Keep Your Child Safe

Recent headline news in Mountain View,
my home town, is about a soccer coach who allegedly sexually assaulted three of
his young nieces when they were 7 – 9 years old. The incidents allegedly
occurred at family events or when their uncle was babysitting them.

Every parent who reads stories like
this shudders and frequently runs to tell their child not to talk to strangers,
hoping this will keep their child safe. But this is largely ineffective and
disempowering of children.

Talking to strangers and meeting new
people is a valuable life skill for children and helps them develop
communication skills that will assist them throughout their life. Plus being
comfortable meeting and interacting with new people is the basis of networking
and expanding your base of influence as an adult. How many adults do you know
who struggle to find something to say to someone they just met?

It’s also important to remember that
most child sexual violations, like the one above, are by someone the child
knows, a member of the family or a family friend. Telling your child not to
talk with strangers makes absolutely no difference in these situations. The
danger is rarely from strangers.

Keeping your child isolated or
over-protected is not the answer either. You cannot maintain either the
isolation or protection for the entire time your child lives at home. Isolation
and over-protection limit your child. In order to develop to her true
potential, she must be out in the world without your supervision, making
decisions for herself.

So what makes the biggest difference
in your child’s safety? The most important answer lies within your child. Your
child must be able to think for himself, to know what feels good to him and
what feels bad to him, and then have the inner strength to take action to take
care of himself.

In most situations of child abuse, if
the child had trusted and listened to himself, he could have prevented his own
victimization. When I look at my 18-month-old grandson Sebastian, he clearly
and strongly knows what he wants and will powerfully take action to have things
the way he wants. Every child is born with this information and inner-drive.

What happens to this natural drive?

We train them out of it. We teach them
to be compliant and to do what adults tell them. This makes them easy targets
to people who would harm them.