The Degrees of "No!" (Part 1)

Recently, during an interaction with my three-year-old grandson where I was telling him to pick up some of his toys, he firmly retorted, “No!” My instinctive reaction to him was to respond, “That is not okay! You do not say ‘NO’ to Minga!” (I should interject here that his name for me is “Minga.”) As I heard those words spill from my lips, my mind stalled, and I wanted to quickly delete those words before they could reach his ears. All I could think was, if I could have been allowed to use the word “no” to trusted adults – to know under which circumstances that saying “no” might be allowed – how might my life have been different?

This brings up a larger question: How do you differentiate, for a toddler, an acceptable use of the word no, from what should not be accepted, as in the instance described above? Afterall, I was only five years old the first time that I should have been allowed to tell an adult, “No.” Of course, that was also an instance where I was convinced that he was a friend of my dad’s, in which case, I thought he was being truthful when he claimed that

my parents wanted him to pick me up on my way home from Brownies to get me home quickly. See the problem with so-called “trusted” adults! I was fortunate that I did not end up with my face on a milk carton. Perhaps the guy was my dad’s friend, after all, and that’s why he released me when he was finished with me.

Growing up in my family, and in my church, for a child to use  the word “No” to anybody who was older than them was absolutely forbidden. You didn’t dare! Telling an adult “No” was considered disrespectful in every possible way, and punishable in a variety of creative but-not-always-ethical ways, dependent entirely upon the parent, or person, issuing the punishment. We were never offered exceptions to any rule, so we didn’t know there could be exceptions. Furthermore, when the person who commits an act against your body is a trusted friend or family member, how are you, as a child, supposed to reason anything other than, “this must be normal.”

As memory serves, (which is not always reliable), I was nine years old when another trusted adult in my life started enjoying my body, and then forcing me to explore his body in return. I often thought it was normal and acceptable, even required, for such actions to happen in order for a girl to come into womanhood. I also somehow believed that my mom – the one person who I should have been comfortable talking to about such a violation – knew about these interactions, and that she was okay with it. Maybe that’s something I was told. I really don’t know. But what if I could have known that it was okay to say “No” under those circumstances? Would it have changed my outcome? Would it have saved me from being perpetrated against by others in my life as I grew up? I’d like to think so.

I need to think so.

Now, how do we change the degrees under which “No” is okay for children to say to trusted adults while maintaining a necessary level of respect to adults?

[More to come on this topic including recommendations from experts in the field of child development, reactions/thoughts from fellow parents, and practical applications of re-learned parenting strategies.]