Today a student curled up sobbing in my lap because one of her cute lil boy friends pushed her away when she gave him an aggressively affectionate hug.

I asked her “Are you sad? That’s ok. You can cry for a little bit if you want.” So we just sat there for a while.

(And then we had a conversation at a 5yo level about respecting other people’s privacy and how it’s ok to say no when we don’t want someone to touch our bodies.)

When she’d worked through it, I said “I love you” and sent her out to recess.

I told my mom and aunt the story because I thought “hey they would get this cause they’re moms, and this is a kinda thing that moms do, right?”.

That instigated a conversation about how silly all this “modern emotional parenting” is with all this “sensitivity and feelings”.

Which made me wonder how my grandparents treated had them when they were heartbroken?

And my great-grandparents before them?

Or why teaching a kid how to process her emotions out loud instead to bottling them up seemed so foreign to them?

Conclusion: the way we love our children will leave a lasting impact for generations. As millennials/Gen Zers, let’s do the hard work of breaking the dysfunctional cycles that hurt both us and our parents.

Then maybe all our kids won’t end up in therapy like the rest of us