If She’s Not Having Fun You Have To Stop
This is about the nuts-and-bolts of how the work gets done. This is about parenting the next generation.
A boy and a girl run around on the grass at the park. The boy tackles the girl. The girl laughs. She gets up and runs away. She loves to run. He chases, she turns and they grab eachother, tumble and land in a pile, giggling. After a few minutes, he tackles her again and she lands a bit hard. She is bigger and physical, but he more than holds his own in roughhousing. She pauses for a second. Then she laughs again; she’s still having fun.
Dad gets his attention, and says, “If she’s not having fun, you have to stop.”
He is two. He needs to hear this now, and so does she. And again, and again, and again, so that like wearing a helmet on the bike it is ingrained. My kids would not think about riding a bike without a helmet. Wearing a helmet is what you do when you ride a bike. Doing otherwise has not occurred to them, and I need the lesson to stick so that, if their peers make bad choices, they stop and think and decide not to join the bad choices.
What I said will mean a lot of things in a lot of contexts; but it always means the same thing. Regard for one’s partner is a basic component of respect.
At one level it’s an anti-rape lesson. This is “Yes Means Yes” in practice. The mere absence of “no” does not a partnership make; and a real partner wants to participate. Shared activity is wanted by everyone involved; “pushing leaners” is for political polling.
But it’s not just an anti-rape lesson. It’s a life lesson. So I start teaching it now. He doesn’t need to know what sex is or what rape is to know what a partner is. If your partner isn’t having fun, you stop.
October 29, 2009 at 4:24 pm
That’s the very best educational parallel I’ve heard so far.
Thanks.
October 29, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I have a 5yr old son and an 18m old girl…I repeat that many many times every day. If she is crying, leave her alone, she doesn’t want to play. Every time I repeat it, I think of what you just said.
We also do the same for him when we play…as soon as someone stops having fun, we stop. If he tells us to stop, we stop. This is the only way to teach our kids boundaries.
November 17, 2009 at 10:20 am
That’s really great.
When I was a child (and now, actually) my mother didn’t respect me saying no or telling her to stop doing something to me at all, and it caused me a lot of trauma and upset. And she wonders now why I don’t trust her.
November 19, 2009 at 2:01 am
Same here, except it was my dad and uncles, not my mom. To this day, if anyone ever intentionally tickles me I get FURIOUS – so enraged I can barely see – and sometimes have a panic attack.
“If she’s not having fun, you have to stop” is a fantastic philosophy. It’s important to teach kids to be in tune with a playmate’s (or, someday, lover’s) responses. Just because a partner acquiesces to something doesn’t mean it’s a great idea for you to DO it.
November 1, 2009 at 7:26 pm
I am 23 years old, and I started using this last night at a Halloween party, with my 20-something friends. I started saying, “If she’s not having fun, you have to stop.” Someone immediately picked up on it as an anti-rape statement, and countered, “But silence is consent!” For the rest of the night, though, when people noticed that someone was being annoyed by another’s actions, they said, “If they’re not having fun, you have to stop.” It was really, really awesome, and finally a positive action that gets people to think about their actions without being preachy.
November 2, 2009 at 10:31 am
Someone immediately picked up on it as an anti-rape statement, and countered, “But silence is consent!”
If sarcastic, that’s a bit grim. If in earnest, that’s a bit frightening. My essay in Yes Means Yes the book is about the clash of those basic conceptions — silence is consent, which is basically a property transaction way of viewing the world and only fits with what I call the Commodity Model of Sex where sex is transacted like a good or service; as distinct from the Performance Model of Sex, where sex is an interaction shared by the participants and therefore consent is necessarily only present when affirmative.
As long as people seriously think that silence equals consent, the idea of an unconscious woman as a stack of free newspapers will continue to hover. This “take one” attitude ought to horrify people. It doesn’t, but it ought to.
November 2, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Best. Parent. Ever.
November 2, 2009 at 6:59 pm
It was a sarcastic comment, as the group is one that indulges in black humor. I answered them as if they were serious, but the conversation was less productive from there. At least I made them uncomfortable, by pointing out the truth.
November 4, 2009 at 1:08 am
I’m adding that phrase to my parental script.
November 5, 2009 at 8:49 am
Fantastic. Especially nice to read after seeing some concern-troll in the comments to the post about ‘too late to say no’ in The Sexist.
November 15, 2009 at 3:34 am
[...] If She’s Not Having Fun You Have To Stop, Thomas writes about an occasion where he witnessed a father teaching his two-year-old an important [...]
November 15, 2009 at 5:29 am
Came here via the Carnival of Feminist Parenting. Excellent, excellent article, and I say similar things to my son, now two and a half.
But there is something I’d like to add; it’s important to teach these things to the next generation but just as important to model them, too.
Unfortunately this side is so often ignored. When the two-year old in question says “no!” to his Dad, is he listened to? Or is his “no”, like the “no” of so many children, ignored, called a”tantrum”, is he told to “get on with it, there’s no choice”, is he told to “stop answering back”? Because I’d hope it’s the former, but all too often its the side of this that people miss out.
November 16, 2009 at 1:37 pm
I also came via the Carnival of Feminist Parenting. I want to second Ruth’s comment about modeling. This is often the hardest part of parenting, isn’t it? I’ve written about how raising an assertive girl means valuing and respecting her assertions and letting go of the notion that a “good” child is a complient child. (That essay appeared at http://www.mamazine.com.) I also write extensively about the intersection of parenting and self defense (broadly defined to mean all kinds of self determination and protection skills) on my own blog.
I look forward to exploring this site more thoroughly. This is a wonderful post. I believe a very important part of feminist work happens in families, in how we raise our kids.
November 17, 2009 at 6:48 pm
EXCELLENT parenting example for the next generation of respectful adults who treat each other with dignity, empathy, and kind regard. It is, as you said, SO important to instill this message in our youngsters over and over until it becomes completely and entirely automatic to treat others with respect. To honor their ‘yes’ and their ‘no’.
November 20, 2009 at 1:55 am
Thank you for the reminder, on multiple levels. And I really appreciate the Performance Model of Sex idea — thank you for adding that to my vocabulary. As a parent, I’m going to take the article’s message away to teach to my son, and also to teach myself. It’s so horrible to be someone weaker and be taken advantage of, even if it’s for something supposedly benign like tickling (which I also hate!). We have had to teach this to relatives, who liked to tickle our son when he was too young to consent and too young to show whether he was having fun or not. We assumed for him that he was not and made them stop.