we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex.
I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence.
I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespect and culminates in rape.
Rape hinges on the detail of consent. As a society trying to combat this issue, we seem to overlook that for the most part.
I taught my children that hugs and kisses required consent. I taught that from birth. Even a baby too young to talk can turn their face away because they don't want a kiss or hold their arms up enthusiastically to receive affection.
When they were older, I told them if they told someone "no" and their decision was not respected, come get me.
I only had one of them come get me once. The person who felt entitled to get "sugar" from my child was utterly shocked that I told them they were wrong.
This was an elderly female relative. My children are both boys.
Most likely, she wasn't actually a child molester, but this practice of adults demanding hugs and kisses from children who have no right to say "no" is commonplace and gets treated as something funny in movies. I treated it as no laughing matter.
If you want children to understand consent and respect, the best thing to do is let them experience it firsthand from birth. And make sure they know that rule is a two-way street, not a one-sided privilege.
My wife told me something a while back about how girls are often taught from a young age to be "sweet" and to defer to adults who demand their affection. I can't remember if it's something she read or came to herself upon examination of her youth. I can see the way that this idea on boundaries can grow to adulthood to having difficulty strongly advocating for oneself. The philosophies you laid out resonate strongly with me, and as a first-time parent expecting a daughter soon, I hope I can correctly instill them in her.
Did you ever deal with an instance where your kids started telling you "no" in response to demands you felt were reasonable, twisting your original explanations to use against you, for things like eating, cleaning up or hygiene? How did you reconcile the difference?
I made sure my demands were reasonable and gave them options. If they didn't want to bathe that night, they had to pass a sniff test. If they didn't want a haircut, they could grow their hair as long as they wanted so long as they kept it clean.
For eating, I made healthy foods available that they liked. This worked really well. One son has two conditions that can land a child in in-house hospital treatment for aversion to eating and he never had issues like that.
For trying new foods, they had to try it, not finish it. I never made them do things like clean their plate. Instead, I planned ahead for how much I expected people to eat at the meal.
I always had a good reason for what I was asking and it very rarely came to "because I said so." On the rare occasions where it did hit that point, they went along with it because it was rare, so they were convinced I had a good reason even if I couldn't get them to understand it.
I also am super flexible with food. Lots of obesity is caused by forcing kids to eat in excess. I don’t make candy available for meals, but not do they have to eat. When they do it, it’s natural food.
I have one major rule - if I give an absolute command, it must be obeyed immediately without question. In exchange, I promise to do it very rarely and explain my reasons as the earliest possible convenience. This has helped in situations where it wasn’t practical for me to physically drag them - get out of the way of the car, come towards me NOW and away from that crumbling cliff. Stuff like that.
Most other things fall into place just by showing by example. Show interest in their homework, talk excitedly about science, etc, they do their best in school.
> Did you ever deal with an instance where your kids started telling you "no" in response to demands you felt were reasonable, twisting your original explanations to use against you, for things like eating, cleaning up or hygiene?
As a parent of teenagers... omg, yes. LOL. I think it's as much because they're teenagers preparing to leave the nest as much as anything.
The question was aimed at me. I never experienced that.
That doesn't mean the teen years didn't have some bumps. The worst of that was cleared up by explaining to my children that they were being flooded with hormones and a side effect of high levels of testosterone is aggression and anger.
So if they were feeling very, very angry, it wasn't because they were being subjected to extreme injustice they had never before seen. It was because they were hormonal.
That conversation ended with the punchline "You're problem is called testosterone, not my bitch mother." which caused everyone to crack up.
After that I occasionally would say "You sound like an icky, hormone soaked teenager." And my son would say "I am an icky hormone soaked teenager" and he would try to tone down whatever made me say that and I would try to cut him some slack for being hormone soaked and not entirely in control of his big, fat mouth because of it.
My grandma had a campfire saying that "smoke follows beauty." I realized many years later as an adult that it was part of a subconscious family mythology, handed down for who knows how many generations. If you're pretty, it's your fault for unwanted attention (smoke).
It’s your saying, but it doesn’t read that way to me. It’s not your fault but it’s a consequence. Just like with a campfire, perhaps this gives people an ounce of solace with unwanted attention, i.e. you’re dealing with this because you’re lucky to be pretty. It’s still not right to have to deal with it, but it’s reality.
Totally agree. As a boy I played chess at the book store. This one man would always have long conversations with me and tell me about all sorts of books. (This was great, I loved reading.) After a number of weeks, he wanted me to go have lunch with him down the street. I felt like this was weird, and said no. The following weekend one of the other men, a math professor at the college, took me aside and said flat out not to hang out with that man, or go anywhere with him. Long story short, predators start by forming a friendship and building trust. If, for whatever reason, your kids don't feel like they can come to you first for things, then they're at a higher risk for predators.
We've also taught a similar one in "your body, your choice." I can confirm some folks look at us sideways when we agree with our kids choice to not hug or kiss.
If there is one thing I'd want my kids to know it is how to establish and confidently hold a boundary.
Thanks for this. I haven’t actually drawn a line between this kind of semi-forced physical affection and the blurring of consent as an adult, but it makes perfect sense. We even encourage/force kids to reciprocate gifts with physical affection. Surely this also inculcates a subconscious notion that you “owe” someone in this way.
I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence.
I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespect and culminates in rape.
Rape hinges on the detail of consent. As a society trying to combat this issue, we seem to overlook that for the most part.
I taught my children that hugs and kisses required consent. I taught that from birth. Even a baby too young to talk can turn their face away because they don't want a kiss or hold their arms up enthusiastically to receive affection.
When they were older, I told them if they told someone "no" and their decision was not respected, come get me.
I only had one of them come get me once. The person who felt entitled to get "sugar" from my child was utterly shocked that I told them they were wrong.
This was an elderly female relative. My children are both boys.
Most likely, she wasn't actually a child molester, but this practice of adults demanding hugs and kisses from children who have no right to say "no" is commonplace and gets treated as something funny in movies. I treated it as no laughing matter.
If you want children to understand consent and respect, the best thing to do is let them experience it firsthand from birth. And make sure they know that rule is a two-way street, not a one-sided privilege.