I’ve blogged a fair amount lately about conversations we need to have with our kids.  We need to talk to them about how babies are made and when we think it’s okay to have sex.  We need to warn them about drugs and equip them to make good choices when they’re faced with tough situations.  We need to educate them about racism, sexism, anti-name-your-religionisms, homophobia and a myriad of ways human beings seek to devalue other human beings.  There is a world full of dangers out there, and as parents, we need to swallow hard and talk to our kids to prepare them as best we can for whatever they may encounter.

Some of these conversations, however, are so distasteful that they make you feel guilty just for having them.  All of the topics I mentioned above are tough, but none of them left me feeling so repelled or so sad as the talk I recently felt compelled to initiate with eight-year-old “Jack” about staying safe when going into a public men’s room on his own.

Up until now, I or my husband has always accompanied “Jack” into public restrooms.  He still comes into the women’s room with me, and frankly, no one has ever looked at us twice; most people understand the world we live in.  But when Jack turned to me in a nearly deserted toy store in our quiet town at 8:30 on a Saturday evening and said he had to use the restroom, it seemed foolish to insist he use the women’s room.  We were standing next to the men’s room, no one was around, and Jack hasn’t required assistance in the bathroom in years. 

“Go ahead,” I said.  “I’ll wait for you right here.”

Jack walked through the men’s room door, and I realized that we had just turned yet another corner of both his childhood and my parenthood.

When Jack emerged a few minutes later, I drew him to a corner of the store.  “Jack,” I said, “You’re getting old enough to go into some men’s rooms by yourself now.  So we need to talk about being safe, because,” I stopped and took a deep breath, “because sometimes bad people go into public bathrooms and they look for boys so they can do really bad things to them.”  I felt like I’d just taken Jack’s innocence, wrestled it to the ground and now knelt above it, my dagger aimed at its heart.   

But I had to keep going.  I reassured Jack that most people will only be interested in their own business.  But some people have darker intentions, and you never know who those people are.  I specified that he should never let anyone touch him, especially in his private areas, and that he should try not to speak to anyone at all in a restroom.  I told him that he should immediately get away from anyone who made him feel “weird,” and that he should have no compunctions about yelling if someone refused to leave him alone or made him uncomfortable.  And I assured him that if he shouted my name, I wouldn’t hesitate to barge into a crowded men’s room to answer his call.

Jack nodded at everything I said and told me that yes, he understood.  But what made this conversation so difficult was that I knew he really couldn’t comprehend the horrors from which I was trying to protect him.  His mind immediately moved on to Legos and soccer balls, and he bounced off to meet his father and sister at the front of the store.  But I felt like staying behind and crying, or at least taking a shower to wash off the filth that was the reality to which I’d just introduced my son.

I’m blogging about this nastiness because I know how tempting it is not to talk about it with your kids.  No caring parent wants his or her child to find out the worst things that can happen.  But it’s our responsibility to recognize those shifting moments when we must educate our kids at the expense of their innocence. 

I can’t know, of course, if I picked my moment correctly or if I said the right things.  I can only hope that I did and continue to be alert for the next time Jack needs to know an unpleasant truth.  I can feel sick about it later, but it’s my responsibility to ignore that feeling and do what is best for my kids. 

As parents, that’s all—and everything—that we can do.