A few days ago I witnessed a scene between children that left me thinking for a long time. A group of families, an ordinary afternoon, kids playing together. Then something broke: one girl created tension among the others, using something that was not hers. Another girl, angry over the unfairness of it, reacted, picking up an object with the intention, never carried out, of taking it out on something, not on anyone.
The gesture frightened the adults present. Whoever saw it judged immediately, as often happens, looking only at the tip of the iceberg.
Behind the anger, intelligence
Talking with that girl, even for just a few minutes, I sensed something. Behind her anger there was no cruelty. There was intelligence, awareness, perhaps a body starting to change ahead of the mind, an early entry into a more complex age. Watching the same scene, my wife arrived at the same reading.
Children with more emotional intelligence, the ones who feel everything more intensely, are often also the ones who explode more visibly when no one truly listens to them before they reach their limit. It is not a flaw. It is a signal that something around them is not working the way it should.
The double standard around us
Society, in cases like this, has no hesitation in coming down hard on a child’s gesture. Wrong, certainly. But almost understandable if read for what it is, an outburst of anger that was never truly received before. That same society, though, finds a thousand ways to justify violence when it comes from an adult convinced they are right, when it becomes revenge dressed up as self-defence. Double standard, double morality, applied depending on whose hand is holding the anger.
What is truly missing
This episode, small in its entirety, made me think of something bigger. Those who struggle to manage an angry child often carry, in turn, an emotional inheritance never truly processed, received from parents who themselves lacked the tools to name things properly. It is no one’s fault in particular. It is a system that repeats itself, generation after generation, when something structural is missing.
What is truly missing, systemically, is care for the mind. Support networks. A state that, instead of seriously investing in this, often retreats into rhetorical calls for “the values of the past”, into religion as a moral shortcut, hypocrisy built more to gather votes than to solve anything real.
It is no coincidence that Gen Z is starting to break this silence more than previous generations, as confirmed by recent data on stigma and mental health. But cultural change alone is not enough if the infrastructure is missing, if there is no one who truly listens before anger becomes the only language left.
The void that creates, once again
I come back to a theme I have already touched on: the void is not always the enemy. Sometimes it is the space in which the mind, if left free, manages to process what it has lived through. But for that void to be fertile instead of destructive, something needs to surround it. It needs community, it needs someone telling you “I see you, you are not wrong, let me help you understand that anger” instead of leaving you alone with it, or worse, judging you for showing it.
That child did not need to be condemned. She needed to be heard before she exploded. Like all of us, in the end.