Tag: safety

How do we keep kids safe in confession (and everywhere else)?

I made my first confession in a parking lot. It was the early ’80s, and that was how they arranged things — lined up in a parking lot across from the church, with a couple of folding chairs set up on the hot asphalt, parents clustered around just out of hearing distance.

Everything was done as casually as possible at this time, as part of an overall effort to demystify and desanctify the Church. I also remember them painting over the midnight blue sanctuary with the gold stars, and making it beige instead.

As foolish and unpleasant as their likely motivation was, it wasn’t actually a terrible system for first confession. I thought of it the other day when Chris Damian asked on Twitter: “How can Catholic parents responsibly send children to confession, knowing that for half of the last century about 1 in 25 priests was a sexual abuser? And that the Church structured itself to hide this?”

You can quibble about his numbers, which he says are based on the John Jay Report; but I believe it was a good-faith question.

It is undeniable that some priests, just like some men in every profession, are sexual abusers, and that they use their spiritual authority and the privacy of the confessional to prey on vulnerable people.

So here’s my answer:

I thought first of what I taught a class of 8-year-olds when I led a confession preparation class. We learned four basic things about safety in general and not just confession. It occurred to me that these rules didn’t change for older kids. They just need elaboration.

One: My body is made by God, and I’m in charge of it….Read the rest of my latest for OSV.

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Photo by cottonbro studio via Pexels

My body safety class for grade 2 faith formation

This year, I took the plunge and volunteered to teach faith formation at my parish. I got grade 2, which is preparation for first confession. I took a short online course about child safety and had a background check done, and I assume I was approved by the pastor, who knows me. I was given materials for the class (Alive in Christ from OSV and Rooted from  Ruah Woods), but what I cover is more or less up to me; but I am required to do one class about safety. 

A few people asked me to share my lesson outline, so here it is. I thought it went pretty well, but who the heck knows? I hope to continue teaching this class next year, so I’d be grateful to know what you think and what improvements you would suggest. I try to have a lot of variety, to get them to answer and offer ideas, to read a memorable, engaging book, to get the kids to engage their bodies when possible, to do visual things whenever possible. Kids this age are very eager to absorb rules and facts, but I also want to make sure I’m conveying how beautiful and welcoming Jesus is. I’m just trying to remember that I’m showing up for the Holy Spirit to use. 

This is the only class completely dedicated to bodily safety. I’ll be returning to the topic later in the context of other lessons (for instance, the idea that the seal of confession is for the priest to keep, and a child has no obligation to keep things that happen in confession secret). The class is one hour long and includes kids who are well-catechized and kids who know very little about their faith. I’m well aware that this one class isn’t adequate to keep kids safe, but at least they will have heard an adult talk about it, and they will know it’s okay to talk or think about. 

PRAYER. We began with a prayer, remembering to make the sign of the cross carefully and respectfully. Prayer: “Jesus, we are here to learn about you. Please help us to hear good things so we can come closer to you. Amen.”

REVIEW. Sign of the cross. The cross is everywhere, not just in church but all over the world, in buildings, in nature, etc., even in our own bodies. (Recall places we have seen crosses, which they were supposed to hunt for during the week.) If we stand up and stretch out our arms, our own bodies make a cross. God puts the cross everywhere to remind us that Jesus is always with us.

REVIEW: The Miracle Man: The Story of Jesus by John Hendrix. (We read this last week, and the kids were enthralled.) Remember how the paralyzed man’s friends opened up the roof and lowered their friend down, because they knew that, if they brought him to Jesus, Jesus would help him. We can’t open up the roof, but we can always bring our friends to Jesus and ask Jesus to help them. [Name friends and relatives we want to bring to Jesus and ask Jesus to help. Kids agreed that they would like this to be a recurring feature of the class. Ended up naming mostly pets.]

READ ALOUD. Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathmann.  [This is a book about physical safety and having a partner who helps you. It was provided by the parish, so I went with it. It’s not a perfect match, but it’s a cute and funny book that the kids like, and it was a good intro to talking about keeping your body safe with the help of other people.]

DISCUSS: Who made our bodies? God made our bodies for us. God even came down from Heaven and got a body, too, so we know that bodies are very important. They are a good gift for us, and it’s our job to try to take care of them. God wants our bodies to stay safe. Here are four things you need to know about keeping your body safe:

HUGGING AND KISSING. Sometimes someone asks us for a hug or a kiss, and we don’t want to do it.  This is okay! We don’t have to hug or kiss if we don’t want to. What are some things we can do instead of hug or kiss? Get suggestions from kids, then fill in: Shake hands, blow a kiss, fist bump, high five. I picked kids to stand up and we practiced acting it out: “How about a kiss?” – “No thanks! How about a high five?” 

SECRETS. Sometimes people tell us something that makes us feel bad or uncomfortable or creepy or weird, or they ask us to do something that makes us feel bad or uncomfortable or creepy or weird, and they tell us we have to keep it a secret. Do you think you should keep it a secret? No! What if it’s an adult who tells us to keep it a secret? Still no!  You’re just kids, and it’s not your job to keep secrets that make you feel bad or weird or creepy or uncomfortable. Kids don’t have to keep bad secrets. If someone wants me to keep a secret that makes me feel bad, I should tell an adult in my safety network right away. 

[Here I meant to make a distinction between keeping something a secret, and not giving away a surprise, but I forgot.]

SAFETY NETWORK. What is a safety network? It’s an adult who will listen to you and who will help you. Everyone gets a piece of paper and traces their hand, then writes the names of five adults in their safety network. They can bring it home and hang it up so they will remember who their safety network is. They can finish it at home if they can’t think of five names right now. 

PRIVATE PARTS. At this point the kids got pretty antsy, so I had them all stand up and stretch. We stretched our arms way up high, way in front of us, way down, and way in back of us. Then I talked about how all the places we stretched to is places we should feel safe. 

Imagine going swimming, and think about how we’re covered by our swim suits. The parts of our bodies that are covered by swim suits are private parts. Sometimes we need adults like our parents or doctors to help us with our bodies, like if we are sick or hurt, but we need to know that most of the time, no one gets to touch our private parts. If a doctor is doing it, we should have someone from their safety network, like a parent, with us. If anyone does anything with our private parts that makes us feel weird, we should tell an adult in our safety network right away. 

I also meant to say, but I forgot: No one can make a kid touch their private parts. No one should show a kid pictures of private parts. If any of these things happen, I should tell an adult from my safety network right away.

A few times, the kids started to veer into territory that I thought wasn’t appropriate for me to discuss in a class, so I gently told them that would be something they should talk to their parents about. 

SING. I wanted to change the mood a bit, so we learned “Jesus loves me.” 

Lyrics:

Jesus loves me! This I know, 
For the Bible tells me so. 
Little ones to Him belong; 
We are weak, but He is strong. 
Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me!
The Bible tells me so. 

A few of the kids already knew it, and I accidentally stumbled on the brilliant pedagogical method of repeatedly mixing up the words, so they had to correct me, which they enjoyed. We sang it a few times and then I handed out coloring pages and crayons. All I had was a Celtic cross, so I asked them what else they would like me to bring in next time. (Here are some links to free coloring pages you can print, many courtesy of my friend Cindy Coleman, a very experienced catechist):

Orthodox Icons

Ukranian Icons

Drawn2BeCreative-saints
http://www.drawn2bcreative.com/free-printables/

Paper Dali http://paperdali.blogspot.com/p/freebies.html
Catholic Saints, Liturgical Year and Catholic Going-Ons

Waltzing Matilda
http://www.waltzingm.com/p/coloring-pages-month.html

Saint John the Baptist Church Religious Education http://www.sjtb.org/releducolor.html
Mysteries of the Rosary, Stations of the Cross, the Creed, Saints

Catholic Playground
http://www.catholicplayground.com/
Saints, Marian, Biblical, Stations of the Cross

Sermons4Kids
http://sermons4kids.com/colorpg.htm

St Anne’s Helper
http://www.saintanneshelper.com/coloring-pages-to-print.html

The Catholic Kid
http://www.thecatholickid.com/

Life, Love & Sacred Art
https://life-love-sacred-art.blogspot.com/…/coloring…

We did some more singing while they colored and waited for their parents to show up. We were supposed to end with a prayer, but I forgot. 

I sent out a email to the parents, outlining what we would discuss in class. They had the option to opt out if they didn’t want their kids in this class, and I let them know I’d be telling the kids to ask them if they had questions I didn’t think were appropriate for class. 

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Image: detail from an illustration from The Miracle Man

“I don’t own my child’s body” is a clever mask for something cruel

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532018668_69f382c523

“I Don’t Own My Child’s Body” is the weirdly melodramatic title of a parenting piece from CNN Living.  (It’s from 2012, but is making the rounds again.)   You can see from the URL that the original title was probably something more like, “Give Grandma a Hug” — and that’s really all the piece is about.  The author’s kid sometimes doesn’t feel like hugging or kissing somebody, so her mom doesn’t make her:

She doesn’t have to hug or kiss anyone just because I say so, not even me. I will not override my own child’s currently strong instincts to back off from touching someone who she chooses not to touch.

Okay, lady.  Big deal.  I don’t make my kid take off her favorite outfit, which happens to be a heavily upholstered puppy costume, but it’s because (a) it’s not hurting anyone, and (b) I’m saving my strength for the big battles.  And I also don’t make my kids hug or kiss people they don’t want to hug or kiss.  Like the author’s child, they are required to be polite, but not in a way that skeeves them out.  But then the author goes on to say:

 I figure her body is actually hers, not mine.

She then quotes a mental health clinician who says that insisting that your child hug a relative

sends a message that there are certain situations [when] it’s not up to them what they do with their bodies … If they are obligated to be affectionate even if they don’t want to, it makes them vulnerable to sexual abuse later on.

She backs this up with a warning from parenting blogger Jennifer Lehr:

 “Certainly no parent would wish for their teenager or adult child to feel pressure to reciprocate unwanted sexual advances, yet many teach their children at a young age that it’s their job to use their bodies to make others happy,” [Lehr] said

The readers of the piece largely agreed with the author, many of them immediately bringing up the phrase “rape culture.”  They firmly believe that there is a direct, possibly inevitable line between “Please give Grammy a kiss, because it makes her happy” and “Please put out for the entire varsity football team, because it makes you valuable as a person.”

I suppose it’s possible that some kids could make that connection, but only if there are other severe problems with the family of origin or with the child’s mental or emotional health.  Healthy families with standard-issue kids do not need to be on permanent freak-out mode about their kids’ bodies.  What you do is you tell your kids, “Look, unless I say it’s okay, like at the doctor’s office, nobody is supposed to touch you under your clothes, and nobody is supposed to get near the parts of your bodies that are covered by underwear.  And if somebody does something that makes you feel creepy, you tell Mom or Dad right away.”  And then you give them lots and lots of examples of normal affectionate behavior, so they can tell the difference between things you go along with, and things you fight.

This article, with its ludicrous leap of logic, reminded me of a phenomenon I see more and more:  the most progressive parents, those who embrace every modern degradation of sex, marriage, and childbearing, are the ones who are the most likely to go completely overboard when trying to keep their children safe.  I don’t know a darn thing about the author of this article, but if she’s writing for a major news outlet, chances are she’s not pro-life.  Her audience certainly isn’t likely to be.  And yet here she is, saying, “I don’t own my child’s body.”

I’m going to try really hard not to talk about abortion here, because I don’t want to have the same old, same old, same old conversation.  I know that pro-lifers will say, “If you don’t own your child’s body, then you don’t have the right to murder him in the womb!” and pro-choicers will say, “If a child owns his own body, then so do I, and that includes anything that might be inside my body, like a parasitic fetus!”

So let’s not even talk about that phrase, “I don’t own my child’s body.”  Let’s talk about why this kind of article is so common — why, as our culture accepts more and more horrors as commonplace, there is an attendant increase in hysteria over little things, trivial dangers, potential risks.

Why do we fret over the dangers of hugging, but shrug aside — well, death?  The death of babies.   The crushing of heads, the marketing of organs. How is this possible?

It’s not enough to say, “Hypocrisy!  Evil!”  I believe the two phenomena, the hyper-tenderness and the cruelty, are actually related:  one comes from the other.

We look around, compare our world to that of our grandparents, and the guilt seeps in like blood through a bandage. We know there is something amiss – all of us do.  And so we compensate by making sure that we’re assiduous about bodily integrity and safety for our chosen children.

Extremism is a very convenient mask for existential negligence and evil.  When we get hysterical over something minor, we feel like we’ve done our duty — we’ve hit all the right notes: I CARE about my child.  I THINK about how I am raising her.  I have GUIDING PRINCIPLES that sometimes make other people feel uncomfortable.  I’m not AFRAID to tackle the hard issues.

And once you’ve hit the right notes, it’s easier to tell yourself that you’re singing a tune that is very beautiful indeed — never mind that that “Ave Maria“ and “Deutschland Uber Alles” have a lot of notes in common, too. It’s no coincidence that modern people are capable of both deep cruelty and overly fastidious care:  these are two sides of the same coin.

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Columbia Students Lay Siege to Themselves

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So here’s what I say to the Columbia students clutching their carefully cultivated pearls as they face down the hot breath of those terrible, wild gods: you’re damn right it’s not safe. You’re not in control here, not on this playground. You may find yourself climbing too high and too fast, and you may reach out for that rung on the monkey bars only to find that you’re grabbing thin air, and down you will plummet, onto the hot asphalt, or maybe further, down into the underworld, where dark Hades glowers over the fluttering dead.

So what?

Read the rest at the Register. 

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Raising safe, independent kids

It’s good and natural for parents to want to keep their kids safe, but it’s healthy for the entire family to acknowledge that our main job as parents is to prepare kids for the rest of their lives. A kid who has never learned to judge for himself when it’s safe to cross the street is a kid who is unsafe.

Read the rest at the Register.