It was a typical morning this week, when my eight-year-old waltzed out of her room, holding her little robe shut with one hand and rubbing her face with the other. I hugged her good morning with a smile, and asked her to have a seat in the living room while I made breakfast.  My morning habits run on auto-pilot – wake up, turn on the television news, fix my tea, and if there’s anything big news, hit the pause button on our DVR while I make us breakfast, so I wasn’t even thinking about her sitting in front of the TV while the news played.  But then breaking news broke through my morning fogginess: “alleged gang rape …7 men … 1 woman…”. I froze in my kitchen, speechless.  I walked back into the living room and she was sitting upright, staring, confused, at the television. I thought to myself, “Here we go”: my daughter is a living question factory, so if there’s something to be mentally poked, prodded, pulled apart and processed, she wants to be the one to do it. It’s easy to deal with when she’s asking about volcanoes – I might not’ve studied earth science at college, but at least I can Google. Google doesn’t know how to tell your child about rape.  I sat down with my cup of tea and paused the TV: “Is there anything you’ve seen on the news today that you’d like to ask me about?”  She replied: “Mommy, what’s ‘rape?’”  I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable about her question, but it didn’t feel fair. We have a “no question left unanswered” policy in our house. My husband and I decided very early on that any question our kids had, we would do our best to answer it right then – not only because it fosters curiosity in a child in a healthy way, but also because it helps our daughter understand that she can always come to us for any question, no matter how big or small, and get the answers she needs without fear of shame or judgment. (Our personal assistant – better known as Siri – makes this pretty easy for us when it’s some fact that we don’t know.)  For instance, we were once walking through the East Village in New York and passed a group of individuals with full beards, hairy chests, matching leotards and tutus. She asked why the men were wearing tutus; I replied, “Who said leotards and tutus were only for women?”. When we once saw beautiful billboards in SoHo featuring androgynous people, she asked, “Is that a man or a woman?” without embarrassment; I asked her, “Does it matter?” and she said, “I guess not.” And, when she once watched Mommy very calmly pause a phone conversation to stop on the sidewalk, turn around and curse out a man who had been slowly following us in his car making kissy noises, she later asked, “Mom, wasn’t he just doing that because he wants to marry you?”; “I promise you, that’s not about marriage”, I told her.  All these situations and others required long conversations about people respecting other people’s right to exist unbothered, about respecting people’s boundaries, and about learning to accept our uniqueness and other people’s. That is why last year, when a little boy insisted on putting his hands on her repeatedly after she’d told him to stop, she screamed out “Respect my boundaries!” into his face. He didn’t quite understand the words, but he understood her intention – and her teachers and I had quite the laugh.  When I didn’t answer right away, she asked again, “Mommy, what is rape?”  “Rape is when someone forces you to touch their genitals, or when they force you to let them touch yours,” I told her, and then I explained that no one should be touching her or asking her to touch them and, if anyone tries, she has every right to punch, kick, pull, drag, bite, slap and scream.  “People get sick from biting other people,” she objected.“I know”, I said, “but if the choice is ‘get sick from a bite’ or ‘have someone touching your privates after you told them no,’ then Mommy says it’s okay to bite.”She then wanted to know why “so many men” would do that to “one woman” and I told her about how “there are some people in the world who think it’s okay or even fun to ignore when a person sets a boundary, but we know better.”“Oh, like that man on the street who followed you hissing at you that you cussed out?”“Yes, exactly like that.” “Why do men do things like that?”“Because there are some men in the world who think it’s okay to treat women this way. Luckily, there are great men like your daddy and his friends who don’t treat women like that. It’s not all of them, and sometimes, you don’t find out a person is a scumbag like this until you talk to them. But once you find out they’re a scumbag, it’s okay to protect yourself.”“Oh. Okay.” She went back to eating her breakfast.  One of the challenges of being a parent is that, if you didn’t have the kind of parents you want to be, you’re severely limited in understanding how to help your child understand and interact with the world the way you do. But I try to think about how differently my life would’ve been had I known all the things my daughter will know, and how much better the world will be from her having known them – and I feel better about our choice of parenting style ... even on days when those conversations turn my hair prematurely gray.
Parents have to answer all kinds of difficult questions. But there are some you just dread and which the news makes unavoidable