When our daughter was still a baby, Nic taught her how to hit him. He would raise his hands, turned toward her like flat pads, and show her how to close her tiny hand into a fist and drive it into his palms. He also allowed her—encouraged is too strong a word, but he was decisively neutral on the matter—to hit him in a more childlike way, slapping with the palm of her hand on his chest and torso, winding up for haymakers she’d land in his belly.
The first time Margo saw this, she wanted to scream. She was not raised to engage with physicality. Her family played sports, but that was it, and in those contexts, they were using their own bodies alongside other bodies, rather than engaging physically with one another. She remembers being rough with her younger sister and receiving tremendous shame for it. She had a desire for tests of physicality but no healthy space to explore it, so she bullied her sister and came to understand herself as fundamentally bad for doing so. Later, in her adult life, she experienced a lot of interpersonal violence; because of that, she came to associate rough physicality with chaos and fear, so she did not want it in her house. As a parent, when she first saw her child exploring the ways she could affect others with her body—hitting her mom or her dad—it felt simpler to say “no hitting” than it did to try to explore nuance with someone who couldn’t yet talk.
Brutalities: A Love Story
By Margo Steines. W.W. Norton.
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Nic grew up differently. He is a professional combat coach and a third-generation martial artist, trained from toddlerhood in martial arts, including judo, jujitsu, and karate. As an adult, he trained in Hiraido, an art with lineage from the Japanese martial art Danzan Ryu, which has been practiced by his Hawaiian family for nearly a century. In his house, hitting and rough contact—what Margo might call “violence,” before she took the time to choose her words a bit more carefully—were contextualized differently.
Nic has been a parent for three and a half years longer than Margo has, and together we parent our daughter, 3, and Nic’s son (Margo’s stepson), 6. Bringing our divergent experiences with physicality into our home as parents and trying to join them into a coherent family culture has been a learning experience for all of us. It has asked Margo to reframe her core assumptions around the meaning of force, power, and consent.
Kids will really expose the gaps or inconsistencies in what you say and how you act, and they will demand explanations. If yours don’t make sense, they will not accept them. This is often humbling, showing Margo how much she gets by on bullshit and personality, neither of which works on toddlers. They demand, and deserve, a fully unpacked parental understanding of what is being handed down to them, and for Margo, that has required a lot of personal growth and a systematic updating of some of her beliefs.
As a parent, Margo wants to offer consistency, and she understands black-and-white rules to be the way to do that. Nic is the opposite. He is all about nuance and really resists absolutes, which Margo sometimes appreciates and sometimes finds maddening. We are opposite people in many ways, but with parenting, there has to be some consistency between us. We had to come to a unified understanding of what we do in our home, with our kids.
Our daughter is now 3, and when Nic holds up his palms, she knows she can punch them. “May I punch you?” she’ll ask him. She also knows that that’s not the same with other people, and that she has to ask first. When she asks Margo, “May I hit you?” Margo always says, “No, no hitting for me.” Part of this is that she doesn’t want to get hit by anyone, including her kid. The other part is that we think it is important for our daughter to become familiar with receiving a boundary and respecting it. For so many people, a boundary feels aggressive, or like a rejection. We want her to understand boundaries as offerings, the ways people show you where you end and they begin. This is clear in physical contexts; when we get into emotional territory, it gets murkier, and the space of physicality offers a great playground for these first understandings of what no means, what not now means, what maybe later and yes mean.
We tend to think of consent as being something for sexual interactions, but sexuality is the most heightened and high-stakes space to learn how to give and receive boundaries. If you can’t say no to a hug you don’t want, how can you possibly enter a sexual situation in full possession of your own power, and how can you graciously—gratefully, even—receive anyone else’s boundaries? Thinking of boundaries as things to whip out only when something is wrong, as if they take form only upon violation, puts us in the precarious position of having to practice stating our needs during moments when we feel encroached upon.
With our kids, Margo talks a lot about small boundaries—“Mommy doesn’t share straws,” for example, or “Mommy’s room isn’t for playing in.” She wants them to be able to receive those boundaries as statements about her, not a censuring of themselves. Someone else’s needs aren’t an implication that they have done something wrong. All of this is somewhat intangible, especially for little kids, but once we’re talking about their bodies, they get it; they can feel and see what we are talking about. Margo tells them we all have body boundaries, and they are all different, and they can change whenever we want them to. Sometimes her body boundaries are that she wants some personal space (this is a hard one for our toddler, but we’re learning), and this shows her she is entitled to space when she desires it. With hitting, Margo and Nic have different body boundaries, and it’s always a conversation. We teach our kids never to hit without asking first, and never to hit anyone’s face. For now, this feels like enough to work on.
Nic introduced combat play to our kids early on. “With [our daughter],” he says, “I hold my hands up and she hits them. This is a game for us right now—this is our play. Outside of our house, it’s not OK. They’ve also both seen martial arts almost from birth. She slept in my arms while I shadowboxed when she was a newborn. [My son]’s first trip out of the house as a baby was to an international Muay Thai tournament.”
In the world, Nic points out, women are largely on the receiving end of violence, and in his family that was contrasted with his mom, who would teach the kids judo and jujitsu techniques. His aunt was a national judo champion, and the best judoka in the family. People would come to spar with the family, and they would be paired with his aunt, who is 5-foot-4 on a good day. He grew up seeing pictures of her throwing 200-pound men, their heels flying in the air. Then he would see other people’s families, in which violence was just framed as a negative, end of story.
Margo wants some of Nic’s female relatives’ confidence for our daughter—whether or not she wants to be a martial artist, Margo wants her to be physically prepared for life. Margo has felt so unprepared physically for so many scenarios she’s found herself in, starting with being a young woman in New York City, getting grabbed and groped and followed home and jerked off to on the subway. She wonders how she could have responded differently to all those incidents if she’d had a practice of physical mastery that wasn’t dependent on size or brute strength.
Nic and his family were taught that the tools they were learning were not meant to be abused or used lightly. His earliest memories are of being taught karate, judo, and jujitsu techniques and being told he was not to use them on kids at school. It was framed as a necessary tool for life, for protecting yourself and deescalating confrontation. It wasn’t about fighting. When he had kids, teaching them how to engage with physical conflict was just natural; it was normal. After a lifetime of seeing people react poorly in response to conflict, he could understand how physical preparedness was a useful tool, and how people who don’t have it are at a disadvantage.
As a young boy with bullies, being picked on, he was taught not to use martial arts until it was absolutely necessary. If an older kid was being physical with other kids and attempted to do so with him, he was able to respond appropriately and not preemptively. “Right time, right action,” Nic says. He saw situations where people around him got into conflict and reacted early with violence, and then they’d just end up fighting. Because even as a child, he knew where those boundaries were—the boundaries between circling and testing conflict, and outright physical aggression—and he was able to verbally deescalate confrontation. Because he wasn’t in a state of fear, he thinks, he was able to maintain a thoughtful process about situations as they unfolded.
After a lifetime of seeing those dynamics, Nic wants the same thing for his children that he was given: the power to protect themselves and the people around them, and the knowledge to be able to know what does and doesn’t warrant a physical reaction. “I give them a space in the home to practice learning those parts of themselves,” he says, “so if they are in a situation, they are not in that space for the first time.”
“I just want to cultivate children who can protect themselves.”
With children, consent is a practice—they are literally practicing it, testing the boundaries of what happens when they violate it, checking to make sure it is reciprocal, feeling for all the edges. Sometimes, our kid hits Margo outside the space of permissioned rough play, with all the wild vigor of a still-forming human who cannot always control her urges, who occasionally wants to see what will happen if she just lets her body loose. She screws her face up and swings her arm around to deliver slaps, her tiny body moving so fast that it is difficult to grab hold of her wrists to stop her, like the gentle-parenting gurus Margo favors tend to recommend. This isn’t cruelty or anger, but dysregulation. Sometimes, there doesn’t appear to be any thought involved at all, and when Margo reminds our daughter that it’s not okay to hit like that (“like that” meaning without consent), she looks genuinely startled, as if she has forgotten that we’ve ever talked about any of this. We do our best to respond calmly, to remind her that she has to ask before she hits. She knows that she can always get her boxing gloves and hit her bag if she needs to let off energy. We also model this for her by practicing martial arts in front of her, and demonstrating how we request and receive consent in that context.
The sweetness of small children is as sincere as their roughness—it’s not one competing with the other; it’s two parts of the same whole. The other day, we were snuggling on the couch and our little kid sat up and abruptly slapped Margo’s belly, hard, apparently out of nowhere. Margo was taken aback, and she said to her, maybe a little more sharply than she meant to, “Mommy doesn’t want to be hit.” Our daughter gave her a long look and laughed, and Margo wondered if she was about to do it again. (If you’ve ever met a toddler, perhaps you are familiar with this vibe.) Instead, she petted the spot she had just hit, then leaned over and kissed it.
Correction, Oct. 12, 2023: This article originally misidentified the publisher of Brutalities: A Love Story. It is W.W. Norton, not St. Martin’s Press.
