Raising Children to Disrupt Harm
Dismantling rape culture starts in preschool and never ends
“...not giving, but coming to know
someone is there through the wavey vision
of the self’s heat, love become a decision.”
~Molly Peacock
I remember a preschool child in my class once cupping my face in both of his small hands, looking intently into my eyes and saying, “Your face looks sad and mad, too.”
Just a few minutes earlier he had pushed another child on the playground and I had asked him to look at her face and tell me how he thought she was feeling—a common preschool teacher strategy for helping young children learn to step outside their own perspective.
Gazing at her, as she stood before him with tear-filled eyes, he said solemnly, “She looks sad and mad,” before turning to examine my face.
After he noted these same feelings reflected in my own expression, I looked back at him and nodded, “Yes. You’re right. I’m feeling sad and mad, too, because I don’t want anyone in our class to get hurt.”
In that moment, very new to teaching, I remember pausing before I responded to his observation of my own emotions. Teachers are often positioned as neutral operators in the classroom. So, I wondered if I’d broken some necessary code of untouchable adult authority. Even now, years later, I was tempted to edit my retelling of the exchange above to remove the word “mad.”
But I also remember feeling instinctively that my own emotions were important in that moment—that showing my empathy for his classmate’s experience was meaningful. Over the years, I’ve grown more confident and sure in this intuition. While it is necessary to help children consider each other’s perspectives, it is also important to offer them models of the solidarity that emerges when we feel others’ pain as an injury to the collective whole.
Since that day, I’ve also thought a lot about the role of adult anger in children’s lives. Anger that erupts can be terrifying for children, whether the anger is their own or someone else’s. But, for this reason, modeling anger that is calmly held, honestly acknowledged, and leveraged toward care is even more essential.
Too often, we look past or excuse uncontained rage—usually of boys and men—even when others are harmed by its explosiveness. Meanwhile, we teach girls that they should not even feel anger at their own pain, let alone act on it or allow others to see it. There is power in showing children, from a young age, that we can and should feel anger when someone is injured, not only when we are hurt ourselves, and that it is possible to hold and channel that feeling gently and responsibly.
I hope both children—the child who pushed and the child who was pushed—walked away from the playground that day with the beginning of an embodied awareness that it is possible to feel and receive anger without inflicting additional pain. And I hope they walked away with the seed of an understanding that one person’s hurt is all our responsibility.
As yet another horrific college rape case has exploded into the public eye over the past two weeks (thanks only to the courage of the victim in filing a lawsuit against Cornell, and to the student journalists, who refused to let the story die quietly), I’ve found myself thinking about these small moments with young children.
Over time, the way we navigate the more finite harms and ruptures of daily life with children lays a foundation for the habit of looking out for others and caring for them when the stakes are higher. Raising kids who will prevent or at least interrupt harm in real time requires that we provide a lifetime of rehearsal leading up to that decision. Courageous solidarity must be built into muscle memory.
Children need to learn to feel and recognize a swelling of sadness and anger when they realize that someone else is being hurt. They need to have experience acting on this feeling, so a well of prior solidarity overpowers the desire to remain in step with a complacent crowd. It is especially hard for adolescents, finding their way in a new social world, to resist the pull of a group's inaction. Doing so requires models and practice.
Children need to see the anger and sadness that arises in our eyes when someone else is hurt. And they need to see how we use those feelings of empathy to interrupt pain and to offer care and advocacy. They also need to be held accountable when they cause harm themselves—not through shaming but through sincere, honest recognition of the impact of their actions, and through frequent experiences of meaningful repair.
Even more importantly, children need encouragement to anticipate harm. It’s not enough to allow cycles of hurt and apology. We also have to ask children, at every age, to take each other’s perspectives, so they learn to predict and avoid causing pain.
All of these lessons must begin in children’s earliest years. These conversations can’t wait until right before they leave for college, or until a moment of crisis.
But, even if we diligently begin these lessons when our children are very young, we also have to make a conscious effort to continue to introduce them. This is where I think we tend to drop the thread of responsibility as adults.
Preschool is often associated with social-emotional learning—how to manage big feelings and how to be a good friend. At times, it can be surprisingly difficult to defend these priorities, even in the preschool years. But they almost always recede in focus as children get older.
I think it feels more comfortable to emphasize lessons of kindness with toddlers than in later years, as formal academic priorities take on increasing significance, and as we stop viewing children’s relationships through the warm, fuzzy lens of preschool cuteness. But kindness isn’t a box we can check off after kindergarten. Leaving the lessons of friendship and empathy behind in the soft haze of preschool memories, and expecting those lessons to still be sturdy enough to draw upon when our kids reach high school or college, is dangerous.
Even more so, when we convey the message that individual achievement is the most important priority, as our children get older, we counteract those early lessons of care. And we all—adults and our kids—can begin to believe that one person’s potential might matter more than another’s pain when the chips are down.
Lessons in care need to begin early. But it is equally important to ensure that they don’t end there. Just as CPR requires regular recertification, practicing empathy and learning to risk our own position in the social hierarchy requires frequent repetition.
We can’t afford to begin these conversations when our kids are teenagers, facing the many pressures and stigmas of adolescence. But, even if we do begin these lessons early, if we leave them lingering in the nostalgia of the block corner, we should not be surprised when our children hesitate to act on them many years later.
Changing powerful cultural norms, and equipping our children to disrupt the group chat, requires that we link arms across all the years of their development, starting when they can still clasp our faces in their small hands and continuing until they reach moments of critical choice.
Wishing you the courage to raise courageous children,
Alicia
P.S. Stay tuned for a special Notes on Hope announcement. We're going on a field trip! Watch your inbox, or subscribe if you haven't yet, so you don't miss out.
A few things I found helpful and hopeful this week…
- The silent path from Cornell to Hope High by Ruth Zakarin
- Beyond Good Men by Garrett Bucks
- A Long Read About Living in a World Where Men Publicly Bond over Women’s Humiliation and Pain by Soraya Chemaly
- What to Say to Your Daughter About Campus Sexual Assault by Nicole Bedera
- Looking for Loren Rex Cameron by Sandy Ernest Allen
- Pick a free bouquet, stay for the community
- Rainforest biodiversity rebounds within a single generation
