Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption, Foster & Kinship Care
Sep 9, 2026 · 1 hr · 11 segments
Drop us some Fan Mail. Thanks! How can parents protect kids from sexual exploitation without teaching them to fear the world around them? For…
CJ ScarletGuestTracy WhitneyHostSo many of the kids in our community that are represented by the parents and caregivers listening right now have histories that impact their ability to trust, unhealthy relationships, impulse control, boundaries, their need for belonging or their drive for connection because of the trauma and the abuse and things like that that they've already experienced.
How do we acknowledge our child's realities of what they've experienced without sending the message that these children were somehow destined to be victims down the road forever?
It is absolutely tragic to me that these are precisely the traits in kids that predators look for, because they make the child an easy target.
And I think that the best thing we can do to reassure them that these things are not their fault, or that we're sending them messages, they're somehow destined to be victims, is to empower them with information about how they can, moving forward, protect themselves and giving them tips and knowledge about what they can do to recognize grooming and recognize opportunities to say no or get away or trust their intuition when their gut tells them something's wrong, that they can act on it.
Because these children like these tend to you know, who have endured trauma already of some kind, they may not trust their intuition because it didn't pay off to trust it.
And so they don't have that ability to set and defend boundaries when someone violates them physically, emotionally, mentally.
in a cycle often where, like me, I was abused by several different people because I was such a great target.
I wasn't gonna tell, I was a freezer and a fawner, meaning that I not only did not tell anybody what was happening, but that I was, I actually in a sick, this is so sick, I worked to make the abuser feel better about themselves for what had happened because I was hoping they wouldn't hurt me more.
And when a child's in a situation where they lack power to get away, often fleeing is not an option.
Things are happening to them and they just freeze like a deer in the headlights and they are unable to respond because they get the tunnel vision, they get the roaring in their ears, they may dissociate.
It's critically important that we teach kids who come from a traumatic background or who've been abused or exploited in some way to let them know that, A, it wasn't their fault.
Bad people made bad choices that made them a target and that that's not their responsibility.
And secondly, when you're reassuring of this, you're acknowledging and rewarding them for the fact that they were smart enough to come to you with that information.
So many of the kids in our community that are represented by the parents and caregivers listening right now have histories that impact their ability to trust, unhealthy relationships, impulse control, boundaries, their need for belonging or their drive for connection because of the trauma and the abuse and things like that that they've already experienced.
How do we acknowledge our child's realities of what they've experienced without sending the message that these children were somehow destined to be victims down the road forever?
It is absolutely tragic to me that these are precisely the traits in kids that predators look for, because they make the child an easy target.
And I think that the best thing we can do to reassure them that these things are not their fault, or that we're sending them messages, they're somehow destined to be victims, is to empower them with information about how they can, moving forward, protect themselves and giving them tips and knowledge about what they can do to recognize grooming and recognize opportunities to say no or get away or trust their intuition when their gut tells them something's wrong, that they can act on it.
Because these children like these tend to you know, who have endured trauma already of some kind, they may not trust their intuition because it didn't pay off to trust it.
And so they don't have that ability to set and defend boundaries when someone violates them physically, emotionally, mentally.
in a cycle often where, like me, I was abused by several different people because I was such a great target.
I wasn't gonna tell, I was a freezer and a fawner, meaning that I not only did not tell anybody what was happening, but that I was, I actually in a sick, this is so sick, I worked to make the abuser feel better about themselves for what had happened because I was hoping they wouldn't hurt me more.
And when a child's in a situation where they lack power to get away, often fleeing is not an option.
Things are happening to them and they just freeze like a deer in the headlights and they are unable to respond because they get the tunnel vision, they get the roaring in their ears, they may dissociate.
It's critically important that we teach kids who come from a traumatic background or who've been abused or exploited in some way to let them know that, A, it wasn't their fault.
Bad people made bad choices that made them a target and that that's not their responsibility.
And secondly, when you're reassuring of this, you're acknowledging and rewarding them for the fact that they were smart enough to come to you with that information.
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