looked upset and ask if they were feeling angry or embarrassed or hurt.
aggressive, he gets the ball. Every day I notice Timmy gets the ball, so I’m going to act this way because if Timmy gets the ball, I want the ball.” A way to use social media for learning good emotional and social communication is FaceTime. She says a lot of research around FaceTime shows it being an effective tool for social emotional learning when kids interact with a loved one. They can see their actions, their reactions, and they can hear words. While they can get that from mom and dad, they can also get through the app. WAYS TO HELP Teaching language, modeling behavior, and understanding why a child is acting the way they are is a great way to start helping boys learn to express their emotions. Responding to a feeling without endorsing the behavior is also a way to help grow language. “I can see you’re really upset. I’m not going to let you hit me, and I want to understand what happened.” To help a child learn language, especially emotional language, Dr. Lucker says it’s important to have parents mirror things such as talking about feelings or working through feelings. “It’s okay for a parent to cry in front of their child,” Dr. Lucker emphasizes. “If their
child sees that their parent is crying, this creates an opportunity to talk about it.”
“Giving them words, and maybe it’s a ‘I don’t know what embarrass means,’ and then it’s explaining to them that it means this,” explains Dr. Lucker. Dr. Lucker says trying to vocalize what you see may look different with a two-year-old than a five-year-old, but starting to have conversations with two-year-olds who are developing the language and giving them the dialogue to help them with words is very beneficial with emotional growth. SCHOOL AND SOCIAL MEDIA Learning how to express emotions doesn’t just come from the home. School and social media can also play a role in teaching children, and boys, what’s right and wrong when it comes to expressing emotions. While not every child is exposed to the extremes of, say, toxic masculinity or heroic masculinity, social media and school can make it difficult for boys to navigate how they should be acting. Dr. Lucker gives the example of being at recess—if a peer throws a tantrum, gets angry and aggressive, but then gets the ball, it’s easy for a boy to identify, “When Timmy is
Boys need to see adults handling sadness and disappointment without shame, says Dr. Lucker. It is okay to model feelings and emotions. She explains that you can model strength and vulnerability at the same time, and they can coexist together. If a boy is older, say elementary, middle, and high school, and a parent is still noticing patterns of irritability, disrupted relationships at home, at school, they can’t hold a friend, they’re withdrawn—that’s when Dr. Lucker says it might be time to consider going to see a therapist. A lot of times, irritability, lashing out, and anxiety can be driven by underlying mental health diagnoses. “Especially ADHD oftentimes really comes out in middle school because in elementary school, they’re the class clown, they’re hyper, but they can kind of get through it. In middle school, when the academics are more demanding, that’s when really specific learning disorders are becoming more apparent. That’s when we’re figuring out maybe this is the underlying factor of what’s driving that avoidance, that anxiety, or that irritability,” says Dr. Lucker.
NOLAFAMILY.COM | MAY 2026 13
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