Big Boys Cry - New children’s book aims to empower young boys to embrace and understand their emotions, to save future generations of men from mental health issues.
Big Boys Cry
Big Boys Cry is a children’s book that seeks to open the conversation around boys expressing emotion and why it’s OK, no matter your age, to cry. The aim of the book is to normalise this idea and to act as a prevention tool when it comes to bottling up mental health problems as boys go into adolescence. Over half of teenage boys do not feel like they can express their feelings to their fathers, which is really concerning and why I believe it is so important to start the conversations about feelings so much earlier.
In my late teens and early twenties is when I was first confronted with male suicide in young males. Naturally, it is devastating when lives are lost to suicide and I think many people feel a sense of guilt over whether these deaths were preventable, especially when these young men had seemingly everything to live. Suicide is a final act of behaviour that is the result of a range of factors, difficulties and distress. For many people, an attempt occurs after months of having thoughts and feelings about suicide.
It was wanting to understand more about mental health, that resulted in my final year dissertation; looking at how the media was portraying mental health and whether that was having a knock-on effect for those seeking recovery. This was in 2014 and I am pleased to say that over the last five years alone, there has been tremendous leaps of progression in the media and their depictions of mental health on screen and also the language being used on paper and online. My case study was the father of someone who had very sadly lost his son to suicide and I naturally delved into researching how the different sexes handled their mental health. Suicide is the biggest killer of men between the ages of 18-24 years, which is so desperately sad when you consider that these lives really haven’t even properly started yet.
Women are far more likely to share with friends and seek help for treatment for mental health problems. Males and females have long faced problems with stereotyping, but the pressure for males to classicly be seen as hunter gatherer types that are silent pillars of strength, heightened by media depictions of heroes that ‘show no weakness’ can be detrimental to the exploration of boys as they become men when struggling with their emotions.
It was whilst finishing my studies, that someone very dear to me struggled with his mental health and I had no real idea the extent to which that person was suffering. This person was, from the outset, what some would consider a stereotypical macho male. He not only ‘looked the part’ but he also ‘played the part’, being at the top of his game in sport and being the heart and soul of his various groups of friends, that were often made up of keen sportsmen. Whilst I knew he was going through a hard time, I had no idea the true extent of it. He is OK today (in fact he is doing wonderfully well), but at that time in his life he was unable to share openly with friends and perhaps vocalise just how badly he was feeling. He was the first person I sent the story to when it was written four years ago and he stressed to me the importance of having this type of writing available to children, which led me onto my mission of turning it into an actual book.
The book follows Billy celebrating his seventh birthday with his Mum and Dad. His parents have given him a bike without training wheels, which in his eyes confirms his ‘big boy’ status. It is whilst out riding his new bike for the first time that he has his first experience that ‘big boys don’t cry’, which naturally he finds very confusing. Billy asks his parents for guidance after receiving this confusing message from a stranger and is encouraged to talk about a difficult topic. Mum and Dad give examples to Billy of male role models that he admires who have expressed emotion and why it is OK to do so ‘no matter how big, small or old you are’. My hope is that this sends a message to children to talk to adults they know and trust about things that are troubling them, rather than keeping silent.
The fear of crying becomes dismantled in the book and Billy is able to both grow mentally and move on positively with his life. This is a vital message for any child to hear and to replicate in their own lives.
Big Boys Cry can be seen as a story, but it is also a guide and a comfort, offering caregivers a way to start a conversation about boys expressing emotion to children. Billy’s father sharing his own story aims to prompt adults to share gentle stories of their own and to initiate questions and answers with a child.
One of the key points Mum and Dad make to Billy in the book, is that if you’re feeling sad you should tell someone. The book seeks to break away from the idea that boys should be ‘tough’, have a ‘stiff upper lip’ and power through negative emotions that they are feeling. My illustrator Helena Maxwell, who has worked for The Times and Shortbooks has really bought the book to life in a fun and playful way and our values on boys and their mental health are totally aligned, which was really important to me.
At the heart of why I wrote Big Boys Cry, is to open the conversation around males and their feelings. The goal would be to have the book in schools all over the UK, so teachers can normalise the idea that ‘everyone cries’ and that it is not explicitly ‘for girls’.
I did a reading at a school in Balham and I asked the class before I read the book, who was more likely to cry, boys or girls. It was amazing that a class of seven year olds all in unison declared that girls (naturally!) were more likely to cry. This also highlights to me that both sexes have very stereotypical ideas of how girls should be and how boys should be, which can be damaging later when boys become teens who later become men. If these ideologies of what it ‘means to be man’ have been subconsciously drummed into them since the ages of seven, it is no wonder that males can feel conflicted about their feelings later on. On reading the book and playing some interactive games with the class, I then asked the children the same question again and it was really gratifying to hear them shout out ‘BOTH OF US’.
If we can start the conversation around boys and crying in the classroom and before bed, perhaps more teenage boys would feel more comfortable expressing their feelings to their fathers if they are going through a difficult time because there is no suggestion that has made them think otherwise. If the fathers of these boys and girls find themselves reading Big Boys Cry to their children before bed, they might even finding solace themselves in the gentle reminder that, ‘yes, it is OK to cry!’
We have had some incredibly supportive testimonials from mental health charities such as CALM (Campaigning Against Living Miserably), Charlie Waller Memorial Trust and Future Men whose services and resources are utterly wonderful for those wanting to learn more about mental health whether directly for themselves or indirectly for loved ones.
Alongside my work and the release of the book, I have been working as an Ambassador for the research charity ‘MQ: Transforming Mental Health’, whose goal is to create a world where mental illnesses are understood, effectively treated and one day made preventable.
It has certainly been a rollercoaster getting the book to this point, but if Big Boys Cry could be a useful aid for even one person then I know we will have made a difference. However, it won’t take one book to start the conversation about boys and their feelings. Rather it will be a collective cultural change to encourage boys to be open and honest; asking for help is not a sign of weakness but in fact a sign of strength. Schools can create cultures in which young people feel it is healthy to talk through emotional difficulties and worries, which is why myself and Helena want to get Big Boys Cry into as many schools as we can across the country. We need to start talking to the boys of today, because these will be the future men of tomorrow.
References
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/s/suicide
Gviom, Y. & Apter, A. (2012). Suicide and Suicidal Behavior. Public Health Reviews, 34 (2), 1-20.
https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/news/half-teenage-boys-dont-feel-they-can-open-their-dads-about-mental-health
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/men-and-mental-health/index.shtml