My young nephew glared at all of us, screwed up his eyes and cried loudly that we'd hurt his feelings. I can't remember what we'd done to hurt his feelings and, in fact, all I remember is that we tried really hard not to laugh at the injustice in his voice. We knew laughing would probably scar his psyche for ever and that, should he ever find himself on a therapist's chair in years to come, a few ill-timed giggles would be blamed for his failure to become a nuclear physicist, multimillion-pound sports star or captain of industry.
My sister muttered that it would probably be the last time he would admit to having feelings anyway, since he'd shortly be going to school and that was the last place you admitted to being hurt if you could help it. It'll be interesting to see when he leaves school whether he'll admit to having feelings at all.
I grew up in the era of "boys don't cry", which had its advantages and disadvantages. You knew where you were in the boys don't cry scenario, although sometimes you wished you could make them sob. But today you can't turn the pages of a newspaper or tune into a radio or TV programme without a plethora of men spilling their emotional guts out for examination. I'm trying to decide whether this is a good thing.
Men's emotional well-being has been a popular topic of discussion ever since women became financially independent of them. Robbed of the traditional breadwinner role, many men are struggling to come to grips with their changed status as equals rather than providers.
I'm not convinced that equal partnership is entirely what the male psyche is geared towards since many of the men I've encountered in life are competitive to an extreme and are truly happy only when they think they are the most important person in the universe.
If tracts on feminism and the liberation of women dominated the 1960s and the 1970s, the following 20 years has been all about allowing men to express their emotional needs and to cry if someone has hurt their feelings.
The phenomenon was given popular currency with the publication of Nick Hornby's Fe- ver Pitch, which showed that it is OK for men to cry.
ADMITTEDLY, it's OK for them to cry only when their favourite football team has lost in the FA Cup or has been beaten by a team from a lower division or has just given away a massive half-time lead. But it means that lots of men can now weep manly tears and everyone can understand because football is more important than life and death. The emotional wreckage that is the thirtysomething man continued in Hornby's follow-up novels, High Fidelity and About a Boy, in which his heroes again struggle to get to grips with what women want from them in the modern world.
In fact, most women just want a modicum of common sense, which means things like asking directions when you're lost and being able to admit that you can't do the entire attic conversion on a Saturday afternoon with the 103-piece tool kit that's on special offer only on a TV shopping channel. Most women are quite happy if men do occasionally mention that they love them - and don't actually need to be showered with roses on a weekly basis as proof.
According to published articles, men today are suffering with gender-role conflict while women are more empowered. Women can talk about their problems while men push them to the back of their minds. Women go shopping to unwind. Men think of ways to beat rivals at work. Women watch sad movies and reach for a box of tissues. Men grit their teeth.
The difference is not that men and women don't feel the same things, it's simply that they express it differently. So psychologists are rushing around to help men who struggle with rigid ideas of what it means to be male in today's society in order that they can function in the same way that women have had to function for years.
Now that emotional health has become a male issue instead of a female issue, the new male crisis leaps from every page. Dr Anthony Clare's most recent book is, in fact, titled On Men: Masculinity in Crisis, which encapsulates the whole concept.
But will all this emotional baggage coming to the surface make men better human beings? Or will they simply cry at night as they do all the things they've always done during the day? Men are more ruthless than women. Once they make a decision they're less likely to be swayed because they are better at compartmentalising issues than women. Women see the whole picture whereas men see the part of it that affects them.
I CERTAINLY never set out to work in a male dominated environment but I ended up doing so for 15 years. And it was those very male traits that so many people are now deriding that made me enjoy it. I liked the fact that what you saw was what you got with male colleagues. When somebody did something that I disagreed with I didn't want to spend hours talking things through. I wanted to bawl them out or be bawled out and just get on with it.
So I'm watching all this emotional stuff with mixed feelings. I know that men can be good husbands and lovers and fathers and colleagues. I know that life can deal them some rough blows and that sometimes they'll want to curl up in a corner and cry about it. I'm just not so convinced that I want them to get in touch with their feelings on the airwaves and in print every single day.
And just because women are supposed to be able to sob in public doesn't actually mean that our crises have gone away either. It's just that we've been dealing with them for longer.