Teaching Our Kids to Speak Up

As printed in My Village News July 2020.

There was a moment on the playground the other day where I briefly felt I had overstepped.

Four kids all aged between 4 and 7 years were doing running races. Two looked like brothers and the other boy and girl siblings too. The pairs didn’t seem to know each other but as beautifully as kids do, met in that moment and started playing together like old friends.

At one point the competition turned nasty though and the pair of the boys quickly got physical with the little girl accusing her of cheating. I was shocked. The girl’s older brother didn’t say anything or try to physically defend her as the kids poked aggressively at her chest.

I looked around for their parents’ to intervene but no one was nearby. When I turned back the shoving had stopped but I felt a boiling up. I looked to the two little boys and waving my finger said, “Hey! It’s never okay to hit girls. You do not do that, ever.” They both looked at me puzzled as to who I was and only a little ashamed. Then the four of them whizzed off to keep playing together.

I was rattled afterwards, as if I’d confronted an adult, and I still keep thinking about it. A couple of things about it stick in my mind. Like the look on the little girl’s face afterward which I read as her feeling underserving of my defence, embarrassed and relieved the kids’ punishment had stopped. The other face that stands out in that split second moment is my daughter’s. She was looking up at me, silent and in a slight awe as if to say, “Oh, so that’s what we do if we see things like that.”

In the context of what’s going on with anti-racist protests across the world this altercation made me realise how important it was for my toddler to see me do that. To show her we speak up when we see something that is wrong. We courageously call out injustices even if we risk being condemned when we do.