Sprinkled all over my blog are discussions of the utmost importance of boundaries. As someone who grew up without them and had to insert them herself as an adult – and take extreme measures to cut off abusers who disrespected those new boundaries – that concept has become a crucial component of my worldview, both as a woman and as a parent (as such, I am parenting a presenting-female child, so ya know, full circle and all).

When I was in college, I was in a very harmful relationship with a guy who intensely sexually abused me. I was taken advantage of in various ways by nearly every other man I’ve ever met since then (and in some cases before then), until I met my remarkably wonderful husband. I can’t help but take women’s rights issues and the #MeToo Movement seriously; I’m especially sensitive about respecting bodies and physical space. This has gotten more intense since having a daughter.

Real talk: I’ve never admitted this so openly before, but, when I first found out I was carrying a girl, I was actually a little terrified. I had to come to terms with it over a day or two. Not because I didn’t want her – of course I did! – but because I was afraid that she would have her boundaries violated the same way mine always were. That’s not to say boys’ boundaries don’t get violated too, because they do, I’ve talked my male students at school through some things, but it’s…well, it’s a little different, especially when they’re older. That being said, boundaries are a universal essential, not least because gender is a fluid concept, not a binary one. Anyway, the bottom line is this: no matter what gender my child identifies with, I want them to have a better understanding of their boundaries than I ever did. Admittedly that’s a pretty low bar. But I digress.

It is very important to me that affection not be forced on or demanded of my daughter. If she’s being tickled and wants that to stop, the tickler needs to drop their hands. If she’s asked for a hug and says no, the asker must not try to guilt her into giving one.

This situation isn’t unique to me; I’ve read other essays about parents who’ve had to navigate these tough conversations with well-meaning but overbearing relatives, grandparents and older aunts and uncles and the like. Much to my relief, I’ve never really had to have that conversation with my in-laws who have always treated my kid’s physical autonomy with utmost respect. They ask for hugs but never demand them, never expect affection because of some misperception that it’s owed to them. If she tells them no, they simply say okay, and they don’t ask again. So far, thankfully, my daughter doesn’t know that kind of pressure.

But someday she will. I had to think about what tools I could give her to navigate those social situations where affection might be warranted, such as when saying goodbye. You see, I expect that people will treat her with respect, but I also expect that she will do the same. While it’s perfectly okay to decline giving someone a hug, it’s not okay to me that she refuse to acknowledge them entirely. She’s a very verbal, vocal child (gee, I can’t imagine where she gets that from!), but spoken interactions with adults, even ones she knows and loves, are tough for her sometimes. Pressuring her to “use her words” is the opposite of helpful. I needed to teach her a happy medium. It took me a few months of crabby awkward goodbyes like that before I figured it out.

I started to give her options. I give her several reasonable alternatives for saying goodbye to someone, so that she could decide what she was comfortable with at that time. When we got to the end of a visit, our visitors would say goodbye, and she would start to get surly, and I would tell her, “It’s time to say goodbye. You can say goodbye with words, or you can give a hug. You can wave, or blow a kiss, or give a high five. How would you like to say goodbye tonight?”

IT WORKS. I watched my daughter’s entire body lighten in visible relief the first couple times I did this. Empowering her with this choice, giving her this autonomy, made such an indescribable difference. She chooses how she wants to say goodbye, and once she says goodbye in one way, she usually feels a little more comfortable with adding a second form of goodbye. In particular, once she has used a nonverbal mode of communication, she seems to be more okay with speaking aloud. The pandemic greatly camouflaged this situation for us, because we weren’t visiting with anybody for a really long time, so figuring out how to say goodbye wasn’t all that relevant. Now though, with being more able to gather together again, she’s getting to meet more and more people, many for the first time in her short life, and others for the first time since she was an infant.

Kid needed a road map. So I gave her one. And, here’s the best part – she USES it!

Tonight, we were driving home from dinner, and I told her that a friend was going to stop by to drop something off for me. She asked me who the friend was and how long they’d stay, and then, almost more to herself than to me, she said, “I think I will wave, but I don’t want to talk. Yeah, I’ll wave.”

Please empower your children. From a young age, teach them not just that they have boundaries which deserve respect, but also explicitly teach them how to maintain their boundaries to others. Give them a road map, and teach them how to use it. Children who learn to assert their own boundaries and respect those of others at young ages are destined to continue to do so as adults. And hey, won’t that be a lovely turn of events when the tide rolls in?