“Boys need paternal tenderness”

It is not accepted for us to behave in relation to the sons gently and affectionately. It is believed that the manifestation of paternal feelings will prevent the boy from becoming a real man. However, today psychologists talk about the importance of bodily contact. We found out from a psychotherapist Albina Loktionova, why dads should hug his sons as often as possible.

Psychologies: In the submission of many people, the correct education of the son is a distant, restrained, devoid of bodily contact. You say it’s mistaken. Why?

Albina Loktionova: How to feel a child that dad loves him if he is restrained and suspended? Children perceive what “lies on the surface”, therefore, even if you experience great tenderness for your baby, but do not show it (or show little), your behavior will be read by him as indifference.

In practice, we are constantly faced with the fact that men, with rare exceptions, are poorly distinguished by touching care and tenderness from intimately colored. Precisely because in childhood they did not have the opportunity to carry out this differentiation. From life experience, they know only the touch, having sexual intention, and therefore they unconsciously avoid bodily contact with their sons. Many men are afraid that this can open the way to the child to something wrong. Although, in fact, tenderness, protection and care from the father are the prevention of any psychological deviations.

Why a child is not sufficiently gentle relationships with his mother?

A. L.: Paternal touches differ from maternal (where the central sensation

is comfort and comfort) in that they give the child a feeling of absolute security. Without surviving the experience in which the father restrains and regulates his strength, it is difficult for the boy to learn how to manage his own masculinity, it is impossible to survive it as an unconditionally positive and very attractive quality.

If in childhood, being helpless and defenseless, the son sees from the pope the manifestation of tenderness, care and protection, then, growing up, he will become a person who can be strong and feeling at the same time. Otherwise, there are two ways of development: “an insensitive strong man” or “fearful lean”.

Is it only a father is able to give his son the opportunity to see the difference between parental affection and erotic touches?

A. L.: Of course, yes. Imagine that the boy experienced a shortage of proximity in relations with his own father in childhood. This leads to longing, a hidden desire to survive it in adulthood. The smaller the child, the more information he perceives through the body.

And it is extremely important that in his bodily self, the feeling of parental care, expressed in tenderness, protection, satisfaction of children’s needs, is rooted. This gives the boy a completely different experience of male touches – paternal and friendly, which he can use further in his life, in communicating with friends and even his own children.

I saw how adolescents hopelessly confuse in their own desires, reacting with excitement where there is even the slightest sign of human proximity. Her, we know for sure: if a little boy receives a sufficient number of unambiguous touches from his father, then he is filled with confidence in himself as a man. And then, growing up, he is well different in a friendly touch from the same touch with sexual intention, because father’s love is “spelled out” in his body.