Mom Shares How She's Teaching Her 2-Year-Old Daughter About Consent
Stranger danger is real.
Having a daughter can be terrifying when you think about navigating their safety and protecting them from danger.
Try as they might, parents cannot protect their kids from everything but they can arm them with skills that will help them set and maintain their own boundaries.
It is never too early to start teaching a child about who and who is not allowed to touch their bodies but knowing how can be difficult.
Well, that's where Tara Cochran comes in.
The Michigan-based content creator and mom-of-one have been helping parents by sharing what she does to teach her daughter about consent on her TikTok account "@tara.and.evy."
The mom has regular check-ins with her daughter to talk about consent and bodily autonomy.
One viral video shows Cochran speaking with her two-year-old daughter Evy to have an open conversation about her body.
"Please have these chats with kids. It's never too early. It's absolutely necessary for ALL genders," she captions her video.
Cochran tells Evy to listen carefully before quizzing her daughter about her body.
“Do you remember your private parts?” Cochran. Evy replies, “My gina” before her mom kindly corrects her pronunciation.
She captioned this part of the video with a reminder that the names of body parts are not “bad words”, and that children are more protected if they don’t call them “cute” names.
“My booty,” continued Evy. “What about your chest?” asked Cohran. “Chest,” repeated Evy.
Finally, Evy indicates her mouth as another private part. Then, Cochran asks a key question, designed to protect her daughter.
“And what do we do if anybody ever tries to touch or look at our private parts?”
“No. No. No.”
“And when you say ‘No. No. No.’ you scream and yell and say ‘No! No! No!’”
Evy repeated her mother, but she encouraged her to yell even louder.
“Good job, and then you tell who?”
“Mommy.”
Cochran also recognizes that she might not always be there to protect Evy so gives her daughter a helpful backup plan in case she's not around when Evy's in danger.
“Can you tell me your five safety people?”
This part of the video was captioned: “Safety people are chosen by her. They’re additional people besides me that she feels safe enough to also tell absolutely anything. They’re her village.”
Then Tara asked Evy to tell her who her five “safety people” are.
Evy listed out her father, her Auntie B, her mother, a teacher, and the famous green superhero who goes by Hulk.
Tara explained that even though these are her safety people, they are not allowed to touch her “any time they want.”
Tara recommends parents take 10 minutes every couple of weeks to have these important conversations.
In a follow-up, Tara shares her “2-week refresher” chat that gives Evy a chance to go back over what she learned from her mom.
Cochran asked Evy what her private parts were once again, but this time the video was captioned: “These chats take about 10 minutes and are incredibly important.”
Tara also informed viewers that she had been doing these talks with her daughter since she was just a year old.
“What do you do if somebody tries to show you their private parts?”
“That’s not appropriate,” Evy responds.
Tara has also shared how she teaches her daughter about 'stranger danger.'
So Evy knows who is in her circle and who to trust, Cochran makes sure to keep her up to date on who's who.
In another video, she has the two-year-old list out names of people she knows and can trust.
“We have to be very careful when it comes to strangers. That means sometimes people might wanna take you.”
“We only open the door for mommy and daddy,” Cochran reminds Evy. “If a stranger comes up to you at the playground, what do you say?”
“No, I gotta ask my mommy first.”
“If a stranger ever tries to pick you up and take you somewhere without me knowing, what do you do?”
Then Evy started to yell out “f–k” multiple times and jump around on the couch.
“If somebody is trying to hurt you or take you or make you feel unsafe, you can absolutely yell holy f–k, help,” the helpful mom says. “Those are grown-up words, but those are words that get people’s attention.”
“If you’re at the playground or at the store, and somebody tries to say to you ‘Evy, come with me. Your mommy told you that you need to come with me.’ What do you say?”
“My mommy says don’t talk to strangers.”
In the comments, people praised Evy for knowing all the right answers and thanked Cochran for sharing the lesson.
"As a trauma survivor, this is so so important. Especially knowing the names of private parts and having safety people," wrote on candid user.
"As someone who needed this kind of talk at her age and unfortunately didn’t receive it… thank you. Makes my heart so full seeing parents do better," said another.
Taylor Haynes is a writer based in Chicago. She covers entertainment, news and human interest stories at YourTango. You can find her on Instagram here.