Vol. 124 - Raising a Strong Woman (and a man who can respect that)

On teaching our kids the importance of autonomy

Our daughter is obsessed with our son.

Now that she’s three, there’s a twinkle in her eye, a fascination with her big brother that didn’t exist in her first few years. And thanks to that obsession, she’s constantly looking to play with him. Like most kids, they love to get physical; to tackle and climb on each other, to beat each other up.

But, as he’s nearly twice her size, he has a major advantage in physical play. This often results in her yelling for him to stop. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t, causing our daughter to yell louder and louder, sometimes screaming for him to stop.

As much as these yells bother me, the reaction they elicit from Emily is visceral. As a woman in the world, my wife knows all too well how not only men, but institutions alike, disregard women telling them what they need; telling them to stop. It’s impossible to not project the image a few decades into the future, to imagine a moment in our daughter’s life that she is statistically more likely to endure than not.

Of course, our kids are just playing. Our daughter is even beginning to learn how to use “stop” to her advantage, to get our son to relent only to immediately pounce on him in a position of power.

They’re just playing but play is how kids learn. So, I wonder, by allowing this kind of play, are our kids learning and normalizing these roles?

Like nearly everything else we’re doing as parents, Emily and I are trying to find the line here. When is it okay to let our daughter figure out how to—for lack of a better term—fight her brother off? When do we step in?

On the other side of the coin, I wonder if we are doing our son a disservice by giving them some leeway to sort it our amongst themselves in these instances, which is often how we try to address conflict between them (“Figure it out” is becoming a common refrain in our home.)

But this sense of physicality and the idea of our son forcing his physical will on our daughter is a quite different than them arguing over a toy or which show they want to watch. “Figure it out” has drastically different stakes when bodily autonomy is involved.

If we do nothing else as parents, it’s essential for Emily and I to raise a daughter who knows that the only person who has power over her body is her. It’s essential that we raise a strong woman, and I don’t mean in the physical sense (though that too) who is comfortable telling a man exactly what she wants and needs to feel safe, and requiring his compliance to the best of her ability. It’s equally as essential to raise a son who understands these facts, regards of how much bigger or stronger he is than the women in his life.

We’re candid with our son about why this is so important to Emily and I. We explain to him, as best we can and in terms that he can understand, that, likely as long as there have been people around, there has been an eternal epidemic of men thinking they can do whatever they want with and to women. We try to explain to him that it’s our job to try and break that cycle. When our daughter can understand these concepts, we’ll have the same conversations with her.

Until then, Emily and I are looking for the line.

I don’t have an answer. I don’t know how many “stops” is too many. I don’t know if we’re fucking our kids up by giving them space to “figure it out.”

Like everything else along the journey of parenthood, there’s a line somewhere. We’re just trying to find it.