A Letter on Raising Them Both
My Dearest Friend,
There are weeks when the news stays safely outside my front door.
I read it. I think about it. Sometimes I argue about it over dinner or send an article to someone I love, and then I put my phone down and return to the small, ordinary things happening inside my own home.
And then there are weeks when it follows me in.
Lately, the conversations happening outside these walls have found their way into the quiet spaces of our family life, and I have caught myself looking differently at the two children growing up in front of me. One is a boy quickly becoming less little than I would like to admit. The other is a three-year-old girl still gloriously convinced that the entire world should know exactly what she thinks of it.
I am raising a son and a daughter.
And there is something about raising both that has made conversations about consent, sexual violence, and the things we excuse in one another feel especially complicated to me.
I held both of these children when they were brand new. I knew them before the world had the opportunity to tell them what a boy was supposed to be or what a girl was supposed to fear. Neither arrived knowing entitlement or shame. Neither knew that one day we might expect him to control himself while teaching her to protect herself, or that we might excuse behavior from boys while handing girls an ever-growing list of ways to avoid becoming the recipient of it.
They were just babies.
When I learned my first baby was a boy, I remember wondering what on earth I was going to do with him. I came from a family of girls. Girls felt familiar. I thought I understood the conversations I would someday have with a daughter because I had already lived on the other side of them.
A boy felt like unfamiliar territory.
How do you raise a boy into a good man? How do you protect the empathy and tenderness of a little boy while the world is busy teaching him what it thinks masculinity should look like? How do you raise someone who will not merely know right from wrong, but have the courage to choose right when choosing it costs him something?
Those questions felt enormous. The actual work began very small., sometimes with a soggy French fry.
My son was barely more than a baby when I found myself explaining that Momma did not want the half-chewed piece of food he was enthusiastically attempting to shove into my mouth. It is impolite to put things into someone’s mouth without their consent. It was absurd and funny and deeply ordinary...and I meant every word of it.
My body was mine. His body was his. Other people's bodies belonged to them.
That became one of those quiet threads running through our parenting. We asked before hugs. If he did not want to hug someone goodbye, he could wave or high-five instead. We used the real words for body parts, answered questions honestly and explained why doctors sometimes needed to touch him and why Momma or Daddy would be there. We taught him that stop and no were not game words; if he said stop during a tickle fight, the tickling stopped, and if someone else said it, he stopped too.
He also learned that I could say no. There were days when I was touched out and did not want another person climbing into my lap, and loving my child did not mean I had to pretend otherwise.
There were also moments when his no could not determine what happened next—because toddlers occasionally object quite passionately to things like holding hands in parking lots—and even then, we tried to explain the difference. I hear that you don't want to hold my hand. I am going to hold it while we cross because I have to keep your body safe. I will let go when we are across.
Consent was never one enormous conversation in our house.
It was hundreds of tiny ones.
And perhaps I have been so deliberate about those tiny conversations because I know what it feels like when the lesson is absent.
I know what it is to say no and discover that someone else considers it the beginning of a negotiation. I know what it is to have someone continue pushing until giving in feels easier than continuing to resist. I know what it is to look back afterward and begin interrogating myself instead of the person who crossed the boundary...to wonder whether I had been clear enough, careful enough, sober enough, forceful enough.
I know how easily a woman can inherit responsibility for someone else's choice.
There are details of my life that belong to me and do not need to become public simply because I choose to write vulnerably about what they taught me. But this much matters: when I teach my children about consent, I am not teaching an abstract principle I once read in a parenting book.
I am teaching something I wish had always been honored in my own life.
Years after I began teaching those lessons to my son, I had a daughter, and suddenly I could see the same conversation from the other side.
She is three now, and she has absolutely no difficulty saying no. She says it confidently, frequently, and occasionally before I have finished asking the question. She is bold and stubborn and funny, and she possesses the beautiful certainty of a small child who has not yet learned to wonder whether having a boundary makes her difficult.
I want her to keep some of that, because I know what may come later. Someday I may give her the list: Watch your drink. Stay with your friends. Don't leave anyone behind. Share your location. Text me when you get home. Trust the feeling that tells you something isn't right.
The details have changed over generations, but women know the list.
My mother knew versions of it. I knew versions of it. And there is something deeply painful about looking at my three-year-old daughter and realizing that, decades later, I may still have to hand it to her.
Not because caution is bad. Not because looking out for one another is wrong. There is something beautiful in the way women quietly watch over each other, the friend who will not leave without you, the text asking whether you made it home, the drink someone guards while you go to the bathroom.
But I don't want that to be the best we can do.
I don't want progress to mean that my daughter becomes better than I was at anticipating someone else's bad behavior. I don't want her peace of mind to depend upon whether she remembered every precaution. I don't want her walking through the world with that constant calculation humming somewhere beneath everything else—Am I safe? Did I drink too much? Was I too friendly? Do I know this person well enough? Did I make the wrong choice?
I want her to carry less.
And raising her has made me look differently at the boy I was already raising. Because perhaps part of changing what our daughters inherit is changing what we ask of our sons. I do not want to raise a son who simply knows that he should respect a woman's no. I want to raise a son who believes another person's no matters even when he isn't the person ignoring it.
There may someday be a room I am not in, filled with people I do not know. There may be a friend he loves doing something he knows is wrong. There may be a girl too intoxicated to consent, someone being harassed while everyone else laughs, a person saying stop while the rest of the group decides it is easier not to get involved.
And in that moment, I don't want him calculating what speaking up will cost him.
I want him to speak.
If his friends are angry, they can be angry. If standing up for someone costs him his place in the group, he can grieve the loss of people he loved and still know that losing them was better than becoming someone who stayed quiet so they would keep him.
Because silence becomes easier with practice.
The first time may be something small. Someone is bullied and you decide not to get involved. Someone says something cruel and you laugh because everyone else does. Someone crosses a line and you notice, but saying something would make the room uncomfortable.
Then comes the next thing...and the next. I don't want him practicing silence.
Perhaps that is why boys will be boys has always bothered me so deeply. It does harm to the people on the receiving end of whatever behavior we are excusing, certainly, but I think it also does something unfair to boys themselves. It tells them we expect less of them. That aggression or cruelty or disrespect is simply somewhere in their nature, and that asking them to control it is asking too much.
I knew my son before anyone could tell him that.
He did not come into the world with aggressive bones because he was a boy. He came into it small and soft and sensitive, capable of enormous affection and enormous feelings. I have watched him nurture. I have watched him care. I have watched him worry about other people.
I don't believe becoming a man requires losing any of that.
Just as I do not believe becoming a woman should require my daughter to lose the little girl who says no without apologizing.
And maybe that is the strange beauty of raising them both. I can see so clearly that they began in the same place. Two babies who did not know the rules yet. Two children learning that their bodies belong to them, that other people's bodies do not, that no means something whether they are the person saying it or the person hearing it.
The world may eventually try to teach them different lessons. It may teach her to soften herself so she does not make anyone uncomfortable. It may teach him to stay quiet so he does not make his friends uncomfortable.
I hope they both disappoint the world in that regard.
I hope she is loud when something is wrong.
I hope he is, too.
Because when I imagine my daughter grown, the thing I want most for her is not some impossible promise that nothing bad will ever happen. I know too much about the world to promise her that.
I want her to have peace of mind.
I want her to go out with her friends and have the ordinary worries of a young woman finding her way through the world without carrying quite so much vigilance alongside them. I want her to be able to trust people without immediately wondering whether trust itself was a mistake. I want her to know that if something goes wrong, the first question will not be what she should have done differently.
And I want the boys growing up beside her to be part of why the world feels different.
My son among them.
Not because women need men to save them, and not because my daughter should require someone's brother to stand guard over her. But because we all have some responsibility for what we allow to happen in the spaces we occupy.
Perhaps someday I will still hand her the list.
Perhaps I will still remind her to watch her drink and text me when she gets home. I am her mother...I suspect I will worry about her until I am very old and she is entirely tired of hearing about it.
But I hope her list is shorter than mine—and I hope her brother is part of a generation of men who understand why that matters.
The Lesson
Consent was never meant to begin with sex.
It begins in all those ordinary moments when our children learn that their bodies belong to them and that other people's bodies do not. It grows when they learn to say no, to hear no, to stop, to speak, and eventually to understand that respecting another person sometimes asks more of us than simply causing no harm ourselves.
I cannot promise my children a world without harm.
But I can raise them to believe we are responsible for making it harder for harm to flourish around us...and I can hope that enough of us are doing the same that someday our daughters inherit a little less fear, and our sons inherit a little less permission to look away.
To the Parent Raising Them, Too
Maybe you are raising a son and wondering how you protect all that softness you see in him now, before the world has a chance to tell him that empathy is weakness or that belonging requires silence. Maybe you are raising a daughter and already know there will be things you have to teach her that you wish she never needed to know. Or maybe you are raising both, looking from one child to the other and wondering how two babies who began with the same innocence could someday be handed such different expectations.
You cannot control everything the world will teach them, and you cannot know who they will become in every room you are not there to witness. But long before the stakes are high, you can give them the language they will need. You can teach them that their bodies belong to them and to understand they do not have a right to other people’s bodies. You can show them that no deserves to be heard without argument, that kindness does not entitle anyone to access, and that another person's discomfort is not something to ignore simply because acknowledging it would be inconvenient.
You can also teach them that there will be moments when respecting a boundary means more than just respecting it yourself. When someone else refuses to hear a no, staying quiet leaves the person whose boundary is being crossed to carry the moment alone. Your child can learn that speaking may be uncomfortable, may be unpopular, may even cost them a friendship...and that some things are worth that cost.
These lessons can begin long before you ever need to talk about sex. They can begin with hugs and tickle fights, with questions answered honestly, with letting a child say no and expecting them to honor someone else's. They can begin with the thousand tiny moments that seem inconsequential while they are happening, until one day your child walks into a room without you and has to decide what kind of person they are going to be.
You will not get to make that decision for them. But you get years to help them practice.
And perhaps, if enough of us do, your daughters will carry a little less fear into those rooms and your sons will carry a little more courage.
Perhaps they will expect better from one another....Perhaps, someday, the list will finally get shorter.
