“At issue is a hug Savannah said she got on the playground from a friend named Sophie. Savannah hugged Sophie back. The hugs resulted in Savannah having to write a letter, complete with teacher corrections, that read, “I touch Sophie because she touch me and I didn’t like it because she was hugging me. I didn’t like when she hugged me.”
They’re trying to spin it with discussions of “bear hugs” & complaints that the hug “lifted” one girl off the floor. But after reading the article closely I’m pretty sure the whole thing is about nipping that queer shit in the bud. We can have little lesbians in training doing the PDA story on a playground. Amazing really.
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/8491575/detail.html
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Ok- this story sounds a bit like like a bunch of wingnuts trying to stop homosexual agenda, but lemme play devil’s advocate for a second.
There was another story in the last few years about a boy who got suspended for kissing girls on the playground and everyone thought this was extreme. The kissing was unwanted, the boy was chasing the girls. At 5 years old, no one had taught the boy that you don’t get to touch someone if they say no.
Kids play, they roughhouse, they get in tickle fights with friends and parents even. I always taught The Kid that if playing goes too far- he gets to say no and the other person has to stop. The same is true in reverse- if we are messing around and it gets too much- he has to listen to me when I say stop. It teaches him to respect his own body, and to know that he gets to be in control of what happens to it and that other people get that right too. You can’t start with the “aw, there just being kids arguement” and then 10 years later try to teach them that no means no. You end up with date rapists and their unsure victims if you do.
SO what don’t we know about these girls- did one want it to stop and didn’t know how to make it stop? MAybe there is more to it?
I’ll grant your whole story. In fact I suspect that the whole interaction was a good bit more complicated & nuanced than the article suggests (it was very thin on the facts). But I was struck (& more amused than anything) with the tone of the punishment note. They indicate that the teacher required corrections, & rather than a note that said “I hugged here too hard & that wasn’t nice…” You get something about touching & why she didn’t like the touching. I dunno.
I will say that there is a interesting PBS production on the contrasting styles for managing conflict in younger children between the US & Japan. Japan is very hands off (letting the kids sort most of the conflict out for themselves) where the US has a more top down controlling approach. The suggestion in the piece is that conflict is natural, & that young children should figure out how to manage it without immediate adult intervention.
Thankfully this is an issue that I’ll always be a step or two removed from (as I’ll never be really invested in a rugrat of my own:)
Not just Japan, pretty much anywhere in the world this would not have been an issue.
E.g., last summer my 1.5 year old girl was at a sea-resort in Spain, where she “met” a 2.5 year old French boy, who was encouraged by his parents to kiss her at every hi and bye. Very cute!
But what if your daughter had been made upset by the boy kissing her? Or what if the boy didn’t want to kiss her? Would you have stopped the boy?
If you made your daughter accept the boy’s kissing when she obviously didn’t want it, then you are teaching her that what she wants when it comes to her body doesn’t matter. If she doesn’t think she gets to control her own body, then what happens if someone tries to molester her (and since a quarter of all women under age 18 have been sexually abused or harrased- that possibility is pretty high). She wouldn’t think she could say no, and she wouldn’t think she could tell you about it because you have already shown her that you don’t think her body is her own.
It is cute when little kids willingly show affection, but willingness is the key word there.
One day my daughter liked it, another day she didn’t. Was she sexually abused the second time, or was she just in a bad mood?
(And I am not talking about premeditated desire to claim to be sexually abused and other complicated things of this kind…)
But did you make your daughter kiss him when she didn’t want to?
I wouldn’t call it abuse- these are 2 toddlers after all, but it is sending a message to her that she has to do things physically even if she doesn’t want to. Is that what you want her to think?
In the near recent past I was trying to break up with a boy. It was one of those aweful, long, drag-out break-ups where we spent an entire afternoon of me trying to end it and him waiting for me to change my mind. Throughout the whole ordeal he kept asking if he could kiss me. I kept saying no.
That he kept asking wasn’t abuse, but had he tried to kiss me after I said no would have been bordering on it.
Your daughter didn’t want to be kissed either.