"This is My Body"

         The preschool that I currently work with, partners each adult with a certain child. These children are usually the ones who need a little extra TLC. My partner child, today, was particularly difficult, in between shoving other children, and stealing my cell phone she stopped and shouted at me "This is my body and you cannot touch me!" I stopped and stared in complete disbelief. Of course as an adult we assume the worst, trouble at home. As I walked her back to her classroom I felt the need to tell her teacher what she had said. The teacher laughed and informed me that a guest speaker had come into each of the children's classrooms and taught them about strangers. This phrase that she so boldly shouted at me was one of the things the speaker had taught the children to say if they were ever approached or heaven forbid touched by a stranger. As the teacher continued to smile I smiled back in a polite response. As I walked back to my classroom my smile quickly faded. First let me say that I think it is fantastic we are taking the opportunity to educate our children about the real dangers of the world. But how sad is it that we must teach a four-year-old phrase like this one.

I assumed a child's life was simple, no job, easy school, and always-new things to discover. But the reality of the situation is, that most of today's children are dealing with issues that are way beyond their emotional capacity. If we took a poll of children's biggest fear and asked children fifty years ago what their biggest worry was it would probably be something trivial to adults. Like "What I'm going to wear to Sally's birthday party", or "I hope they don't serve chicken at lunch today, I don't like chicken". Things like this mean nothing to adults, in fact most adults probably miss half of what their own children say. Because at the end of the day how important can a four-year-olds issues be? If we took that same poll today we'd find a much more disturbing picture. The issues at hand today would be something like "I wonder if Daddy will come home today" or "My mommy keeps throwing up and I don't know why." Some might call attention to the fact that I'm only assuming what a child might say. This is true only for the children fifty years ago, and that's only because I wasn't alive fifty years ago. But the statements about what children today might say aren't assumptions they're quotes. Children I work with everyday, three to four year-olds, have actually said these things to me. This is not a guessing game this is a fact, and the fact is that children today grow up faster than ever before. At this rate in the next fifty years what can we expect from our children's children?