Open Conversations

As a senior mental health practitioner, I often get a pretty good feel of our society’s mental health pulse – the problems that are presented in the therapy room will tend to follow a pattern, creating a discernible picture of what’s going on ‘out there’.

Recently, as a result of the Everyone’s Invited movement, many young women (and also some young men) have been encouraged to speak up about being treated as sexual objects both inside and outside the physical confines of academia, and increasingly I note that this has urged the current generation to verbalise how girls can feel on ‘alert mode’ daily.

Young men, for their part, are mainly surprised by how wary and vigilant girls have to be and are expressing curiosity towards understanding more. 

TALKING TO YOUNG PEOPLE ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS AND BODY IMAGE

As a mother of two young women, I sometimes found it difficult, when they were growing up, to strike the right balance between educating them on the realities of some men, whilst teaching them to be open to forging healthy, trusting relationships.

And when it came to the issue of clothing, I encouraged them to be proud of their bodies and to not feel that their safety was contingent on sartorial “modesty”, whilst feeling protective and irked by the thought of any men misinterpreting their short skirts, for example, as an invitation to leer.

This is a dilemma that women have to deal with daily from the age of about 10 - when they start to physically mature.

Unfortunately, many of the testimonies on the Everyone’s invited platform are of girls telling those in a position of authority about being subjected to harassment, only to be told to shrug it off because “boys will be boys” who mean no harm.

The time to abandon such archaic notions is long overdue. If we want each generation to be healthier, psychologically as well as physically, we must teach both sexes to respect their own and each other’s bodies, to know how to set boundaries and to not be coerced into doing anything which stirs even the merest feelings of discomfort. 

RAISING DAUGHTERS: ADVICE ON COMMUNICATIONS

Having raised daughters, I can attest that I’ve already put my money where my mouth is when it comes to conversations with girls about their body, the right touch, and how to listen to the warning bell telling you that something isn’t right – a bell that I believe all children have inside them from a very young age.

As a practitioner, I advise parents on continuing to have age-appropriate variants of this talk as their daughters mature and become curious about sex. If the communication begins at an early age, the child internalises their self-worth and feels comfortable about approaching their parents with any worries that they may have.

This, in my view, is a far more effective way of keeping our daughters safe than by instilling fear through tales of things going horribly wrong. I tell my clients: your children are going to do things that will worry the wits out of you.. just like every generation has done before.

Teach them to talk to you openly so that you can, at least, guide them and so that they feel able to turn to you if things do go wrong. 

In previous generations, it was the parents’ job to tell their daughters not to have sex. Needless to say, they did if they wanted to. Today’s version is telling daughters not to send nudes and, once again, we all know that they will if they want to.

To keep up with our children, our advice has to keep up with the times. Instead of dishing out prohibitive rules that will be ignored, it may bear more fruit to tell girls that they should only send photos if they feel they want to, and not because they feel pressured to do so by anyone else.

Give them practical advice such as protecting themselves by never showing their face or by sending photos of themselves in a bikini instead. Nothing keeps our children safer than honest and clear communication with caring adults who can practice an open mind toward their experienced reality.

We must understand that our children will make mistakes along the way and that those mistakes, more than anything else, will form the curves of their learning. 

Given the choice between a life of consciously chosen participation, filled rich with experience and the occasional misstep, and that of standing by – safely away from where vitality lives – I’m glad that my daughters were sufficiently confident of their parents’ support to choose the former.

As both a mother and a therapist: I highly recommend it.

Please contact us if you feel that you or your children would benefit from talking to someone about the topics discussed in this piece.