Parenting: Teaching body safety

I'm the mother of a three-year-old.

He's the very best little boy.

And yes, I'm 100% biased, but he really is a wonderful, beautiful little thing.

It brings so much joy to our lives.

He will likely be an only child, but fingers crossed not.

He loves to make friends.

He's very socially strong in that context.

I'm very conscious of his safety, especially when it comes to body safety.

A few incidents in my life have made my awareness to the risk of heightened, and I'm afraid I overthink, and I often imagine the worst.

I was sexually molested once as a young child by a stranger when I was only six at a beach.

In my opinion, that event did not have a huge impact on my life, luckily, as it was very quickly explained to me that this was not my fault, that the man was a predator and very sick.

He was a dangerous man.

I'd done nothing wrong since then.

I've recently learned that a member of my family was a survivor of childhood sexual assault when they were in a private secondary school.

This has thrown the fear of something happening to my child back into the forefront of my daily thoughts.

Can you recommend a book that is age appropriate for me to start the conversation of body safety with my son? I'm hoping that if I equip him with this information early, the fear and thoughts I'm having will dissipate and my young child will be body safe conscious.

That's interesting.

Now, is this Do you need a book for the child or a book for the parent?

Well, you know, maybe it's both.

And I think and look at Sean, there are books and maybe I very quickly give two titles just to answer that.

But I think there's more to this question.

You know, there is a book by Janine Sanders that I've mentioned here before.

It's called Let's Talk About Body Boundaries, Consent and Respect.

And there is another one that's maybe even more age appropriate, given how young he is.

And it's by Nikki Gill.