The other night, my son and I accidentally had a conversation about sexual assault prevention because of a monkey who needed a pillow. Which feels like a pretty good place to start From the Inside.
It started Sunday morning at breakfast. A story had been all over the local news here in Boise about a group of high school boys who were reportedly in a group chat making racist comments about a female student and threatening her with sexual violence and death. Horrific stuff. A commercial about it came on while my kids were around, and they noticed. That gave us an opening.
My kids are six and eight. They don't need every detail of something like that, and I certainly don't want them walking around terrified of the world. But they're old enough to understand that the way we treat people matters, and that being someone's friend doesn't mean you have to go along with everything they do.
So we talked about it. About consequences, about standing up for somebody who's being hurt, and about what happens when the person doing something wrong is one of your friends.
Especially then, really. If it's one of your boys doing something shitty, being his friend doesn't mean helping him do it. Sometimes being a good friend means being the guy who says, "Dude. Stop."
We talked a little about boundaries and consent too, although I don't think we ever actually used the word. Then breakfast ended and we went about our Sunday.
No capital-T Teaching Moment. No ominous music. I didn't sit them down on the couch and announce that Dad would now be delivering Module One of Sexual Assault Prevention.
We ate breakfast.
That night, I went into my son's room for our normal bedtime routine. He's younger, so I've always gone into his room first. We read something, snuggle, talk about the day, and I usually ask what made him happy or what he's proud of before I head into his sister's room.
Lately we've been working our way through an old collection of bedtime stories we've had since he was little. That night we landed on one called Oh No, Bobo.
Bobo is a monkey who wants to go to sleep, but the ground is too hard. He needs a pillow. Fair enough. His strategy for solving the problem is less impressive.
He starts wandering around the jungle looking for animals that appear soft enough to sleep on. He tries lying on one. He pulls feathers from a bird. Apparently Bobo's solution to insomnia is violating the personal boundaries of the entire jungle.
It goes about as well as you'd expect. He gets bitten. He gets squawked at. I think he gets knocked out of a tree at one point.
A couple pages into the story, my son stopped me.
"What's the point of these stories?"
He wanted to know whether they were just random stories or whether they were supposed to teach you something. So we flipped back through the couple we'd already read and talked about what each one was trying to tell you. He was pretty close on both.
So I told him, "Okay. As we keep reading this one, think about what it's trying to teach you."
A little while later, Bobo was bothering another animal, and I stopped.
"What's happening here?" That's all I asked.
My son looked at the page and said something to the effect of, "He's not asking permission to touch them. He's just doing it."
And I remember thinking: There it is.
Nobody had said the word consent all day. I hadn't connected the story back to breakfast or asked him a specific question about boundaries. He recognized what was wrong with Bobo's behavior on his own.
I didn't teach my son consent in one bedtime story. I'd been teaching it for years. That night, I got to see what he'd learned.
What Prevention Looks Like Before Something Happens
I've thought about that conversation quite a bit since. Not because my son said something especially profound, but because years of little conversations showed up in a moment I hadn't planned.
It got me thinking about how we talk about prevention. Because I think a lot of what we call prevention starts too late.
Watch your drink. Don't accept an open drink from somebody. Walk with your friends. Know which places to avoid.
Those are useful safety practices. I want my daughter to know them someday. I want my son to know them too. But they mostly answer one question: How can this person lower the odds that somebody harms them?
There's another question I think deserves just as much attention.
How do we raise fewer people willing to do the harming?
I don't think that question starts when kids begin dating. By then they've spent years learning how to treat other people, how to handle disappointment, and what to do when somebody tells them no. And when we talk about children, we often emphasize making sure they'll tell us if something happens. That's incredibly important. I want my kids to know they can always come to me. But if they're standing in front of me saying it already happened, we're no longer preventing that thing.
For us, prevention has been hundreds of little conversations instead of one giant one.
When they were little, it meant using the actual names for body parts and talking about which parts of their bodies are private. As they got older, it became boundaries, personal space, and asking before touching somebody.
Sometimes the lesson is as ordinary as a hug. There are moments when I'm overstimulated and don't want to be touched, and my kids have learned to ask. There are also moments when they're roughhousing, having a blast, and one of them decides they've had enough.
When somebody says stop, you stop.
You don't get one more tackle because you're having fun. You don't argue that they were enjoying it thirty seconds ago. You don't get to decide they didn't really mean it.
And, as anybody who's watched two siblings roughhouse knows, accepting that the other person is done can be a surprisingly difficult concept.
But that's the lesson. Another person's boundary doesn't require your agreement.
The same goes for disappointment, and this is one I think is especially important when raising boys. Can you hear no without turning it into a negotiation? Can somebody disappoint you without you deciding they owe you something? Can you be angry without using that anger to scare or hurt someone else?
Those skills don't suddenly appear at sixteen when dating starts. They're being rehearsed years earlier.
It's one reason I love sports for kids. Sometimes you lose. It sucks. You have to sit with the suck, shake somebody's hand, and come back tomorrow. That's a rep. So is apologizing when you've hurt somebody. So is naming what you're feeling instead of throwing it at everyone around you.
Obviously, losing a soccer game isn't the same thing as navigating consent in a relationship. But learning to handle disappointment, respect boundaries, and accept that other people get to make choices you don't like? Those lessons start a long time before dating.
Those things might not look like sexual assault prevention. I think they are.
The Protocol
But recognizing and respecting somebody else's boundaries is only half the equation. My kids also need to recognize when somebody crosses theirs—and know what to do.
So we practice scenarios.
Not just which adults they can trust, but what unsafe behavior actually looks like, even when the person doing it offers an explanation that sounds reasonable.
The other day, I gave them a hypothetical. You're in a bathroom stall, and an adult looks over the top. When you ask what they're doing, they say, "Don't worry. Your parents told me to check on you."
I asked what they'd do.
"I don't know."
And that makes perfect sense to me.
They're six and eight. An adult just told them their parents said something was okay. We have this strange expectation that kids will be dropped into an adult situation involving authority, manipulation, fear, or embarrassment and somehow invent the correct response while it's happening. Why would they?
So we have a protocol: get out of the situation, find another adult who can help, tell them what happened, and tell them you need to call me. Then we figure out everything else together. I also tell my kids that I would never approve of a situation like that without talking to them myself.
We practice because I don't want the first time they search for those words to be the moment they desperately need them.
And there's a reason that matters so much to me.
When I was a kid, the man who abused me wasn't a stranger lurking somewhere. He was my coach, someone my family trusted. The abuse was tangled up in baseball, attention, games, gifts, trips, and all kinds of things that made it hard for a child to understand what was happening. I knew things felt wrong long before I had the language to explain why.
I didn't have a protocol. I didn't have the language. So I stayed quiet.
There's a much bigger story there about trust, grooming, familiarity, and how all of it has shaped the way I parent. That's one I'll give its own space. But the piece that belongs here is simple: I want my kids to recognize unsafe behavior regardless of who's doing it. They don't have to decide whether somebody is a bad person to know that something they're doing is wrong.
I cannot guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to my kids. I wish I could. Every parent does. What I can do is give them the words and practice I didn't have.
And I can work just as hard on the other side of the equation. I want my kids to know how to protect themselves. I also want other people to be safe around my kids.
Back to Bobo
That's why I keep thinking about that bedtime story.
When we talk about preventing horrible things from happening to children, our minds jump straight to the horrible things themselves. I understand that. These aren't comfortable conversations, especially when you're talking to a six-year-old who still thinks a monkey looking for a pillow is a compelling bedtime plot.
But the conversations themselves don't have to be as frightening as the situations we're hoping to prevent.
Sometimes it's the proper name for a body part. Sometimes it's stopping when your sister says stop, learning to lose a game without flipping the board, asking before a hug, or standing up for somebody at school even when your buddy is the one being an asshole.
And sometimes it's lying in bed with your six-year-old, reading a story about a monkey who cannot figure out how pillows work.
Those moments don't replace explicit conversations about safety and consent. They're where the teaching gets practiced, reinforced, and eventually becomes something a child can recognize without being led through every step.
That night, I asked one question: "What's happening here?"
And my son already knew.
Bobo didn't ask. My six-year-old noticed.