You know that person at the family dinner who clearly has something going on behind their eyes, but when you check in, all you get back is a quick reassurance that everything is fine? Maybe it is a parent. Maybe a grandparent. You have watched emotions flicker across their face in unguarded moments, only to see the wall come right back up the second anyone notices. Most of us have been taught to read that as a choice – a deliberate refusal to open up. But decades of psychological research suggest we have been reading it wrong.
The invisible rulebook behind the silence
Millions of people who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s were raised inside a set of unspoken cultural rules about emotions. Boys were told not to cry. Girls were told not to make a fuss. Nobody was supposed to burden other people with their problems. You handled it. You moved on.
These were not gentle suggestions. They were survival instructions, handed down by parents who had themselves been shaped by the Depression and the wars. In households where survival had been the priority for decades, emotions were treated as a liability – something that slowed you down, something that made you weak. The phrase about family problems staying behind closed doors was not just an expression in mid-century homes. It was a governing principle. Marriages that were falling apart stayed together for appearances. Children who were struggling were told to toughen up. Mental health was not discussed. Therapy was reserved for people who had, in the language of the time, really lost it.
Research on baby boomer mental health confirms that this generation was raised under authoritarian parenting styles now linked to anxiety, low self-esteem, and social difficulties in adulthood. The Silent Generation parents who raised them prioritized obedience and composure. The boomers internalized those values and carried them into their own families. And the pattern held across cultures – in Australia, for instance, the emotional template was identical: you do not complain, you do not explain, you get on with it.
What psychology actually found
Psychologist Ronald Levant, at the University of Akron, spent decades studying the specific mechanism behind this emotional shutdown. He gave it a name: normative male alexithymia, a mild-to-moderate difficulty in identifying, describing, and expressing emotions that results from gender-based socialization influenced by the traditional masculine norm of restrictive emotionality. The word alexithymia itself literally means without words for emotions.
What makes Levant’s findings so striking is one detail: this was not an inherent trait. It was trained. Boys actually start out more emotionally expressive than girls as infants. But by the age of two, they fall behind in verbal emotional expression. By school age, the gap has widened further. Peers punish emotional expression, fathers model stoicism, and the broader culture reinforces the message that vulnerable feelings are a problem to be solved, not experienced. So could an entire generation simply have had the emotional wiring rerouted before they were old enough to know it was happening?
Levant’s research found that normative male alexithymia is negatively correlated with relationship satisfaction and communication quality, and positively correlated with fear of intimacy. The result is a population of adults who are genuinely skilled at enduring hardship but genuinely incapable of articulating what that hardship does to them. Their closest people often interpret the silence as coldness, as indifference, as not caring. It is rarely any of those things.
And while Levant’s work focused primarily on men, the emotional suppression of that era was not exclusively male. Women were expected to absorb everyone else’s emotions while muting their own. Anger was considered unfeminine. Ambition was selfish. Sadness was self-indulgent. The role of the mother was to manage the household’s emotional climate without ever acknowledging that the management was labour.
The generational gap that no one chose
Here is where it becomes especially complicated. The generation that grew up in the 1960s often raised children in the 1980s and 1990s, a period when emotional intelligence, self-expression, and psychological awareness were entering the mainstream. Those children were given a vocabulary their parents never had. And now they look at their parents and see people who seem locked behind glass.
Bowlby’s attachment theory tells us that emotional responsiveness – not just physical presence – is what creates secure bonds between people. A parent can be present every single day and still feel emotionally unavailable if they never learned how to meet their child in the space where feelings live. For people raised in the 1960s, that space was explicitly off-limits. They were taught to stay out of it. They built their entire adult lives outside of it. And now their children are asking them to walk back in, and they do not know how.
Breaking the chain requires catching an old reflex before it fires. Instead of telling an upset child that they are fine, the shift is toward acknowledging what you see and inviting them to share it. That sounds simple, but for anyone raised in mid-century emotional culture, it goes against every instinct that was ever modelled for them.
Small openings matter more than you think
Buddhist philosophy offers a useful lens here: real presence is not about fixing someone’s experience. It is about being willing to sit in it with them without needing it to change. The ego wants to solve. Presence just wants to stay. For a generation trained to solve everything and feel nothing, that kind of presence is foreign – but it is not impossible.
Many adult children report watching their parents soften over the years. Not dramatically, not in some cinematic way. Just small moments where they say a little more than they used to, where the shutters stay open half a second longer. For someone who spent sixty years being trained to keep everything behind closed doors, leaving one slightly ajar is an act of extraordinary courage. If you are the one standing on the other side, the most useful thing you can do is not push. It is wait – and let them know that whatever comes through, whenever it comes, you can hold it.
