Its not even that its a “sham choice.” Its the absurdity of thinking you’re teaching the concept of “consent” to someone who doesn’t yet understand what you’re asking, and is not capable of responding yes or no. You ask your baby “let’s change thst dirty diaper, OK?” To which she responds by blowing a snot bubble and sticking her hand in her mouth. Is that a “yes” or a “no?”
“Nappy”?
Fuck that. We speak American.
Spoken in the bold font of non-absurd outrage?
Very, very well stated.
Parenting advice on this is all over the place. Sometimes I read to not be passive like that, and tell the kid, “stop licking the dog.” Others say to purposely shift the dynamic, so the kid seems to be making a choice, instead of following a command, “we don’t lick the dog,” “does licking the dog seem like a good choice?”
There is also the idea of escalation, “in restaurants we sit in our chairs,” “you need to stay in your chair,” “sit down.”
I think, even if she doesn’t say it explicitly, the person getting used to the idea of asking for consent is the parent, not the baby. If you are in the habit of asking your baby for consent, that may continue to older ages and other situations when consent is more meaningful.
Failure to give consent also doesn’t shelter from real world consequences. That doesn’t mean that consent in that situation is a sham. “Do you want to put your shoes on now?” No, well kid, you’re walking to school barefoot, then. In this case putting on shoes is a choice, but going to school is not a choice.
I think a much more relevant example for babies and small children is tickling. Even when pre-verbal, little kids usually clearly express when they are done being tickled. That is the time to stop; the child has withdrawn consent.
Tickling is a really good example and has some parallels to sex. Not that it is sexual, but that it is an activity that can be fun or not fun depending on circumstances and can quickly go from being fun to not fun when taken too far or continued when consent is withdrawn.
What does consent for pre-verbal babies look like? Telling the baby what you are doing is good, since it helps them learn language, even rhetorical questions like “we’re changing your diaper now, okay” is good, but actually asking for consent for a six month old is insane. Do we ask them for consent when we put them into jail for the night? (Crib - bars, y’know.) Do we ask for consent if we have to give them medicine? Get them vaccinated?
On the other hand, there are boundaries. When the poop is drippin’, the consent I’m skippin’.
Tickling is a good parallel to sex because neither are required. Diaper changing is. Strapping your kid in a car seat to go to the doctor is also. You are going to do it no matter what the kid wants because it is not allowed for him to ride out of it.
Perhaps this would be less controversial if we distinguish between good teach moments for consent and choice, like tickling and clothes choice, and situations which are not good, like keeping his finger from the light socket.
I interpreted the original statements to be saying exactly what they were saying. If the speaker didn’t mean “consent”, then she could have said a different word, but she chose “consent”. “Consent” means what it means, not something else that she made up.
Consent doesn’t gradually get more meaningful, starting at some small level. With a newborn, consent is 100% meaningless, and asking for their consent is 100% sham. No good comes to a parent who learns to go through the motions of requesting consent and then disregard the response. That’s an example of exactly the problem that we’re supposedly trying to solve! If the baby doesn’t consent but the diaper change happens anyway, everyone involved has learned the opposite of what they needed to learn.
A person cannot “fail to give consent”. Consent does not have the qualities of success or failure. Consent is either given or not given. If your own children don’t consent to shoes on a certain occasion, do the shoes stay home? If the shoes are not staying at home, then it was never about consent.
I’d argue that their “inappropriate” choices must also be respected - or, more accurately, that your judgments of “appropriate/inappropriate” must be withheld. Because choice entails being the one who decides what is or is not appropriate. If you reserve the right to determine appropriateness, then you’re just slipping sham choice in by the back door.
Whoa there. I do not consent!
I strongly suspect the pink-haired goofball said what she did about nappies more to stir the pot than as an actual expression of her views on consent. I have a baby at home, and we change her diaper when it’s dirty, regardless of our daughter’s body language or eye contact.
I’m very grateful that most of my adults were careful to state questions as questions, statements as statements and orders as orders. It’s one of the first things we weaned Mom of, when the Bros and I decided to get her civilized after Dad’s death (“the clothes need hanging” “that’s nice, Mom”).
One of the multiple ways in which Spain can be divided in halves is the half which treats hablemos con propiedad (let’s speak correctly) as an essential rule and those who don’t even understand why the heck would we be upset if someone rapes a dictionary. I grew up in one of the areas which are part of the first half.
I’m reasonably sure that “throwing the food to the floor” is an inappropriate choice.
Do 0-2 year olds even grok the concept of consent? Seems like at that age they are working out whom to trust, what to expect of the world, and how to get what they want from it. Certainly they have no interest in other people’s consent for what they are about to do. Once they start successfully asserting their will on the world, that’s when discussions about empathy become relevant. Prior to that they are completely at the mercy of the world, and it seems like experiencing such helplessness is a good foundation for learning empathy.
The intent of what the woman was saying was pretty clear to me, and I don’t know why it’s so hard to grant her a charitable interpretation, and understand what it is she’s saying. She was clearly NOT saying that you must get your baby’s consent before changing the diaper.
True, she isn’t claiming you literally must get consent from babies, but at least according to the article above (by some talking head expert who was, presumably, attempting to give a charitable interpretation) it was all about teaching the kidlets about respect and the concept of consent:
Assuming this “charitable interpretation” is true, it is foolish.
Why?
As many have already pointed out, doing something anyway regardless of response after asking for “consent” teaches the exact opposite of the supposed lesson that its advocates claim to be imparting.
What it is teaching, from a young age, is that their consent is a formality, not an actual choice; that whatever response they may have doesn’t actually matter. Extrapolating that to situations where their “consent” would in fact be an issue (not of course necessarily sexual), this teaches a bad lesson.
In reality of course for young children plenty of things are not choices - they must have their diaper changed, they must go to school, etc. Learning the difference between what is, and is not, a “choice” is an important skill for kids.
Confusing these things goes nowhere but wrong.
I recall that my mother used to hold a ladle of green vegetables (a type I hated) near my plate, asking, “Want some?” When I said “No,” she would promptly pour the ladle of vegetables onto my plate anyway.
It’s as trivial, frivolous and unimportant a case of “consent” as “consent” can possibly be, but the message it sent - along the lines of what some others have said above - was that my opinion or consent didn’t matter. And it made me trust her less.
So yes - to choose a situation where one’s consent is irrelevant (i.e., changing diapers,) and use that as a lesson about consent, teaches the most opposite, contradictory message about consent possible.
And should parenting be about ‘consent’, anyway? It’s not like my kids consented to be born.
It should be about teaching autonomy. If a kid feels a sense of autonomy, consent becomes an expected thing, even in cases where someone is failing to request consent.
Autonomy - the ability to know what you want and act on it in your own interests - is far more important than any trendy establishment of consent.