All Cried Out

This study makes me sad: Researchers at the University of South Florida have found that crying may not actually make you feel better.

The psychologists asked nearly 100 women to keep track of their crying jags in “daily mood journals” and from the entries, they deduced that having a good cry made pretty much no difference in the moods of two-thirds of the women in the study, according to the Time Magazine Healthland blog.

I have always been a proponent of the cathartic crying theory, believing that if you feel like crying, for the most part you should just let it out right there and then. In my experience – and I’ve done a lot of crying in my day – crying always makes me feel better. I’ve found that if I hold back the tears, they will just come out at some point later in the day anyway. And of course I am capable of holding back the tears because sometimes that’s just what you have to do according to the situation you’re in.

I think that this crying is OK philosophy is important to parenting, too. As a parent, you just have to accept that kids are going to cry and let out their emotions. That’s not to say that I support and encourage my toddler’s crying over life’s smaller disappointments that fall under the broad spectrum of not getting her way. But she recently told me that the kids in the next class up in daycare don’t cry. I’m sure this is just her way of saying that bigger kids are expected to buck up and quit bellyaching over the small stuff.

But me being the crier in her life, the only person in the family who broke down at the end of Toy Story 3, I wanted to make sure she knew that if she’s sad, it’s OK for her to cry because letting it out will help her feel better and move on. My own unscientific and unofficial studies prove that it’s a fact.