I would imagine that if I were a baby, I’d probably want the dirty thing off as soon as possible. Like I said, that’s why most babies cry when they need a diaper change. I’m guessing if they could talk, their answer would be, “WTF, bitch, why do you think I’ve been screaming here – get this filthy thing off of me NOW!!!” 
Good username+post combo 
It is completely uncontroversial that we should be sensitive to a baby’s feelings, make eye contact, empathize and show our empathy so that the baby knows we are paying attention to them.
But the plain words of the person quoted in the OP did not say that. The recommendation was teaching about consent. That is not synonymous with empathy.
Of course, the whole notion of teaching a baby about consent is ludicrous. You seem to be taking the generous approach of dismissing what she actually said and assuming that she must surely have meant something sensible and uncontroversial (“be empathetic to your baby”).
Okay, but I think I and others are taking what she said at face value, and transposing it to a more reasonable setting of a young child at an age where they can understand, and pointing out that even for an older child the idea of teaching about consent by offering sham choices is fundamentally misguided. It’s important to teach the child when they have real choices, to respect an appropriate choice when the child makes one, and to teach the child to expect that respect from others and grant it to others. You don’t teach that by offering a sham choice, acting all empathetic and sensitive, but then ignoring their choice if it doesn’t suit.
In any event, it is simply a straw man to suggest that those of us who are arguing against offering sham choices are arguing against acting sensitively and empathetically toward a baby, or that we are arguing against offering any choices to a young child.
See, that to me sounds like if you’re teaching them anything here, you’re teaching them the opposite of consent. Consent 100% requires that a choice be respected: if you’re in one of the myriad interactions with children where you can’t respect their choice, you shouldn’t frame that interaction as one in which their consent is meaningful.
I’m all about teaching my kids consent. Tickling is a great place to do it: I make it real clear to my girls that if they say stop, I’m stopping, and won’t continue until there’s a conversation about it. If a kid wants to do something themselves that won’t hurt them to try, teach consent there. Teach it with the “blue vs. green shirt” choices.
But why, why, WHY would you take an occasion in which they can’t withdraw consent, and frame it as a lesson about consent?
This.
It’s teaching, unintentionally, that consent doesn’t matter.
You see, I don’t think anyone is advocating that, here. Though I suppose I can see where you’d think that.
What I’m saying is that making everything a discussion and negotiation is an enormous mistake for a parent to make. Don’t ask permission from a kid when the decision’s been made. Make the decision clear and move forward. But that doesn’t mean one makes every decision for one’s kids. Far from it. Anyone who needs that level of control - which would be fictional - has insecurity issues a mile wide. But when a decision is made, you stick with it.
Now my kids know - now that they’re older - they can try to talk me into things. But once I’ve made my mind up that’s that. They’re free to solve problems their own way but involving me isn’t going to happen.
Frankly, having mouthy, smart kids convinced they can talk their way into and out of almost anything is one of the real treats of parenting. But that comes from a basis of how the lines of authority work in our dynamic. I’d never have that respect - and my own respect for them - if that hadn’t been established early.
It’s already been days, but I do think it’s a terrible idea to introduce the idea of consent if that consent, or lack thereof, is not going to be respected. I asked the baby if she will consent to a diaper change, she made it clear that she does not want it- so either I’m overruling her, and changing the poopy diaper, or I’m letting her sit in the diaper until she consents.
The former seems counterproductive, at least in terms of consent and bodily autonomy, and the latter seems like a bad idea, for reasons of rash and… Honestly, “fine, I’ll make you sit there in poop until you do say yes!” Seems almost like punishment.
I used to work in a daycare where getting consent for nappy changes was the policy. This teaches babies early lessons about social interaction, respect and consent. You keep saying it’s a sham choice, but it’s not. If you don’t have consent, then you don’t change the nappy until you do. Sometimes you have to work, or plan, or show extra consideration to get consent, but mostly it is not very hard (as people are saying, babies often want their nappies changed). Some people seem to think it’s impossible, or ludicrous to get consent from a baby, but it’s not. It’s usually quite straightforward.
I understand you are saying that they don’t actually have any choice in the matter, so why pretend they do. But it makes a difference in the way you approach the whole process if you are required to keep it consensual. Where I work now, I don’t have to get consent, but I still do it that way anyway, because it is more pleasant and (I think) respectful. If I know that I can, it seems rude not to, just to save myself the bother of thinking about their POV.
Yes. It’s easy to forget that when you’re with a child you are ALWAYS teaching, whether you like it or not.
You have just demonstrated that you don’t have the faintest clue what “consent” means. Consent means the person who you’re asking has a choice, and that you are going to respect that choice. Babies in daycare do not have a meaningful opportunity to withdraw consent.
Imagine that you’ve just met someone and they suggest that the two of you have sex. And you say “No”, so they stop asking. And then, two minutes later, they say “Right, how about now?” Did that person respect your refusal?
And what about the baby who doesn’t consent to going outside, because he’s afraid? Or the toddler who doesn’t consent to putting his boots on, because they bother him?
I’m in favour of being kind and gentle and respectful with babies. More so than most daycare people I’ve seen doing their jobs. But the consent thing is silly.
I should maybe add that I teach children sometimes, and parents often think I’m a loony because I do actually take the kids’ opinions as seriously or more seriously than I do the parents’. “Tiger mothers” give me horrified stares, because the children learn from me that they really do have choice and control. I’m all about consent and autonomy - but only when it’s honest.
It’s still a sham choice, there is no choice, the nappy is getting changed eventually.
I really hope that my baby is not being asked for consent at her daycare, just change the damned nappy!
I’m not saying that teaching consent is a bad idea, but the example of changing a baby’s nappy is just stupid. What happens when the baby doesn’t “give consent” because she is really really hungry and wants to be fed right now! But when you try and fed her she won’t drink because she’s really uncomfortable but doesn’t know why. Nope, just change her nappy, then feed the baby and enjoy the ensuing happiness.
My toddler (2.5 years old) can choose many things. She can choose what clothes to wear from a small selection. On days where she doesn’t have to have a bath she can choose to have a bath or not. On days when she does have to have a bath (after swimming lessons, after daycare, every second day) she can choose between a bath or a shower. When we go for a walk she can choose to take her bike or her scooter. She can choose which route we take. If we need to go somewhere in particular we narrow her choices so we get to where we need to go (“We have to go home now, but we can go this way or that way”). If she’s being tickled and says stop, then I stop. If we are jumping on the trampoline and she says stop jumping, then I stop jumping. She has certain choices she can make and we respect those choices. We don’t give her a choice over things where we don’t intend to respect her choice though. There is no choice about whether she gets in the car or not. There is no choice about when to cross the road. There is no choice about going to bed at night. She certainly didn’t have a choice about nappy changes, they were something that just happened if and when they were needed.
Even in English, there is not a separate word for every separate concept.
I didn’t expect my baby to give “informed consent” to everything I did. I’ve used bought consent and tricked consent and physically restrained consent. And I didn’t do that because I was refusing to act without consent. I did it because I thought it was a good idea.
But certainly when I was changing diapers, I tried to get co-operation, which implies a level of consent. The level of consent described by the speaker referred to in the OP.
Posters above are correct to notice that it is ridiculous to expect the same level of consent before consensual sex as before changing diapers. The ridiculousness comes when misinterpreting the original statements to mean that.
Also…considering that nobody remembers anything from baby age, what difference does “consensual-diaper-changing” make? Does anyone seriously have recollection of, “When I was 11 months old, my mom changed my diaper despite my protests against it?”
Teaching a 2-year old or 3-year old about consent is one thing, and important, but doesn’t it all go over an infant’s head?
Is this really the root of the disagreement in this thread? That half the posters here are using consent as a synonym for cooperation?
I don’t think of them as the same at all, or that cooperation implies any degree of consent. Certainly, when I was a child, I cooperated all the time without consent. I cooperated because I didn’t want to make a disturbance, or didn’t want to be punished, etc. Not because there was the tiniest shred of agreeing to whatever I had to do.
What AGE baby are we talking about here? Babies don’t understand that they’re separate entities until they’re 7 months old, so if the idea is we’d be setting up concepts of autonomy and consent, it’s an exercise in futility to do so before then.
Teaching children autonomy and consent is a gradual process, and it should be done with some knowledge of infant and child development. To do so before a baby is developmentally able to understand the concepts may make the parent feel she’s setting up expectations of autonomy and consent, but if so, she’s doing it for herself, not her child.
I hate to restrict your freewheeling use of the English language, but if we want to teach children what the concept of consent means, I rather think we need to draw some boundaries as to what it means. To call “physically restrained consent” an oxymoron would be an understatement. It seems to me that physical restraint bears roughly the same relationship to “consent” as stabbing someone in the eye does to “making friends”.
I agree that the only way to render the suggestion in the OP non-ridiculous would be (hypothetically) to water down the concept of “consent” to include just empathy, sensitivity to the baby’s feelings, eliciting cooperation by any convenient means that keeps the baby smiley.
But if we water down the concept like this, it means almost nothing. And isn’t the whole point that it does mean something important, something that we do want to teach children very clearly?
I prefer to just dismiss the suggestion in the OP as ridiculous, and stick with a clear definition of consent as something that babies do not yet have the cognitive capacity to understand and experience.
Most people don’t remember much from being 2 or 3 either. But a huge amount of development and learning takes place in 0-3s whether people consciously remember it or not.
Babies are not born with a sense of bodily autonomy. They don’t know that their body is even theirs to start with. That understanding emerges and is refined over time. I think it’s easier to get it right the first time, rather than go back and reteach something. So as their understanding grows of their body grows, I want them to at the same time learn that they generally have control of their bodies, and other people don’t mess with them willy-nilly. Then it’s easy and consistent to extend that to other people having their own autonomy and ideas of respect, etc. Otherwise, you have to guess when they are ready to start learning that (and 3 is probably a lot later than it needs to be) and start implementing a new approach, which they are not going to understand right away anyway (young children learn by repetition, over weeks and months). Or you could just start the way you mean to continue, and in a way that helps children learn the lessons you are trying to teach.
I’m no expert in childcare, nor am I a fan about of politically-correct liberal gibberish. However the outrage against these dialog-changing words is absurd. Children—even very young children—want and need to hear their parent’s voice. It’s never too soon to learn language, to understand social interactions, or to develop a personality. If they become precocious enough to answer “No, I’d prefer to wallow in shit for a while,” it won’t hurt the kid’s psyche to gently say “Sorry; we’re doing this anyway.”
The absurd faux outrages we see these days make me suspect some of us are not completely rational.