The monkey loves to watch Pocoyo, a cartoon in YouTube that comes in many different languages. He will be watching episodes in German, Polish, Swedish, Mandarin, and Spanish. He likes to rewind the same episode over and over, watch it in different angles, and covers different sections so that he can focus on specific pieces.

We mentioned this to one of the Pediatric Developmental Specialists some years back. She told us, “It’s his engineering mind at work. He’s trying to figure out the inner workings of things.”

This morning my daughter asked me to make sure his brother was okay, if I could go check up on him. He was crying and crying. When I went to his room, I noticed he was watching cartoons. He was watching a Pocoyo episode about an alien. The alien was trying to conquer Earth. But when they tell him he needs to be nice, behave right, and not try to conquer the Earth, only then can Pocoyo and his group will become the alien’s friends.

The monkey keeps rewinding the alien crying. Then the monkey starts to cry with the alien. I struggle when he does this. Should we let him cry it out? Should we stop him. This shows he has empathy. But there are times that I feel I shouldn’t let him do this because he keeps repeating it. He does this over and over.

Today however, I let him cry it out. I know quarantine has been difficult on this kid. On all of us but the monkey struggles to express it. He’s struggling because he doesn’t go out, he doesn’t go to school. It’s just us, all day, for months. Just us. That’s difficult on everyone. But I think more on him.

Maybe crying is good for him. Maybe this will help him decompress.

Plus, I think we all need a good cry every now and then.