On Parenting and Consent: When Sharing Isn’t Caring

Drawing on her own experiences, author Rebecca Cokley explains why it is important for parents to teach their children that they have the right to consent—or not consent—to how their images, words, bodies, and experiences are used.

I work in progressive politics, specifically with marginalized communities. There, we talk a lot about the power of storytelling: crafting a narrative in such a way to convince a policymaker to make or change a decision about something, moving people to the polls based on a candidate’s narrative, or telling our own personal stories to help shift expectations about what people like us or our families can achieve.

So when I was thinking about what to write about parenthood for Mother’s Day, it seemed natural to draw on my own experiences, which have moved from solely being an advocate within the disability community to teaching my son how and when to advocate as he gets older. Earlier in the school year, he had gone through some bullying drama with a classmate. It led to all kinds of discussion in our household on how to deal with such situations from the perspectives of parents, kids, marginalized communities, education policy leaders, and others. It was a really tough few weeks, but recently, we’ve seemed to break through to the other side of it.

The above excerpt was originally published in Rewire.News. Click here to view the full article.

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