When I was a kid, the sexes in my household were nicely evened out. There was a mother and a father, a son and a daughter. Even the numerous family pets were split more or less fifty-fifty.
When I take stock of my current household, things are very different. There’s my husband and my two sons. And then there’s me, the sole representative of my gender. We don’t even have any pets to swing the balance.
I am seriously outnumbered, and my family takes great pleasure in letting me know that. “Gang up on Mommy” games feature regularly in our lives. It’s a great deal of fun, and we all get a lot of laughs out of it.
It also means that I have to live with an inordinate amount of boy humour, which, let’s face it, boys never grow out of. I live with three people who have contests to see who can fart the loudest.
These days, the evolution of boy humour is most evident in my younger son James, who is six years old. He is highly verbal, has a phenomenal imagination, and finds everything funny. He is the world’s biggest drama queen, and has hissy-fits with alarming regularity, but they never last for long. It’s so easy to make him laugh. All you have to do is mention the word “butt”.
An unfortunate side effect of all of this is that James has started making inappropriate mention of various parts of his body. That is to say, he has been making anatomical jokes at inappropriate times, in the presence of great aunts, grandmothers, and random strangers.
I know this is a phase that boys go through, and on the face of it, there’s no real harm in it. I remember being six years old, and I remember what my six-year-old male friends were like. Let’s be frank: they were a little smutty without meaning to be. One can hardly blame them – kids that age often don’t have a clue about the meaning of what they say.
It makes me worry, though. I know it’s a phase, and I do my best to turn James’ outrageous remarks into teachable moments. But what if…?
What if James makes a joke about his penis in the presence of a questionable audience?
What if a sick pedophile uses one of James’ jokes against him?
What if he says the wrong thing to the wrong person – all the while thinking he’s just being funny – and that person ends up doing horrible things to him?
James knows, of course, that his private parts are private. He knows that it would be wrong for anyone to touch him there. He knows that he’s not allowed to talk to strangers or go anywhere without my husband and I knowing about it.
The trouble is that he knows about privacy and stranger danger in broad terms and now, being the inquisitive child that he is, he is wanting to know about specifics. He is asking just what, exactly, these strangers would do to him and why his solution of just “punching them in the nose” wouldn’t necessarily work.
I have a confession to make: in this matter, I feel a little out of my depth. I want my son to be aware of what dangers could be lurking right outside the gates of his schoolyard, but I don’t want him to go through life in a state of fear. And I am trying to figure out how to strike that balance, and what level of detail is appropriate. The generalized statements about what is and isn’t safe are no longer enough for James. But although he is looking for detailed answers, just how much detail do I go into?
I mean, he’s six. He’s only a baby. Apart from some feel-good stories about how Mommy and Daddy came together to make babies, the kid doesn’t even know what sex is. Am I really thinking about telling him that there are people out there who would want to touch his penis and force him to touch theirs? Does he need to know that sometimes, people do horrible things to little kids and then kill them?
On the one hand, I think I must be absolutely insane to even think about telling my six-year-old child about stuff like this. But on the other hand, it does happen. To kids his age and younger. Can I really help him stay safe if he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be staying safe from?
For now, I’m sticking to the theme of, “Not all people are good, some people are bad and like hurting others”. But I suspect that the time is coming when that will not be enough. And when that time comes, I have to be prepared.
What is your approach to teaching your kids about the ugly side of life? How do you handle questions when you’re not sure that your kids are developmentally ready for the answers?
This is an original post for World Moms Blog by Kirsten Doyle of Toronto, Canada. Kirsten can also be found on her blog, Running for Autism, or on Twitter @Running4autism. You can also connect with her on Facebook.
(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/69811036@N07/6350615094. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)
I’m lucky cos in my house “girls” slightly outnumber the guys (the dogs are both female, but kids, cats and parents are each one male and one female :P)
I don’t believe it’s necessary to give grim details of what some sick F&^%s do to innocent kids. In my experience, the best way to protect our children is to have an ongoing honest and open dialogue. They must KNOW that, should they ever feel uncomfortable, they can call you and you won’t be cross.
This happened a couple of years ago with my kids – they were at a party and they weren’t being properly supervised. Alcohol was brought into the mix and some of the kids were starting to do inappropriate things. My son phoned us and his dad went to fetch them immediately. We praised him for having called and did not punish either of our kids when they admitted to having “tasted” some alcoholic beverage too. For us, it was more important to encourage them to call whenever they feel uncomfortable.
The best WEAPON against predators is to raise confident children who are not afraid to talk to you about potentially embarassing things. Predators target lonely, insecure children. If your kids aren’t lonely and insecure, they most likely won’t ever be approached.
What I have “drilled” into both my kids’ brains is “NEVER, EVER GO TO A SECOND LOCATION WITH ANYONE. SCREAM AND RUN!!” That said, I was unable to scream and run when it happened to me … but then again I WAS lonely and insecure!
We handled it the same way with our six-year old son. Not too specific. And they learned in school about the possibility of “voleurs des enfants” (child stealers). We just tell him enough to make him wary.
He’s still way too innocent though so we keep a careful eye on him. I don’t think he can distinguish between what’s okay and what’s not in time to get out of the situation.
Kirsten, I just read a blog on the Washington Post about child exploitation and trafficking. It stated that in the U.S. 2,000 children go missing per day. TWO THOUSAND PER DAY.
This issue is very real. Talk. Talk. Talk. to your children about it. I like what SImona says about not going to a second location.
Thank you for bringing awareness to this important topic! As for boy humor, my husband is outnumbered in this household!
Jen 🙂
Oy. This is such a tricky thing. You don’t want to tell them any details that are age inappropriate or simply scare them unnecessarily, but you do want to impress upon them the seriousness of it all. And when a child asks you a question outright, you want to be honest. Just today my 3.5 year old son asked me what a funeral was and before I could help myself I told him about death. He was silent and then said, “mom. I don’t like dying. Will I die?” Which all made me think I made a terrible mistake being honest with him. So, maybe we should just do as the other commenter mentioned and impress upon them that some people are “not so nice” but skip the R-rated details? Not sure. But great post.
Great issue to raise, Kirsten. We’ve been really open about sex and the mechanics thereof, right from the age of two – simply because I know many kids don’t ask their parents and do, often, get the wrong end of the stick when they ask their friends about it. We had the advantage of having biggish gaps between ours, so it all just came up naturally when I was pregnant with the next one in the line. The three year-old has been looking at “Mummy Laid an Egg’ by Babette Cole recently, which has been our standard text. I am also really open about periods and how my body is different from theirs’, seeming I too am the only female in the house. With regards to the yukky stuff, we’ve talked to the older boys about people kidnapping kids for a long time and that they are allowed to make as much noise etc as they need to – they are pretty excited about the idea that they can swear as loud as they like – if someone tried it on. Also we’ve told them to scratch so that there is DNA under their finger nails. We are fairly straight-up about the good and bad in life with our kids – we don’t sugar coat the serious stuff. Makes for some interesting dinner discussions, that’s for sure!