Doctor's Orders: Your Kids Don't Have to Hug Anyone

Source: Gemini/Google

For many of us, the holiday season involves gatherings with extended family. Ideally, such get-togethers are fun and easy, but for some of us they can be stressful. As a pediatrician, I’d like to provide official permission to any parent who needs it that it is not only acceptable, but advisable, that your children should not be forced to hug relatives at these events. Or ever.

Most parents have been in a situation where a great aunt holds out her arms expectantly for a young child to dutifully provide a hug, and our child doesn’t go rushing forward. The dynamics in this situation can be tricky for a lot of people, particularly in families where parents feel likely to be judged and criticized. Nobody wants their relatives to be offended and certainly nobody wants relatives huffing to others that our children are unfriendly or rude or ungrateful. So, the parental impulse to nudge a child forward, or whisper instructions to go give Great Aunt Edna a hug, is understandable. But the problem with it is that teaching kids that they should be forced to show adults physical affection on demand, or worse, that it’s their job to provide physical affection to make adults happy, is a dangerous lesson.

About 10% of children are sexually assaulted before they turn 18 and they are overwhelmingly assaulted by people whom they know (Putnam, 2003). This is a staggeringly high number. While most people don’t appreciate the degree of risk, sexual abuse is in fact the most common serious threat that kids face. I am a pediatric emergency medicine physician, but I also work in childhood sexual abuse prevention, and whenever I meet people and explain what I do, everyone has a story. Sometimes it involves a cousin or a neighbor who was assaulted, or a case at their child’s school, but very frequently people quietly share their stories of the uncle or cousin or grandfather who sexually abused them many years ago. Extrapolating from CDC data, it is generally agreed that there are at least 42 million adult survivors of sexual abuse in the United States today, and the real number is probably higher. When you start speaking to some of these survivors, you realize that many of them were harmed at the hands of relatives.

Now obviously, most children who don’t want to hug relatives are not reacting that way because those relatives assaulted them. There is a long list of more common reasons why children might not want to offer a hug, many of them developmental. When I'm at work in the hospital, I know that any child between the ages of 9 months and 3 years is likely to start crying as soon as I walk in the room, and almost certainly will when I start to examine them. Exhibiting stranger anxiety is a normal developmental stage that most people recognize in young children, but older kids can also feel shy or slow to warm up, and that’s entirely acceptable.

The important point is that as parents, we need to encourage kids to listen to their inner voice when it tells them that a situation or an interaction feels uncomfortable. The reason it matters is because listening to that internal warning is a skill set biologically designed to help keep them safe throughout their lives. This is the same voice that will someday also tell them not to get in the car, to decline the drink, to leave the party, or to end the date. The last thing that we should be doing as parents is silencing that voice. In fact, we want our kids to have lots of practice hearing and listening to it.

We will help our children far more in the long run if we come at their resistance to offering someone affection with acceptance, support, and curiosity. If your child chooses to run into a great aunt’s arms, that can be a lovely moment, but if not, you can help smooth the situation while still honoring your child’s inner voice. You can say to your aunt, “It seems as if he isn’t feeling like a hug right now,” and then turn to your child and ask, “Would you feel more comfortable giving a little wave?” Maybe your child is OK with a wave and maybe not. Either answer is fine, and then you just move on. You’ve gently established with your aunt that you’re not forcing hugs, and you’ve simultaneously signaled to your child that you’re paying attention to his cues and supporting him in following his instincts.

An important part of sexual abuse prevention work is creating a culture of awareness, which is very different from a culture of suspicion. The goal is not for parents, or kids, to feel as if danger is lurking in every interaction, but rather for everyone to recognize that sexual abuse is a real risk for kids and to understand how it happens and how to prevent it.

We can change our culture for the current generation of children by encouraging them to listen to their inner voices and making certain that we are paying attention to the signals they’re sending us. Ultimately, I want all families to talk to kids about sexual abuse so that they can recognize warning signs long before anything damaging transpires, and I want kids to know how to immediately disclose any uncomfortable interactions they experience. But in the meantime, let's all commit to making this a holiday season in which we’re not coercing kids into offering physical affection that they do not want to give.