How do we protect our children from danger and abuse? On some level, no amount of precaution or protection will guarantee our children will never be hurt. Having children is a risk, as Elizabeth Stone put it: “Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body”.
As parents, we have to makes decisions along the continuum between safety/security and danger/experience. An extreme emphasis on safety stunts growth and development, i.e. helicopter parenting leads to emotionally stunted children. While an extreme emphasis on experience with a high risk threshold can lead to injury or death. Every parent has to decide what is best for their children, but one skill that will serve children throughout their lives while they navigate their own limits with risk and openness to experiences is “CONSENT”. Luckily, it is something that be easily learned though play. As parents, we can demonstrate boundaries, e.g. “you can splash my legs with water, but not my head”. We can demonstrate amending consent, e.g. “I agreed to splashing and playing in the water earlier, but I just put my shirt back on, and I don’t want to get my shirt wet. I don’t consent to anymore splashing today.” I really like this article by Caroline Mimbs Nyce in The Atlantic, “How Should Parents Talk To Their Kids About Rape?”, 16 June 2016:
“The high-profile case [of Brock Turner at Stanford] sparked a discussion in Notes: How should parents talk about rape and consent with their kids? . . . Many readers—including some parents of kids under 5—responded to her callout. ‘I’ve been thinking about this topic since my son’s birth two years ago,’ writes one primary school teacher and mother [the above quote comes from this unnamed teacher]: Consent has as much to do with setting personal boundaries—for yourself and others—as it does with preventing sexual assault. Explaining consent to small children has little to do with sex, although it does help prevent sexual assault as well as giving children a voice if they are threatened by or actually assaulted at any age.
Learning consent for small children means if you are tickling your best friend and she says to stop then you stop—even though you personally think tickles are the best. Consent means that when you're wrestling with your friend and you can tell he doesn't want to anymore, you stop—even if you love rough-housing and could wrestle forever.“
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