The Most Important Thing Your Can Teach Your Children For Self Defence Is Not What You Think!

Trigger warning: child abuse, spousal abuse.

My brother and I grew up in a household with parents who had no regard for personal boundaries. Personal boundaries are the rules we set for ourselves within our relationships and interactions with other people. Boundaries are the lines between the behaviours we are happy to accept from people and the behaviours that we are not happy to accept. Boundaries are also the line between what we are comfortable doing and what we are not. When someone says no, or stop, that is them drawing a line at a boundary.

Some of my earliest memories are of my father tickling my brother and I to get cheap laughs for his own amusement. I hate being tickled; I really hated it then too. I only laughed as laughing the body’s reflex action in response to being tickled, not because I enjoyed being tickled. Depite my persistent “please stop Daddy,” he continued only to gaslight his small child with “well why are you laughing then,” and then he continued to tickle me, until I was hyperventilating and crying. He enjoyed making children laugh, regardless of whether or not it made that child happy. 

As a middle aged adult, I now recognise that the tickling was one of many ways my father crossed my boundaries in those formative years. Despite me telling him to stop, he continued. He taught me that my boundaries were for crossing, that my feelings did not matter. My parents saw us as their property rather than individuals to be nurtured. Sadly, they still do. It is no wonder that my brother and I both ended up in terrible and failed marriages with spouses who had no regard for our boundaries. Lucky for my brother he has since married an amazing woman. However, me as the girl-child growing up in that household, I had additional conditioning to overcome. Accordingly, I stayed in my toxic marriage much longer than I should have. In comparison, my brother exited his first marriage a lot sooner.

Therefore, as parents, the most valuable element of self defence that we can teach our children is that their boundaries are sacred. When we behave in a manner disrespecting our children’s boundaries, we set them up as easy targets for bullying and abuse. It is our job as parents to respect our children’s boundaries and to teach them how to enforce those boundaries with others. As parents we are the first people our children interact with, so they must be allowed to practice asserting boundaries on us. Likewise, by teaching our children to respect our boundaries, we teach them to respect other people’s boundaries. Furthermore, we must always support our children when they assert their boundaries with others. For example, if your small child doesn’t want to give Uncle Steve a hug at Christmas lunch then do not make them! This is not about how it makes you or Uncle Steve feel when your child says no; you and Uncle Steve are both adults and need to recognise the importance of allowing your child to make that decision.

Teaching children how to assert boundaries is the foundation of teaching our children to recognise red flag behaviours in others and it is also the foundation to teaching them about consent. Children who are taught about healthy boundaries from the start are much more confident and are less likely to be targets of bullying. Children who are taught to assert healthy boundaries are much more likely to grow up into adults who are at less risk of abuse.

Lastly, as a martial artist, I encourage all martial arts instructors who claim that their kids’ classes teach children to stand up to bullies, to incorporate teaching children about healthy boundaries in these classes.