Is it Always Wrong to Tell a Child to Stop Crying? (2024)

The title of this blog post could be put another way: “Because I said, ‘Stop crying’ to my son when I was raising him, did I ruin his life?”

I have been asked questions like this for more than thirty years, including recently, when I was serving on a conference panel to discuss fatherhood. At this conference, I heard another panel member tell the audience that a boy’s future health depended on his crying and expressing feelings constantly—it was a terrible flaw in masculinity, masculine training, and fathering, the panelist said, to ever tell a child to stop crying.

This is a view we hear often, and my research agrees with this panelist’s opinion to a point: constant suppression of a child’s emotional life is harmful; crying and expressing feelings are important social-emotional skills. But brain science also shows us that the panelist oversimplified things. While “Stop crying!” can be used too harshly and too often, still, this parenting/social-emotional strategy can also build resilience, strength, and social adaptation. How?

Think for a moment about your own parenting. Haven’t you at some point watched a child whining and crying and thought, “There is no way that is functional.” Haven’t you quite naturally told a child: “Okay, stop crying, that’s enough, it’s time to do something about your problems.” I think we all have.

According to studies from four different continents, fathers, in general, tend to get to the point of ending a child’s tears more quickly than mothers. One reason is a less active male insula (the part of the brain that creates mirror neurons for empathetic response). The female insula tends to create more mirror neurons and retains them longer than the male, so it is not uncommon, in the aggregate, to hear more mothers spending more time listening to and crying with a child than dads might do.

In the context of this male/female difference across cultures, Patricia Hawley, at the University of Missouri, has studied the subtleties of bi-strategic parenting—the application in child-rearing of both maternal and paternal (female and male) nurturing styles. Hawley found that bi-strategic parenting has protected child development for millions of years, and even more subtle (and despite the public psychological narrative, especially regarding boys, that the more coercive and masculine approach is always dangerous to a child’s development) it is, in fact, essential to good, collaborative parenting.

To help us explore all this, let’s look at four scenarios.

• Scenario 1: A father (or mother) says to a child, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!” He or she is wielding a belt across the child’s behind.
• Scenario 2: A mother (or father) says to a crying child, “Crying just makes you weak, I’m ashamed of you,” and walks away from the child.
• Scenario 3: A father (or mother) says to a crying child, “That’s enough crying, it’s not helping anything,” and gives the child other emotional expression strategies.
• Scenario 4: A mother (or father) says to a crying child, “If you see a problem, do something about it,” and helps the child stop crying so that they can problem-solve, and take good action.

In the first two scenarios, brain-based psychological science would agree with the conference panelist that parents will likely cause social-emotional harm to their children, especially if the abuse or disrespect for tears is repeated constantly throughout childhood. In both three and four, however, the parent who tells the child to stop crying actually assists the child in building resilience, thus helping the child become a mature, self-regulating, problem-solving adult.

Children themselves need and want this kind of direction: a boy’s initial crying, for instance, is often happening in his brain’s hyper-stimulated amygdala, tear glands, and other functions–his crying pleads with adults for help answering his internal question, “How do I get stronger, more adult, more mature, more emotionally independent?” Just as much as he needs to cry, he may often need to stop crying and act. Similarly, while a teen girl may want to cry longer than a teen boy, she will at some point be asking the same question.

In my own fathering of my children, I never hit or abused them, but I did make the mistake of Scenario Two at various times, ordering them to stop crying but not giving them new assets to replace the tears. I regret these moments. At the same time, there were many moments in their childhoods when I knew my children were crying, ventilating, and “feeling” more than was healthy. Maturity and resilience, I knew, would come if I did my part to help my children end their tears and initiate changes in their lives.

In these times, it was healthy for me as a parent to tell my child, “Stop crying, get control of yourself, work on solving your problems.” My sub-text, in these situations, was “Crying and constantly talking about feelings is not necessarily the best thing in the world. It often gets to the point of whining and complaining, and that is not going to help you much.” In this kind of nurturing, my male insula finished quickly with its mirror neurons, and my brain saw “healthy parenting” from the more “male” perspective that Hawley’s research pointed out (what is called “coercive” but not “authoritarian” parenting).

Brad Bushman, at Ohio State University, has also completed research that helps us see the wisdom of bi-strategic parenting and even a bit of coercive parenting. When he and his colleagues prepared to study the emotional expression of young adults on social media, they assumed, like the panelist at the conference, that the more a child or adult expressed feelings (ventilating, talking, crying, asserting “how I feel”) the more functional and successful the adults would be.

Bushman and colleagues found something else: the young people, both male and female participants, who spent the most time in ventilating and, thus, ruminating behaviors were more depressed and less emotionally successful than the people who did not. Bushman reported his study and conclusions in the journal, Personality and Social Psychology. “The students in the rumination group were angrier and most aggressive while the students in the control group, who did nothing to vent their feelings, were the least angry or aggressive.”

Bushman is not contending that crying or expressing feelings is a bad thing—it is a good thing—but it can also be counterproductive. Dr. Bushman’s studies have been replicated by neuro-psychiatrist Daniel Amen who tracks rumination and feeling-expression in brain scans. Dr. Amen told me: “The more extended and chronic the rumination we experience in the brain, the more at risk our brains are of ANTS (Anxious Negative Thoughts), which just continue the stress cycle of more emotional distress and more likelihood of anxiety and depression.”

Dr. Amen, author of Sex in the Brain and Unleashing the Power of the Female Brain, pointed out the male/female aspects of this during our conversation. Males and fathers, he noted, tend to use fewer tears and fewer words-for-feelings than females and mothers. The anterior cingulate cortex of females is up to four times more active than the male’s; male tear glands are smaller than female tear glands after puberty comes; and, the male cerebellum (the “doing” center of the brain) is larger and generally more active in the male than in the female brain. Thus, in general, fathers are more likely than moms to try to end a child’s feeling-expression and move to problem-solving and “doing.”

In fathering my own children, I’m not proud of the mistakes I made, but my children, now grown, have told me they are glad I was “more masculine” in the way I parented them than their mom was. They loved how Gail parented, don’t get me wrong. What they were talking about was my attention to resilience over emotion or distended emotive rumination.

Our public psychological discourse generally wants parenting to be pure, orderly—and, especially, “not masculine.” But adulthood is a time when strength and resilience are as important as anything else, so we do need both maternal and paternal resources, even despite the fact that we do not all agree on what constitutes male/female and maternal/paternal, and not all families have a male and a female in them. Some women may also have a more 'masculine' parenting style and some men, a more 'feminine' approach to parenting.

From a larger social context, I believe we need to challenge panelists like the one I heard. When they say, “We want fathers more involved with kids,” but, simultaneously, take an incomplete or even a denigrating view of the gifts fathers bring, we must challenge them to think more deeply and see things more clearly. This might mean: when you see dads, moms, and teachers doing the sorts of things featured in scenarios three and four, you might congratulate them for telling their child–or yours–it is okay to stop crying. This, too, is a sacred part of parenting.