Episode 67: Teaching Kids About Body Safety & Consent with Rosalia Rivera
/Okay so, last week on The Balanced Parent Podcast, my guest and I talked about healthy cycles and body beliefs. If you were able to get some takeaways, please let me know. I would love to hear from you and how it helped you have healthier relationships with your bodies.
Now, for this week, I have invited Rosalia Rivera of Consent Parenting to talk more about bodies, particularly: consent, body safety, and boundaries. She is a consent educator, abuse prevention specialist, and sexual literacy and child's rights advocate. She is a speaker and host of the fabulous AboutCONSENT™ podcast for survivors. As a founder of CONSENTparenting™, Rosalia is on a mission to help all parents educate their children about body safety and consent so that they can empower their families to prevent abuse.
I know that this can be an uncomfortable and scary topic to even think about, but it is so important. I know your child's safety is so important to you and I want to equip you with the skills and tools you need to keep your kids safe. We will be providing you information & solutions so that you can protect your children. Here is a summary of our discussion:
Body Consent, Autonomy, and Boundaries
The balance between teaching kids about abuse prevention and the responsibility of keeping them safe
How to create a safety network
Secret Safety and what it means
The nuance between secret-keeping and privacy
A list of books you can purchase or check out from your library to help you have these conversations with your children
To get more resources on this topic, follow Rosalia's social media handles and visit her website:
Website: www.consentparenting.com Instagram: @consentparenting Facebook: www.facebook.com/consentparenting
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts, and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello everybody! This is Dr. Laura Froyen and on this episode of The Balanced Parent Podcast, we're going to be talking about consent, body safety boundaries, and all of that with one of my favorite consent educators, Rosalia Rivera.
Thank you so much Rosalia for coming on our show and helping us have this really important conversation about how to keep our kids safe in an ever-changing world where we really want to keep our kids safe without scaring them, without shaming them. I'm so really excited to have this conversation with you.
Rosalia, why don't you just tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do, and then we'll jump in because I've got to lots of questions for you.
Rosalia: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me and for inviting me on. I'm excited for our talk today.
So, I'm Rosalia Rivera and I'm a consent educator, abuse prevention expert, child rights advocate. I've recently really added that to my title because…
Laura: I just added that to my title too.
Rosalia: Really? That's…
Laura: I just realized that’s what I'm doing. That’s what I'm doing. Yes, yeah cool.
Rosalia: Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's super cool. So, that feels like serendipitous for our call.
So, I really help parents. I work a lot with parents who are survivors of child sexual abuse, who are now parenting, wanting to obviously prevent that and break that cycle. And so I help teach them about body safety boundaries and consent and how they can teach their kids to empower their families. So, I really want to always approach these conversations from a place of empowerment and not fear like you said.
And also just to make sure that we are giving our kids the freedom to grow and express who they truly are without being that overprotective parent that like strictly wants to like keep them safe but doesn't let them experience the world. There's like this fine balance, right?
And so, I'm always on that mission because that's how I was raised, really strict, and I know it made me very rebellious growing up and not always the best thing. But anyway, that's part of my mission that I'm really charged with a sense of purpose to child sexual abuse. At the very minimum, create as much awareness about the issue as possible.
Laura: Oh well, we so appreciate that and I so appreciate you’re bringing a balanced perspective to this because the pendulum swings both ways, right? Our goal here, you know, we talk a lot about balance here. But this is one piece of not going so extremely one way and so extremely other best thing. We’re kind of right in the middle and a good place where we're listening to our kids. We are allowing them to be who they are and we are teaching them, equipping them with the skills. I love how you say empowering them versus being based in fear.
Okay, so what is the thing that's really on the front of your mind right now that you've been thinking a lot about? That you really want to start having a discussion with parents about?
Rosalia: I love this question. So thank you for asking it because there is something I've been really trying to formulate how to bring to the table and discuss with parents in a way that's not going to freak them out. So I'm going to just forewarn you that what I say now may frighten you. That's not the intention. The intention is just to give you this information and then to talk about how you can proceed forward in an empowered way, right? It's like I'm always coming at it from that because, I, as a survivor myself can very easily get triggered, can very easily want to retreat and not deal with this conversation. I say this with lots of intention for you to know that there is solution.
Laura: Okay. So listeners, if as you're listening to this conversation and if it's getting hard to hear, don't check out, don't go out the window, stay with us, put your hand on your heart. Have some things that you can say to yourself that you're safe, that we're going to be offering solutions, that there's a path forward for you. There is safety here. If thoughts start running through your head, come back to the present moment, feel the chair that you're sitting on or the ground beneath your feet. Really ground yourself and stay with us. Okay?
Rosalia: Here's the thing. We have been locked down in different waves of it depending on where you live for the last year and a half basically. And unfortunately, through that time, a lot of children have been in unsafe homes, trapped with unsafe people. And because of that, we have seen numbers of abuse skyrocket in the last year and a half. There have been, you know, calls to cyber tip lines because of exploitation, online exploitation, as well as hands-on in-person abuse within the home. And so we are talking about millions of children that are going to be coming out of traumatic situations right going back to school.
And so unfortunately with that, we have the potential for an increase of child-on-child abuse when children return reintegrating into schools, reintegrating into playgroups, daycares, and etcetera. A lot of parents aren't thinking about that. They don't realize that.
Laura: I don’t even think the parents even know the numbers that are coming out of this pandemic on this specific topic.
Rosalia: So just as a baseline, we're talking about pre-pandemic. One in four girls, one in six boys is the statistic in North America of child sexual abuse. And so when we look at a classroom of 20 kids, we're talking about potentially 25% of that, right? A quarter of those children.
Now cut to post-pandemic, that number is likely increased because there is a higher opportunity for children to have had these experiences. Now we're talking about…
Laura: And reporting is down to, so…
Rosalia: The reporting is down exactly.
Laura: They're not in the environment where they could disclose to safe adults. So they're no longer in those places where they can get help.
Rosalia: And unfortunately also for many who are young, who are so young, that they don't even recognize that this is abuse. Then you now have a potential for those children to potentially reenact this behavior in other children. And display those problematic behaviors with siblings with playgroups, anything like that.
Laura: So important to just frame this for folks who might be experiencing this, that this is because that child is bad or damaged in any way. They are processing. Kid's process through play and it makes sense that things like this that would happen to them. They would also process in that way.
Rosalia: Absolutely. And I'm glad that you said that because it is important to note that it does. These children are just products of that trauma. And so that doesn't mean that they're bad or damaged or intentionally harming others. So the reason that I bring that up is because I think that it is now more than ever so much more critical for us to be educating our own children about abuse prevention so that they know to recognize when unsafe behavior is happening even with peers and that they know what to do in those situations, that they know how to speak up and report to the right person so that it doesn't continue. So that, that child can also get help so that there is more support for that child who is enacting that behavior as well to make sure that they are not in an unsafe situation or also get out of that unsafe situation.
So I think that prioritizing abuse prevention education this summer should be at the top of the list because it's not just about the adults in our children's lives, but it's also now the potential for peer-to-peer abuse that we need to be looking at as a potential. This is something that a lot of experts are predicting, are looking at. I think everyone's trying to formulate, like how do you communicate this to parents in a way that supports everyone, all the children involved? Right? Because it's similar to the situation with porn exposure. It's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's a matter of when it will happen. And so based on the statistics and what we've seen over the last year, in terms of reports that have come out, just even with online reports, it's like 118% increase in the last year of reports, which is, you know, a huge percentage.
What I want parents to know is that if your child is going to be starting school, if they're starting a new school, if they're starting daycare or preschool or graduating to middle school event that this is such an ideal time. Like talking about it slowly, taking your time to talk about it throughout the summer so that you're not like trying to cram all this information into your child's head. Like let's talk about it this whole week and really starting to practice these things at home can really make a huge difference in how your child steps into school.
Laura: Can we dive in, teach us a little bit about what that looks like at different ages and like can, if you haven't been having these conversations, how you go about starting to ease into it, you're not kind of just dumping it all on kid all at once. Can you give us a picture of what that looks like in action?
Rosalia: Yeah. So one of the first things that a lot of parents, kind of, they'll want to start with like, “Hey, I just want you to know that your body belongs to you and you get to say what happens to it and all these things”, right? And that's fantastic and great. But we also need to back up our words with our action, right? So really truly honoring what that means, which is really teaching our kids about their body rights, which is starts from understanding that you have body autonomy or agency, right? And for different ages.
That means different things when your child is two, they're going to have less ability to exercise that as than if they were seven. And what I mean by that is your child can't just run across the street, you know, on their own and exercise their body agency that way if they want to. It means that you examine what that looks like on a day to day, right? So I always recommend to parents like look at your day journal. What does your typical day look like and how are you enforcing certain things that are absolutely health and safety-critical or really your choices and decisions about their body? That maybe you could be handing over a little bit more to them, right?
Laura: Can we make a quick little list of things that maybe can be handed over?
Rosalia: Yeah, for sure. So, I mean to me…
Laura: Hug and touch obviously.
Rosalia: Yes, hugs and touch for sure. Also things like what they want to wear. If it's, you know like they feel like wearing a tutu instead of a skirt. Is that, is it mandatory? Like is it absolutely necessary that you make that call or can you give them that ability to choose? Things like letting your child decide when they're full versus you and forcing them to eat, what you think they need to eat, and letting them learn how to understand their body cues. So things like that versus health and safety, we have to put a seat belt on when we get in the car seat because that is important for your health and for your safety. So those kinds of distinctions.
Teeth brushing is one of the most popular questions I get, which is like, what about this? Finding ways? Can we all brush at the same time and you can copy what I'm doing, you know, as an option versus saying like “you have to brush now and you have to brush this way” and really enforcing it to be this strict boxed in like no option kind of situation versus like how about if we try right before bed or when I'm reading you a book or giving some different options.
Laura: Like autonomy within boundaries, right? So having boundaries brushing teeth needs to happen. But there's lots of possibilities or like getting hands clean after coming inside. I think lots of parents are continuing to be concerned about handwashing right now. There's lots of ways hand washing can happen versus there's one way, the parents’ way, right?
So there's economy within boundaries.
Rosalia: What we're really trying to teach also is the skill of decision making, critical thinking, like helping them develop those things because in the long run that is going to help them when it comes to body safety. Like these skills of learning how to tune into your body, listen to those cues. All of that is developed through these ways of like letting them decide when they're full and letting them decide what feels good for them in that moment to wear and what makes them happy and how that feels in their body. Like all those little pieces. So I know that that seems really simplistic, but that is such a huge foundation for consent, right? Is like them recognizing.
Laura: I think you're hitting on something that's so important for parents to understand is that, that consent and boundaries and body autonomy are not taught in these small few minute conversations that you have, you know, once every few weeks when a boundary has been crossed or something. It's taught through the way that you live, it's in living it. That's how it's taught to kids.
Rosalia: I always talk about finding ways to weave this into your parenting, right? So that it's really the part of the fabric. And so when you start from that foundation regardless of your child's age, what you're really saying to them is I'm truly honoring right who you are as a person. I'm truly honoring your body rights. So, we're really teaching our children about their body rights and that's going to be the strongest foundation for them to start to recognize what is okay, what's not okay with me, right?
And so that's how they learn to start to actually develop their boundaries, then we want to teach them how to implement those boundaries, right? How to say, “I don't really want to hug right now, thank you” or “I would prefer a fist bump” or so this is how we teach them to implement those boundaries. And then we can teach them how to actually uphold them which is if somebody tries to cross that line anyway, which is bound to happen. How to vocalize with confidence, right, if that line did get crossed and they try to uphold it and it still didn't matter that they know how to ask for help, how to get support, how to report that something unsafe happened or that someone made them uncomfortable and that they were comfortable enough to let us know because they've developed that skill set of something is wrong. I don't feel safe. I know that I have a safety person, that is my backup, right? So, whether that's mom, dad, whoever that other person is.
I usually will also teach parents create a safety network because sometimes you may not be available or they may not for whatever reason want to come to you and they at least have another safety line, like another lifeline that they can ask for help.
Laura: And so, I'm thinking then of course about what if the person who's crossing those boundaries is in that network? For example, of my parent’s generation, our parent’s generation are less hip with don't have to give auntie a hug. You don't have to give grandma hug. My parents are working on that. But one of those persons is the person who's crossing some of those boundaries. And of course, we know the statistics that oftentimes in cases of child sexual abuse, the child usually knows the person and that
Rosalia: Mm-hmm 90% of the time.
Laura: So how can we teach our kids? Lots of the holdup that parents have is that we don't want to scare our kids and there's extra piece of we don't want to make kids responsible for their safety and it's our job to keep them safe. So I feel like can we talk about that balance?
Rosalia: I love it because this is my jam. This is exactly where I love to help parents because they do find themselves in that position a lot. Here's the thing, I love that you said it shouldn't be all in our kids and I 1000% agree with that. And I talk about that because we tend to think we teach kids abuse prevention and then we're good, but in fact, it's not our child's responsibility to prevent abuse. A 100% yeah because here's the thing. What we're doing when we teach our kids about abuse prevention is we're skill-building, but that doesn't put the responsibility on them. It's still our responsibility to talk to the people in our children's lives about what we are doing at home. In terms of, you know, hey, we're teaching this, we're practicing this. These are some expectations that we would like you to support, you know, in terms of how you interact with our child. Uh, you know, for grandparents, please do not ask your child to keep even what you consider to be an innocent secret. Because we're teaching them about secret safety.
Laura: Wait, you have a podcast so everybody can go listen to your podcasts. Right?
Rosalia: Well yeah, I do talk about some of this on the podcast
Laura: Okay.
Rosalia: Podcast is more for talking about like survivor topics around trauma and relationships and things like that. But I do have lots of information around this. And one of the things you know, when I talk about creating a safety network, part of creating a safety network, means vetting the people that are on your safety network. So you're not just going to be like, oh these people, I know them so therefore they belong on the safety network.
No, no, no, no, no.
We want to make sure that we have communicated to the people that we have invited into our safety network and to let them know that “hey, my child and I have decided that we're creating a safety network, and these are some of the people that both my child and I have decided could be great to be part of the network”. And so we want to ask you if you would be part of this network and if you do this is what that means, right? And so we want to explain to them that we are practicing consent. We are, you know, teaching our child secret safety. We're teaching them what a safe person is, right? Because a safe person does not mean, oh, it's a police officer, like a uniform on or a doctor who has a lab coat. Like no, that is not relevant. What's relevant or the actions of the person.
So, a safe person does four things. One is that they would never break a body boundary. They would never ask your child to keep a secret. They would always believe your child if they came to them, and they would help keep them safe. They would make sure that that unsafe situation does not happen again. So those four things are the four pillars of what a safe person is. And you want to teach that to your child.
And you also want to let the person who you're inviting into your safety network? No, these are the requirements for someone to be on our team of safe people. Right? So you're really communicating this to the person, you're letting them know. So that one, it's like, do you agree to this? You know, do you want to be part of the safety network. Two, now you know what is required. So, if you are a potential predator, right, then you're going to be like, “oh, you know, like hands-off on this family because they're not an easy target.”
Predators are looking for easy targets. That can be someone in your family. It could be someone in your school. It could be someone in your youth-serving organization. You know, when I say predator, people think of a stranger, but you know, like you said, 90% of abuse happens at the hands of people that the family and the child knows and trusts. And it usually happens through a process called grooming. So, we can't just assume that just because it's a family member, just because it's someone we've known for 20 years. Unfortunately, predators know how to hide in plain sight, and they know how to make themselves look like an upstanding citizen that you would never imagine.
We need to be really vocal about this and talk to the people in our child's life. That's 50% of abuse prevention is us talking to the people in our child's life. And the other half is educating and skill building with our children, right? So, if we look at it as a 50-50 that's the split. We don't want to put all the pressure on our kids. Explain to our children, this is what a safe person is. And we explain to the adult, these are the expectations we have of a safe person that really covers, you know that those two pieces so that we can create those networks. So that kids know, okay, this is the safe person. They would never break the body boundary. They're not going to ask me to keep a secret. They will believe me and they will help to keep me safe.
Laura: Can we touch a little bit on secret safety on what that means?
Rosalia: Yeah. So secret safety is huge. It's so critical. It's one of the biggest pieces that I find a lot of parents don't think to teach because they're not really sure like how to teach it. Because secrets can feel like a tricky kind of conversation. A lot of parents will teach that there's good secrets and that there's bad secrets. We don't want to go down that route because a predator can use the concept of a good secret as a manipulation technique, as a grooming strategy. You know, this is why I always tell parents, ask the people in your child's life, particularly anyone who they spend a lot of time with it. They have one on one access to that they do not ask your child to keep a secret. Let them know we're teaching secret safety, which means that our child knows that there are no secrets between us. Within the family, we do not keep secrets within the family.
So, we want to teach kids about surprises instead because that's like you have birthday parties or a gift that you want to give somebody. Those are things that are meant to be shared. That makes someone feel good. There's a timeline versus a secret is never supposed to be shared. It's something that you don't tell anyone, even if it doesn't make you feel bad, it could be something that a tricky person is trying to get you to believe. And so you want to introduce the concept of a tricky person. A lot of people are like, how do you explain that? But there's a lot of media, books, movies, shows that have these characters already in the storyline.
Um, I always like to point to like the first movie for Frozen with the prince who like seem like a good guy, but he turned out to be a bad guy. That's a tricky person, right? So, you can give your child these examples to say if somebody is asking you to keep a secret, even if it feels like it's an okay secret or they tell you that it's okay to not tell mom and dad. That might be a tricky person, which is why it's so important that you tell mom and dad anyway because then you can confirm and make sure that you're staying safe, and ultimately, a safe person isn't going to ask a child to keep a secret.
A surprise is different. It's meant to be told. There's a timeline. So, making sure that they have that distinction. So, creating a safety rule in your home that we do not keep secrets. That's our safety rule. Giving kids that script to tell someone if someone asked them to keep a secret: “We don't keep secrets in our home. That's our family safety secrets rule.”
And again, that will be a really big red flag to a potential predator that they are like, “oh, this child is being educated hands-off.” Like they're looking for the lowest hanging fruit, like least resistance. The way that they look for children are the homes where kids are not talking about these things, that they don't have the language, that they can very evidently see that this child doesn't know. And they will ask them to keep a good secret, something that's totally innocent to test them to see if they're willing to keep the secret at all. So if your child knows to say that they're getting crossed off the list.
Laura: Okay, so now whenever I start thinking about secrets and secrets safety, I love that phrase. You have really good turn of phrase. I also start my daughter. My oldest is getting older, she's starting to seek more privacy, which is a normal part of development. And so, I also I would love to discuss a little bit of the nuance between secret-keeping and privacy because I do believe especially if we're talking about consent, the kids are entitled to privacy too.
Rosalia: Absolutely.
Laura: So, I'm curious if we can, I don't know, touch on that a little bit too. I feel
Rosalia: Yeah
Laura: like I’m asking you so much.
[laugh]
Rosalia: No, it's all good.
Well, I mean it's important too because that is… it stems from the idea of private parts, right? So if you're teaching about private parts, then you can start to talk about the idea of privacy in general because kids will explore their bodies and these are private activities, right? So something that you can do when you have privacy and then you introduce this idea of that's your own alone time, that's time for you. You can do that, you can do whatever it is that you want in the privacy of that time and space. So, you can give examples of like, you know when someone goes to the bathroom and they close the door. They want privacy. They don't want anyone else to see what's happening in there. And so introducing the idea through those kinds of physical examples kind of sets the stage. So that as they get older they can introduce that like they can kind of transition that into more of an abstract concept of just space and time with things like you know, I don't want someone to know that I still like sleeping with my teddy bear, that's my own private information. I don't want people to know that because it might embarrass me or it might, you know, I just don't want somebody to know about that. So you can introduce the idea that that's okay to have that private information. If you write in your diary, right, that's your private information.
As long as it is not something that is involving someone hurting you or impacting your body safety. This is where you want to introduce this idea because someone could say, “oh well let's keep this between you and I, it's private.” They still use that, that term. But you can say like if somebody is making you feel uncomfortable, if there, whether that's uncomfortable physically or emotionally or mentally, then that is still something that you should come and talk to us about because we can help you with that.
So, introducing the idea that privacy is okay, as long as it doesn't affect your safety. Once it affects your safety, then it's really important that you talk to your safe person about that. And so that could be me, that could be dad, that could be whoever else is on your safety network. So really starting from that place of the physical, private space, private activity. When we're talking about kids exploring their bodies, you can introduce the idea. Then a lot of times kids when they're really small and they're walking around the house, kind of exploring, you know, hands down the band's my kids do without shaming them. We just want to redirect and say, hey, you know, I realized that you know, maybe you want to explore, but let's try to keep that private activity if you want to go hang out in the bedroom or the bathroom or just let mom know, hey, I need some private time and you're on the couch doing your thing. I'll be in the kitchen. That's cool too.
You know, whatever that looks like for you in your home, that's the perfect sort of place to start with concept of privacy.
Laura: Okay. And so then, you know, kind of circling back to the conversation that we were having at the beginning of this episode. What about when kids start wanting to have alone time together? So my daughters will sometimes want to play by themselves and one of their rooms and say, mom and dad, don't come in. You're not allowed, no grownups allowed. How do we navigate those situations?
Rosalia: Personally, I think it's important that we have an open-door policy. The only time that private time is allowed is for yourself when you're between a certain age, right? Especially with playdates. For us, there’s an open-door policy. For me particularly we're about to move and to a new home and I know that the bedrooms are going to be in a different floor. Like right now our bedrooms are on the main floor, but we're having a different situation. And so when friends come over bedrooms are off limits. We don't allow that because I need to know that child better. I need to know the parents better. I need to know more about that family before I feel comfortable saying like, “oh sure guys like closed-door activity.” Like not okay for me because for safety reasons.
So I, even with siblings, will still advocate an open-door policy and just say “I will knock” and still like give you that much of to say, “Hey, you know, I'm coming to see what's going on” or whatever you want to say, but it's got to be an open-door policy. So I still feel like private time is okay for you to do on your own. But when there's another person involved, there's got to be an open-door policy.
Laura: Okay. And so then keeping on this topic that we were talking about before, this whole time, we've been talking about abuse prevention and the slow build. And so if our kids get into a situation where they report something happened to them, some touch that didn't feel good or they weren't even sure about because I think for young kids often they aren't sure.
They… Something happened. It didn't feel quite right. What they didn't know if it was, especially when it's between kids. So, they come to us and they report we find out about it. Our reaction is really important, right? At that moment and time.
Rosalia: Oh yeah.
Laura: And so, do you have any tips for parents who are in that situation? How to go about that without shaming, without blaming? And a child's response and processing of those moments can define whether something's traumatic or whether something they move on from it too. Can you give us some tips for parents?
Rosalia: Yeah.
Laura: About that situation
Rosalia: For sure.
Well, one of the things to that I want to just kind of go backwards a little bit to say is that when we're inviting someone to be part of our safety networks, explaining to them once they agree to be part of the safety network is educating them on this same thing.
How do you respond if my child comes to you so that you're not re-traumatizing them by saying the wrong thing?
So, when we're talking about creating a safety network, it's not just like, “Hey, let's just pick five people,” like there's a process in order to really make it effective and also for your child to be supported by that person, right? So if they were to come to them, you want them to know the same thing that you know about how to respond. And so how to respond is critical for two reasons. One is obviously you don't want to re-traumatize your child, but to you want to make sure that they feel safe enough to really tell you as much as possible. Because a lot of the time they're only going to give you a very small amount of information to see how you handle it before they divulge anything else.
Our initial response is going to be really critical for a potential investigation for, you know, making sure that they feel safe as they unfold any other details. So first you want to commend them for the fact that they did the right thing by coming to tell you. You want to let them know that they didn't do anything wrong. That in fact, you're really proud of the fact that they have come to you and did the right thing that, you know, what you instructed them. And then you wanna let them know that you're going to do everything in your power to make sure that this situation unfolds in a safe way.
You don't want to, you know, if you feel triggered also in the moment that you received the information, like take a breath, take a moment to pause and if you need to like even get up and say, “you know so thirsty. Let me just get a glass of water for a second. Would you like a glass of water?” You know, because they're going to be like looking at every bit of your reaction, right? So just try to stay calm. If you're a survivor yourself, it could be extremely triggering, right? So just prepare yourself with some tools, breathing techniques or something that's going to help you regulates so you can have this conversation.
And then, you know, so that you can be as supportive. Thank you for telling me you did the right thing. You're so courageous for coming and telling me that even if you just felt uncomfortable like sometimes we're not sure how we feel and it's always great to be able to talk to someone. So thank you for trusting me to come and tell me.
And then you want to ask them. So what else would you like to share about that? Was there anything else that you wanted to tell me? Right? You don't want to ask any leading questions. You don't want to um you know, add things in there that you perceive happened without them actually happening. So stay away from leading questions. Just be open to hearing. So what else happened? Is there anything else that you'd like to share? And then do not, you know, if whether it's an adult or a child, we don't want to ever attack that person, you know, “oh my goodness, I can't believe that person did that or I'm going to make sure that they go to jail or oh my goodness, I could just kill that.” You know, like whatever that sometimes response that's in our head, we don't want to verbalize that because that child may have a really good relationship with that friend or that person, that adult and us threatening in some way could really make the child retract and you know, not want to share anymore because of fear of what the repercussion is going to be to that person.
They may just want that situation to not happen anymore. But that doesn't mean that they want that person to necessarily go away in a child's mind. It's like I just want them to stop doing that thing, but they're my friend, so I don't want my friend to go away right? So you don't want to say anything that's going to like make them fear telling you any more information. So calmly say, “I'm going to look into it and see what happened and make sure that it doesn't happen again.” And you know, depending on the age of the child, you want to keep them, you know, feeling like they're involved in the process because if they feel like they've been shut out, there going to be very apprehensive to tell you more because you're shutting them out, they're going to shut you out. So try to keep it open and supportive and then, you know, look at just my child, need to see a play therapist. Do they need to talk to a counselor? Most likely they do, you know, something that really impacted them. You know you want to make sure that you're giving them the support and then do your own investigation from that point. If it's, you know, a situation that needs to involve, it's an adult and you need to involve child protective services. If it's a child, you want to obviously talk to the child's parents> you want to find out if it was something that happened in school-on-school grounds, obviously you're going to take the next steps from there.
But your response, initially, it's going to be really important too, because your child made later come back and say, “so there was this other part of this thing that happened and like I wanted to tell you.” You're going to have follow-up conversations so that first one is going to be really important.
Laura: Okay. And so, one of the things that I'm thinking about now too is so how do we tell the difference as parents between age-appropriate kind of explorations between peers and things that are should not be happening?
Rosalia: So typically, it's there's a 2 to 3-year gap where it can be a curiosity exploration kind of situation, right? If they're in the same peer group and I would say that that's for like six and under. Six and over, we're talking about there should be more knowledge around body safety generally. So if someone is asking another child, you know, to touch them in a private area or wants to touch them in a private area or is asking them not to say anything that's very clear knowledge that they know that that's not appropriate and is leaning more towards that an abusive situation.
Again, the child themselves even may not understand that that's abusive because they may being abused and not recognize that that is not okay. So you know, it really depends on the dynamics. If it's over a 2 to 3 year age gap, let's say the child is six and the older child is 10, that's a very clear like the child is 10. They know that's inappropriate, shouldn't be doing that. That's when you're talking about potential for that to now be abusive. So there's that, that age window um, you know, 2-3 years, yeah, years.
Laura: All the parents listening, I hope that you are staying calm and knowing that this prevention is so important. So having just listened to this interview with Rosalia is doing a whole lot for your family.
But as we move into kind of opening the world, backup kids are going back into school settings. Are there things that we can be doing for our communities? Um, not just for our family but for communities to start these conversations. And we hear all the time it takes a village, but how do we actually put that into practice?
Rosalia: Well, first of all, I think this will make everyone feel better. This is one of my more favorable statistics is that 90% of abuse can be prevented through education. So if we are taking the time to do this education, you should feel good about the fact that's going to really help, right? And what we can do is again, like have these conversations with our inner circle, so grandparents, relatives, family members, friends, then talk to the next level of people who are interacting, educators, let them know. This is why I created consent letters because you can give this letter to someone and say this is what we're doing at home. This is how we're practicing it. We would love for you to be involved and help us, you know, support this education that we're teaching. This is how you can support it. You know, will you support it? You know, it's a really challenge calling people in.
I think a lot of people are afraid to have these conversations because they think that they're going to make that person feel uncomfortable or like you're pointing a finger. But we're not calling people out, we're calling people in. And so coming at it from that, you know, intention, that perspective, it really makes a difference. So whether that is a teacher, a coach, even, you know, a babysitter, hey, we're doing this, this is how we practice it. Having those conversations, not being, you know, as afraid like having the courage to talk about this more openly and educating others. Hey, these statistics have been on the rise, you know, this is not something that I'm making up. I'm not just being paranoid, you know, I think that we're afraid of being seen that way, but in fact, when we start to educate people, they are actually really surprised that they didn't know those statistics because no one is talking about it. So we have to be those first people to say, “I'm going to be the one to talk about it in my community because it's going to make our communities safer.”
Bring a list of abuse prevention books to your local library and say, “Hey, can you bring those books in?” You know, and that really helps to educate more parents in your community, Right? The more, the more we share this information with other parents, like if you're going to a play date and “hey, we're starting to practice this new education and x, y z,” you can share this. So just getting more vocal about it, in general, is going to empower your community and you know, they'll be like, “Hey, you know, where did you learn that? How can I learn more about that? Oh yeah, there's this, you know, website here. There's this podcast there. I learned about this here.”
Give more of those tools to everyone else so that everybody can get on board.
Laura: I love those, especially those two ideas. So, I think those are resources that people can get from you, right? Where can people find those?
Rosalia: Yeah. So, you can go to consentparenting.com and I have the free pdf of the book recommendations that are all about abuse prevention broken up into age groups. So, you can easily take you know, circle which books you want the library to bring in and hand that over to them.
And then my consent letters, you know, I have eight different templates, including ones for sleepovers, you know, for doctors, for yeah, for teachers, for day cares. You know, we want to be able to talk to everybody. Right? And so these letters really help facilitate that communication.
Laura: What a great resource.
Rosalia: Yeah. I even actually…
[laugh]
Well, I was gonna say, I actually also just created two new versions which are videos. So, if you have a co-parent, like if you're in a if you're divorced and you're co-parenting, that sometimes the most challenging is like to try to get your co-parent on board with what you're doing. And so, you can send a consent letter or you can send a video, which is essentially me explaining what you're teaching in your home, how you're teaching it, why are teaching it.
Some statistics to back up like the reason why and then asking them to be on board and asking them, you know, we're practicing secret safety. This is what it means. This is how you can be part of it even if you're living in separate homes. Right? And so it's me basically sharing that information coming from an expert, making it easier for the co-parent to like just send that over and yeah.
Laura: Oh my gosh. What a great resource. Okay, so your website is consentparenting.com and that's also your handle on uhm…
Rosalia: On Instagram.
Laura: On Instagram which everybody listening, if you do Instagram, you should definitely be there. Her page is helpful. So wonderful. Thank you so much for your time and your expertise in what you're doing for the world. You just really are a gift to
Rosalia: Thank you.
Laura: To us parents and I so appreciate you.
Rosalia: Well, thank you for inviting me on and for making this a topic that you're making space for on your podcast. So I really appreciate you for doing that as well.
Laura: I feel just so honored to have had you here with us.
Okay, so thanks for listening today. Remember to subscribe to the podcast and if it was helpful, leave me a review. That really helps others find the podcast and join us in this really important work of creating a parenthood that we don't have to escape from and creating a childhood for our kids that they don't have to recover from.
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All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this.