Strength, then and now

Strength, then and now | Daily Tribune

We get it wrong sometimes — not because we know less, but because we were taught differently. Those of us who came of age toward the end of that generation were shaped by a particular cultural weather: one that prized toughness, quiet endurance, and carrying on without visible strain. It was the air we breathed, the script we inherited.

That is partly why Senator Robinhood Padilla’s recent remarks — made during a Senate hearing on the proposed Children’s Safety in Social Media Act — did not surprise me. His office has since framed the remark as part of a willingness to raise difficult issues even when they are unpopular or politically risky.

Like many Filipinos of my generation, I grew up watching his action films through the late 1980s and much of the 1990s, when the tough-guy archetype was not just popular but formative. Strength was expected.

When Kim Atienza, widely known as Kuya Kim, responded with a call for kindness and a gentle redirection toward support and available help, the two instincts seemed to stand at odds — until I considered what both were reaching for.

I have previously written about the senator, and I try to view moments like this through the same careful lens. As a father raising two teenagers myself, I find it difficult to dismiss either instinct outright. If anything, this exchange reveals less about who is right and more about what our times are quietly demanding of us now.

I still remember how boys of our time were expected to grow up “matapang” (brave) and “malakas at hindi lampa” (strong, not awkward). Martial arts classes, rough sparring sessions — sometimes with older Kuya figures like Omar Cedric — and the occasional test of toughness were rites of passage. The message was simple: hold your ground, or risk being tagged a “mahinang bata” (weak kid).

In many ways, the senator, Kuya Kim, and those of us who came in toward the tail end of that generation were shaped by the same cultural weather. Both men have carried on their public lives with a visible grounding in faith. I would not describe myself as outwardly religious, but I have learned to anchor myself in belief.

I know the signs now: a heaviness that settles without warning, a kind of internal static I have come to privately call my loops. When the winds pick up and the clouds thicken, during those periods when the emotional weather turns unsettled, I find myself returning to that quiet point of steadiness.

Perhaps this is why the current conversation about whether the youth have grown emotionally weaker feels incomplete. Perhaps the question before us is not only what we say about resilience, but how we speak about human struggle when it inevitably appears.

Our generation was taught to prize resilience, and there is value in that lesson. But fatherhood and experience have a way of revealing that strength is not always loud, and endurance is not always visible.

If anything, what this moment invites is not a choice between toughness and tenderness. It may be an opportunity to bring both instincts to the same table. The strength our generation learned to value still matters. But so does the wisdom to recognize strain early and create deliberate space for it to be processed — often with the quiet guidance of the country’s small but indispensable community of mental health professionals. These are not opposing virtues. They are, increasingly, complementary disciplines.

As parents, many of us now find ourselves navigating terrain our own fathers rarely had a language for. The pressures facing today’s youth are layered in ways that are difficult to compare neatly with earlier decades. To insist only on hardness may miss something important. But to abandon the cultivation of resilience would be just as incomplete.

I am learning, deliberately and sometimes with difficulty, to hold both. The steadiness we hope to pass on to our children is not built only in moments of visible strength. Often, it is formed in the quieter work of listening, steadying, and helping them make sense of what they carry — work that, in my own life, is often guided by the quiet disciplines of faith.

Perhaps the better task now is not to decide too quickly whether the young have grown weaker or stronger, but to listen more carefully — and help them build the kind of resilience our times now require.