Article Source: PBS Parents

How do we help our boys express their feelings and grow up to be unafraid of them? How do we help them understand that they can be masculine — and have feelings too? How do we help them survive the tests of masculinity intact and on their own terms? In the book Raising Cain, co-authors Michael Thompson, Ph.D. and Dan Kindlon, Ph.D. present the following strategies, designed to help parents nurture and protect the emotional lives of their boys, to respect their interests and needs, and help them grow up to be caring, intelligent, successful men.

• Give boys permission to have an internal life, approval for the full range of human emotions, and help in developing an emotional vocabulary so that they may better understand themselves and communicate more effectively with others. "The simple idea here is that you consciously speak to a boy's internal life all the time, whether he is aware of it or not. You respect it, you take it into account, you make reference to it, you share your own. There is something of the prophecy fulfilled here. That is, if you act as if your son has an internal life — if you assume that he does, along with every other human being — then soon he will take it into account."