What should parents stop teaching their children?

[Answered on Quora.com by Vee Dattilio]

I have two things:

1. Sharing is caring. When your child has a little snack or they rock up to the playground with a new toy, they’re immediately bombarded by other kids demanding they share. Share your nice snack, share your new toy. While sharing is important, it shouldn’t be a law. A child shouldn’t be forced to give something of their up for other kids to take, use, and possibly break against their will. With school property, sure, this is fine. But really, I think the rule should be “Sharing is caring but you’re allowed to say no.”

2. You have no control over your own body. When I was a child, my dad taught my brothers and me that if someone said stop, we stop. This was mostly used for tickling. Even if it was our parents or grandparents who were doing that, the second we said stop it stopped. If we didn’t want to hug or kiss someone, it was up to us who got to touch our bodies and we were allowed to say no. If something was happening to our bodies and we didn’t like it, if someone was touching us and we didn’t want them to, we said stop and it would stop (excluding the doctor.) Consent matters. Even if it’s a child who doesn’t want to hug grandma, they deserve to have a say in who touches their body. I can’t imagine raising a child and forcing them into invasive physical contact explicitly against their will. What, does this sound like soft parenting for my dad? Touching someone when they said “stop” or “no” is as unthinkable to my brothers and me as cannibalism. He didn’t even apply the concept to sexual assault until we were in our teen years but the second he did, we accepted it. Because we knew that when someone said stop, we stopped. And that no one should continue to touch us even after we said stop. If we were all raised like that, I hazard to guess society would be a better place. Stop forcing your kids to let people touch them.