And you’re free to think that. I, like many other people, give serious and genuine consideration to the concept of teaching young children about personal autonomy. Having an honest conversation about when this should be taught to children is only helpful to that end.
Are you sure you’re not just hand-waving it all away to make you feel better about yourself?
I don’t think that I or anyone else presenting the story misinterpreted anything. I mean, the lady unequivocally said that babies ought to be asked permission to have their diapers changed. It’s not an ambiguous statement that everyone foolishly drew some wild ass conclusions from. If that’s not at all what she meant, then it’s her fault for communicating whatever message she intended so poorly. If you say something and 95% of your audience hears something entirely different, then maybe you ought to reconsider your delivery.
???
Exactly. If anything, that’s a really terrible way to teach about consent. Like another poster said, they’re just going to learn that consent is essentially meaningless.
I think Aziz Ansari would advise you otherwise. 
This, honestly. These two particular posts raise a question that no one else advocating the “ask your kid permission for the teensiest of things” crowd considers. What happens when your kid refuses to “consent” to eating their vegetables? Or doing their homework? Or cleaning their room? Or going to the dentist to get their cavities filled? I’m not sure how the hell teaching your kids the basic fundamentals about bodily autonomy and consent turned into this nonsense. Kids generally don’t know what’s best for them, that’s why parents are legally responsible for their well being. And that means making decisions on their behalf that your kids will dislike, even all the way up to their teens. That doesn’t mean you should run your household like a dictatorship and completely disregard your child(ren)’s feelings, but a line has to be drawn somewhere. Your kids won’t like everything you do for them/to them, and that’s fine. Good parenting means occasionally having to be a killjoy.
No wonder I see so many kids these days being so boldly rude to their parents and adults in general. If that’s the new wave of parenting, then we’re doomed. 
And since there’s already a mod chiming in, what do you think about moving this to the Pit? This thread has Pit potential but I don’t want the topic to veer off course.
She also plainly states that of course the baby can’t give consent and that it’s more about laying a foundation where the child begins to understand the concept of consent rather than literally needing permission.
That part gets left out of all the Facebook outrage. Can’t begin to guess why :rolleyes:
She doesn’t address things like doing homework or taking piano lessons or flipping your parents off. Just concepts of bodily consent. And I don’t think that your kid learning that they should have some say in people removing their clothes and touching their genitals means that now they can refuse to get vaccines or dental treatment.
The woman comes off a little goofy and I’m not even hard-core saying “Yeah, she’s so right!!!” but the vehement opposition on display (not just here but this has been the smug outrage machine of the day across the net) is even more baffling.
There are several reasons for this, that I can see.
It’s not just about the kid. It is about the person. By asking for and acknowledging that there is some consent, you are not treating the baby as if they are some item, some thing, but rather as though they are a person. We see parents beating and even killing their children from time to time, and they are always “so sad” about it, not realizing what they were doing, not until the baby finally stopped crying. But recognizing that it is not just an object of inconvenience that needs to be dealt with, but rather, as a human being that is still in the state that it needs a great amount of assistance in just the most basics of survival, frustrations that lead to violence can be decreased.
It is also about the kid. At some age, the kid will become cognizant and aware. Do you wait until that age before you treat it as a autonomous being? How do you know when that happens? If you start with the idea that you should be respecting its sense of dignity, then you don’t have to make any sort of changes when you notice that the child is starting to become aware of what it is that you are doing.
It also sets as a model to older kids. If your 7 year old kid sees treating the infant as though it were a human being worthy of dignified treatment, that may make them less inclined to treat their sibling (and other people) with dismissive contempt.
This is a straw man. Who would argue that empathy and sensitivity to your child’s state of mind is wrong? But that isn’t what the quote in the OP advocated, it advocated a sham consent procedure when no real choice is being offered.
Parenting is about empathy and providing comfort and security; it is about imbuing kids with self-respect and confidence in their own autonomy; it is also about socializing them and giving them clear behavioral boundaries, in other words the limits to their range of choice.
You can surely be empathic and sensitive to a child’s state of mind without going through a sham consent procedure when no real choice is offered. The latter is confusing, it makes the boundaries of acceptable behavior unclear. I think it ultimately undermines a child’s confidence and sense of autonomy.
not only that, it’s that you’re offering a sham choice to a person who is not yet capable of understanding what you’re even saying.
I just think it’s a legitimate conversation to have - when should you start talking to children about consent? With so many people who can say #metoo we are obviously doing something wrong.
Maybe there is a better way and talking about it can only be a net positive.
Absolutely. Here’s a contribution to that legitimate conversation: the educator quoted in the OP is advocating teaching a child that the concept of “consent” encompasses offering a sham choice, then continuing with the activity even if the child says no.
So are you saying that it’s not a legitimate conversation or that you disagree with that one suggestion? I agree that a diaper change is not up for negotiation. So then when do you start teaching about consent? And how? It has to be different than what we’ve done which is to tell kids that “I’m the adult and I’m the boss and you have to obey me - period” and then expect them to say “no” to a predator.
If it’s not up for negotiation, you don’t give them a choice. Period. You don’t ask a child – or hell, anyone, for that matter – for their consent, if you’re not going to honor that consent. It’s a horrible lesson to teach. Even if it’s just an “exercise” or to “establish a concept”. Because it’s meaningless at best, and at worst, the kid ends up getting the wrong idea about what consent means.
Once again, since the baby cannot give consent, then you’re laying down a concept of consent that is false. “See, I’m going to ask for your consent, even though I know it’s a meaningless question.” And if you’re doing it for the benefit of showing it to your other kids, well, do you want THEM to absorb that lesson? C’mon, there are far, far better ways of teaching kids about consent than this. Because it’s not really consent, it’s more like playing pretend.
(Like, “No, you don’t have to hug Uncle Joe – just be polite and say Hi.”)
Nobody’s saying you shouldn’t talk to your baby, or you should treat it like a doll.
This and “sham consent”, etc seems to be greatly overstating the impact. It’s very common with any parents I’ve ever been around to frame non-negotiable things as a question: “Eww, stinky! Should we change you?”, “Uh-oh! Twelve o’clock! Should we make lunch?”, “Ok, how about we start getting ready to go to Grandma’s now”, etc
I’m sure there’s parents out there careful to frame any such thing as a statement or demand rather than a question but they’re a rarity.
The person being quoted wants to do something good. I get that.
Her explanation of how to accomplish it is stupid, and her words are advocating something that’s worse than useless.
I wonder whether she’s trying to model the opposite of some kind of bad practice she’s seen people doing. Trying (and failing) to turn a perfectly legitimate and correct “Don’t do X” into a fake-positive “Please do Y” can cause this kind of mysterious confusion. So can just being a sloppy-thinking or semi-irresponsible person trying to communicate a good intention.
I have nothing against her as a person, and the idea I think she supposedly wants to get across (consent is important to teach your children, especially including that they learn to refuse to consent to bad things suggested by friends and relatives) is right - but the words she says are a very poor representation of that idea, and her suggestion is a very poor way of going about what she wants to accomplish. Sham consent IS worse than nothing.
I’d actually argue that unquestioning obedience is what abrogates responsibility. Your responsibility is not to create automatons who do exactly what an authority figure says. It is to raise them into independently thinking adults. Granted, you can’t let them make all decisions for themselves, as they are not ready for that level of responsibility. You do have to be “in charge” in a sense. But that doesn’t mean that encouraging unquestioning obedience is good, either.
What you learn as a kid should be what you’ll use as an adult. Unquestioning obedience is a horrible thing for an adult. That’s what allows authoritarians to take over. It’s what allows abuses of authority. Hell, I see a correlation in the more authoritarian parenting style rural America, and rural America’s greater acceptance of authoritarians.
That doesn’t mean I agree with this particular advice. I share the concern that it’s actually a false choice, and might teach that one has to do whatever one is asked–which would be just as bad as teaching that one has to do whatever one is told.
That said, I doubt that, at that young age, it matters all that much either way, as long as you are consistent as they get older and can actually hold memories. And thus I’m not averse to letting them try it out and see if it helps get kids less likely to let Uncle Frank come in and molest them because refusing would be “wrong.”
Either way, I’m all for later on teaching them that no one has the right to touch them without their permission. I think that’s probably the most important lesson here to prevent molestation.
I don’t think anyone here is saying that’s a bad thing. Just that this isn’t the way to go about it.
Of course there is a difference to a baby between addressing it, getting a response and proceeding with the nappy change, and just picking it up and changing it. It’s an interaction, and that’s what they are learning about. Babies love interaction and it’s how they become socialised.
There is a lot of focus on the yes/no, power and control aspect but to me it is more about interaction, cooperation and responsiveness.
If that’s what the person quoted in the OP had actually advocated, obviously we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Of course, and it’s part of a process of teaching them that in some things they have absolute autonomy, in some things they have choices within certain boundaries, in some things no choice at all (with this changing as they grow up); and that in some things their choices must be conditional on not violating the autonomy of others.
We show them that their appropriate choices will be respected by their parents, and that they have a right to expect this same respect in their interactions with other people too; just as they learn to judge whether the actions of others are appropriate choices to be respected, or inappropriate violations of their own autonomy.
Learning to judge these differences and boundaries is not easy, and offering sham choices that will not ultimately be respected does not teach them anything, it is positively counterproductive.
This. The babies won’t get anything out of this, and even if they did, as some people seem to believe, they would get exactly the wrong lesson out of it. That’s totally absurd, especially if the toddler can understand something of this interaction.
What do you think they are advocating? Ask the baby’s consent verbally; it doesn’t answer verbally, so you never change its nappy?
There are two parts. One part is the adult taking into consideration that the baby is a person in its own right, so treat it with respect, and the other part is the baby learning about its own rights and autonomy, and how that works socially.
You are going to change the baby’s nappy anyway, but there is a lot you can adjust about how or when you change it, if you are bothering to take the child’s preferences into account. I drastically increase my odds of getting consent to a nappy change, if I wait till they are not currently in the middle of something, or interrupt in a tactful way. If they are wriggly, and won’t lie still to get changed, then you can sing, or pull faces, or give them a toy. I don’t see how this is anything but positive for the child. Sometimes requires a bit of thinking by the adult.
If it was your job to change my diaper and I didn’t speak your language, I would want you to cut the chatter, try not to do anything rough or unkind, and just get it over with. Nobody in a situation where they need to have their diaper changed is simultaneously in a situation where they have (in that moment) a meaningful choice in the matter. Pretending they do have one is actually kind of cruel.
Saying “Imagine it was your diaper being changed, what would you want?” makes more sense to me than the faked consent routine.