Running On Caffine

This will probably be the last meme I will make for this series.

eren icons!

Avatar: The Legend of Steven (Steven Universe - Avatar AU)

I wanted to make more, but I’m going to be busy again!

“Honey, can you listen to me for a moment? I’m glad you’ve found a new friend, but you need to make sure to look at her face to see if she likes it when you hug her. And if she doesn’t like it, you need to give her space. Okay?”

Two years old, and already her mother was teaching her about consent.

My daughter Sally likes to color on herself with markers. I tell her it’s her body, so it’s her choice. Sometimes she writes her name, sometimes she draws flowers or patterns. The other day I heard her talking to her brother, a marker in her hand.

“Bobby, do you mind if I color on your leg?”

Bobby smiled and moved himself closer to his sister. She began drawing a pattern on his leg with a marker while he watched, fascinated. Later, she began coloring on the sole of his foot. After each stoke, he pulled his foot back, laughing. I looked over to see what was causing the commotion, and Sally turned to me.

“He doesn’t mind if I do this,” she explained, “he is only moving his foot because it tickles. He thinks its funny.” And she was right. Already Bobby had extended his foot to her again, smiling as he did so.

What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.

Teaching consent is ongoing, but it starts when children are very young. It involves both teaching children to pay attention to and respect others’ consent (or lack thereof) and teaching children that they should expect their own bodies and their own space to be respected—even by their parents and other relatives.

She smiled and said, “Ask him.”

“What?”

“Hold out your hands to him and see if he leans toward you or away from you.” So I did, and he leaned away, and I dropped the subject. Five or ten minutes later, he was leaning towards me, overbalancing and almost falling out of Mystery’s arms, and she said, “He’s asking you to hold him now.” So I did, and it was magical, getting to introduce myself to my nephew and the firstborn of the Sybil family.

I am all about respecting children’s agencies and teaching good boundaries. I didn’t ask at the airport, when Totoro was surrounded by new stimuli and needed the reassurance of his mother. I didn’t ask when we first got back either; I gave him time to settle down, get used to his surroundings, and get used to me in person instead of a moving picture on a cell phone screen. I thought I was respecting his boundaries. But it had never occurred to me that an eight month old, who couldn’t speak or even understand most speech, might be able to establish his own boundaries.

A year later they came to visit again, when he was 19 or 20 months old. The weather was what we Northwesterners call “a bit nippy” and what thin-blooded Midwesterners like my sister call “fucking freezing, are you kidding me?” As we were getting ready to leave the house, Totoro objected vehemently to the need for pants and a coat. Finally Mystery had me stand by and hand her things as she near-literally wrestled him into his clothes. He was screaming and kicking and saying, “No pants, no no, don’t wanna, no Mama.”

And as she worked, Mystery kept talking to him soothingly. “I can hear you saying no, and I understand that you don’t want to wear your clothes, but it’s my job to keep you safe and warm. I know you’re saying no, I can hear that, but it’s very cold outside and I have to keep you safe and warm.” Over and over, reassuring him that she understood what she wanted and that she had a good reason for ignoring his wishes.

And it hit me all over again, an aspect of respecting children’s agencies and boundaries that had never once occurred to me. Because sometimes it is necessary to override their wishes. Part of being a good guardian is keeping them safe even when they want to play in traffic or eat nothing but candy. But I’d never thought about it from Totoro’s point of view, how frightening and how helpless it would feel to scream “no” into an unhearing void. Mystery made sure he knew he was being heard, he wasn’t being ignored, he was important enough to have people react to his words.