Friday, October 24, 2014

Which is more disturbing?

So, I had a weird thing happen, and I'm not really sure what to think about it. Or rather, my daughter and another kid had a weird thing happen. Kind of.

My daughter, who is four, was playing with a little boy at preschool. Said little boy tells her to drop her drawers and show him her girly bits (what? it feels weird to say genitals or vagina on a blog - but there, I just did). Anyway, she says, "Are you crazy?! I'm not doing that!" then goes to tell the teacher. The boy is pulled aside, parents talked to, etc. Apparently the kid had done this to a few of the other girls, too, though they hadn't refused and hadn't told.

Anyway, the teacher pulls me aside to tell me this in this quiet voice like she's waiting for me to just flip out and withdraw my daughter from school immediately. My first reaction was, "Wow, I'm so glad I had that talk with my daughter. I'm proud of her for standing her ground." Then I went to, "Ew. That's totally inappropriate. What could've been going through that kid's head?" After asking a few more questions, I was relatively comfortable - if not mildly squicked out - by the situation, so I took off.

Then I called my husband, kind of expecting him to freak out. To my astonishment, he said, "So, what? I mean, he didn't touch her, right? She didn't touch him? Unless it was weird and sexual or the kid just does it over and over and over or gets aggressive, it's inappropriate but not unusual. They're four." Yeah, yeah they are four. Damn it, I hate it when he makes sense.

So I moved on. Then the teacher pulls me aside this week to tell me in that weird, quiet voice that the child has been withdrawn from the school and his parents are "seeking treatment for him." Wait, what?

I don't normally wish a problem on anyone. But a part of me can't help but hope that this kid isn't being withdrawn from preschool and "treated" just because of this incident. Part of me hopes there's a bigger problem, because it sure seems weird to treat a four year old for something like this.

I'm sure if I were one of the parents put into the uncomfortable position of having to explain to their four year old daughter that they shouldn't have lifted up their skirt to anyone for any reason, I might be ticked off and demanding some sort of action. But thinking back to my son at that age, I'm not sure which would've been more disturbing: the thought of him telling another kid to show him the goods or the thought of him being treated for it as though it were a psychological problem. There's gotta be way more that I don't know (that's none of my damn business), but still. I didn't really go down that "sexual deviant" path in my head or think anything else about it until I was told the kid was being treated.

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