To teach consent to your children, you don’t have to be a consent educator, but you should be up to date on best practices. This is a guide you can use to see what you’re already doing, and what you may want to learn more about so you can incorporate best practices into your family dynamics.  Remember, you’re not raising children, you’re raising future adults.

At all ages

At a fundamental level, scaffold feelings, boundaries, and consent into all discussions and behaviours. Feelings and boundaries are interconnected and distinct pieces of the consent puzzle. 

• Feelings help us determine what our boundaries are.

•  Boundaries are something that help us feel our best in different relationships (including friendships, and parent child relationships). Boundaries are something we enforce for ourselves, and we show care for others by respecting their boundaries. 

• Consent is how we navigate and respect each other’s boundaries.

You’re raising future adults, and connecting feelings, boundaries, and consent are the building blocks for healthy relationships.

These best practices are for all genders. While the realities of consent violations tend to be gender-based, we want to raise future adults who understand that consent is for everyone. 

Infancy/Toddlerhood

The key components of consent in this age group are about bodily autonomy and anatomically correct language. 

Use correct anatomical terminology for all body parts, including penis, vulva, clitoris, and anus. This is the building block for body safety as they get older.

Explain why you’re touching your child where you are. Ideally, you would always ask your infant or toddler if you can wipe their bum, or give them a bath, but that’s not always possible. When you can’t ask, narration is a practical tool. Tell them before you touch them, name the body part you’re touching them on, and why you are touching them there. 

Do not force your child to hug or touch anyone they do not want to hug or touch. 

Younger Childhood

Continue to reinforce the above messages. While you can’t ask with babies, you can ask with younger children, so increasingly move from narration to permission.  Normalise talking about feelings, where you model what that sounds like and empathise when your child expresses a feeling. 

Begin giving appropriate choices, when relevant, like letting your child pick between two or three vegetables for dinner, or what they want to wear. 

You can teach body safety rules starting now. Body safety rules are usually some variation of “My body belongs to me. Nobody can touch my body without my permission. If someone touches me on my genitals, chest, or bum, I will tell an adult that I trust right away. If someone asks me to touch them on their genitals, chest, or bum, I will tell an adult I trust right away.” 

Older Children

The core concepts at this age are privacy, trusting your gut, and explicitly connecting verbal to non verbal communication. 

If your child is old enough to ask for privacy, respect those requests. Make sure they know how to wipe and wash properly and ask before helping. When it’s not about safety and hygiene, pick your battles.

Teach your child to trust their instincts, and to identify what anxiety and lack of safety feels like in their body. Go over safety plans in different contexts: if you feel this way at school, with friends, or around an adult, what can they do, who can they tell? 

Specifically point out non verbal cues of comfort and discomfort, like someone pulling away, lack of eye contact, or crying, and joy (like dancing around the kitchen). Not all people communicate non verbally in the same way (like eye contact). Encourage your child to use their words to check in on their friends, and ask instead of assuming.

Pre-Teens

This is when all those feelings conversations are going to come in handy, thank you hormones. Teach your child to practice handling the word no with respect. Explicitly talk to your pre-teens about what coercive relationships look like, from friendship to romantic relationships. Talk about internet safety around privacy, video chatrooms, and how social media is just as public (if not more public) than walking outside. Your child should be able to come to you if they make mistakes, without fear of punishment.  When they confide in you, thank them for sharing their thoughts and feelings. 

In younger years, you taught body safety rules. Now, teach your child what to do if they or a friend is a victim of assault. What are their options, and who can they tell? 

Teenagers

Many people treat consent talks in a gendered way, with “you are having this done to you” ascribed to girls, and “you are doing this to others” assigned to boys. Instead, brush up on consent theory like the FRIES model, and Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent, and PRICK so you can think holistically about consent. Focus on core themes like enthusiasm, curiosity and personal responsibility. 

Know the age of consent and surrounding laws, and understand that they exist to protect young people from harm, without preventing them from having the ethics of  a 30 year old dating a 16 year old are different than the laws around it. 

Be sex positive. 

Being sex positive means that talking about sex and sexuality is normal and on-going, which makes it easier to talk about sexual consent, specifically.  Sex positivity also means that you don’t tell your teenager that sending a nude will ruin their life - instead discuss personal responsibility, long term effects, and the laws and ethics around sharing received photos and revenge porn. 

Make sure your teenager understands that sexual assault includes the aforementioned revenge porn, stealthing (sneakily removing a condom after agreeing to use one), and coercing someone into sex through manipulation, alcohol, or other methods. 

Acknowledge gender based violence, without making consent a gendered issue, which involves helping your teens spot homophobia and sexism. Avoid gender stereotypes that say men always want sex, and women are supposed to deny those same desires. Teach that everyone deserves to have their boundaries respected, how we communicate around those boundaries, and how to receive the word no, whether articulated verbally or through body language.

Preparation for Post Secondary/Adulthood

Adults have a drink and have sex. Adults sometimes do drugs and have sex. Your child is now an adult. Have explicit conversations around body language that shows someone may be too drunk to consent, personal decision making around drugs and alcohol, and keeping an eye out for friends. 

If your child is going to a post-secondary institution or moving away from home, part of your research should include identifying sexual health clinics or a local doctor. 

Consent talks layer on top of each other

Consent, at its core, is about emotional literacy and boundaries, and that can begin as soon as your child is born so it can be built on as your child ages. 

You’re not going to get it right all the time. You won’t always have the perfect words, or perfect emotional response. Your kids will make mistakes, and so will you! Use those moments to model what it means to take responsibility for your actions. 

Over time, all these small moments will layer, so by the time you’re actively talking about sexual consent, it’s an easy jump to incorporate the same messages you’ve been teaching all long.