's boy," and a few other unprintables. A child learns that it is not safe to express feelings-- and that it isn't really safe to feel them either. In other instances, positive feelings such as joy are also shut down, as an adult berates a child who is showing normal joviality with "Quit acting so happy!" In some areas it is also popular to employ this tactic on the youngest of children-- instead of being open to a child's needs, expecting him to "tend to himself" if he falls, or keeping a pacifier stuck in an infant's mouth.

But whether it is cultural influence, or someone who has actually committed abuse against a child using such means to silence him, or those who merely do not wish to be "bothered" by a child's needs, the results are the same: when an adult in charge gives a child the message that his feelings are not valid, there are going to be repercussions to it at some point in time. While injuring a child in any way is unconscionable, the longterm effects of invalidating a child's feelings is much worse. In such instances, when a child quickly learns that expressing emotions will result in "something bad" from the adult in charge, he decides that he does not know what he is "supposed to" feel-- and the implications of that add up to disaster.