Asking Permission Empowers Youth

Family sitting together on the grass with their dog.

As the holidays approach, cameras will be snapping photos and social media will be blowing up with images of family gatherings, decorations, and cherubic children in their holiday outfits. Holiday cards and video messages will be perfectly edited and passed around to our dear friends and family members with annual updates of each family member’s accomplishments.

This year, before creating the perfect holiday photo, ask your children about how they would like to participate in the process. As any teenager or young adult will tell you, it’s important to get permission from someone before posting any photo on social media or sharing it. Starting this process as early as possible at home sets a precedent for your child recognizing that their body belongs to them. It also promotes them owning their own image and controlling its distribution. One of my family’s most memorable family photos was an autumn scene with the four of us posed under a stunning maple tree. When preparing to leave the house, my six-year-old daughter insisted upon wearing her own choice of outfit: a polyester dress she had outgrown, and a moth-eaten shawl that she picked out from a yard sale. I had intended for her to wear an adorable corduroy jumper with an autumn themed turtle neck and coordinating headband. When it was time to depart, the battle began and I found myself at a crossroads. Should I insist that she wear the outfit that I selected, and risk arriving late with a tantruming child whose face is covered with tears and mucus? It was not worth the battle. And, it stifled my daughter’s unique fashion sense, but more importantly, her personal sense of agency. In the July/August issue of Parenting Special Needs, we reviewed research on employment of people with disabilities and discussed the importance of choice. Opportunities for choice can be incorporated at any time in the child’s life, but providing our kids with opportunities for choice for low stakes decisions, like choosing their own clothing ensemble, can be helpful later on as they grapple with high stakes decisions. Choice making is a muscle. When people have opportunities to make choices, they become more confident and self-determined and will likely want to increase the choices they make. By allowing my daughter to make her own choices, I was leaving the steppingstones for her to anticipate that her choices would be honored and respected. I glowered at the holiday cards that arrived from other families in their pristine khaki pants and matching tops, but now, over twenty years later, our family photo with the yard sale shawl makes me appreciate my daughter’s unique way of looking at the world and her original sense of fashion.

For a child with a disability, smiling for the camera can be daunting. Although a child may smile and laugh naturally, reproducing the expression on demand may be just too much to ask. The sensory overload of uncomfortable clothes, flash bulbs, and holding a pose in close proximity to others may be intolerable for some children. And the permanent product, a photo which could live in your electronic cloud or social media forever, may trigger a flood of frustrating memories. A holiday greeting that has individual pictures of family members doing what they love throughout the year is a person-centered and acceptable alternative to a group photo of forced smiles.

As families, we can empower our kids to make decisions about if and how their image appears on the internet, but not everyone is as respectful. This requires someone to inform the well-meaning picture taker that the child must approve and agree to the photo being posted. Because many children have been encouraged to be respectful of adults, this places them in an uncomfortable position of needing to set boundaries with an authority figure. As family members, our overwhelming desire is to jump in and communicate the information for them. In doing so, we are disempowering our child to advocate for themselves. As a caring family member, it can be torture to sit on your hands and watch a child struggle, when you could easily fix the situation. Practicing with your child about some appropriate ways to say something can lessen everyone’s anxiety about having a confrontation. If you can’t stand to sit on the sidelines, you could consider paving the way a little by informing the picture taker that your child has something to share with them, and you would appreciate them listening.

It’s never too early to start asking permission to your child, but it’s also never too late to get started. In doing so, we are creating a model that will hopefully teach our children to respect others and themselves, and that their consent is important when it comes to their bodies and images of it. A gift of self-advocacy is one that will be remembered long after the presents are unwrapped.

About the Author

Molly Dellinger-Wray is part of the Partnership for People with Disabilities at Virginia Commonwealth University, a university center for excellence in developmental disabilities. She is also a mom of two fabulous children, who benefitted from special education and early intervention. Together with the VCU School of Social Work, she helped develop LEAP: Leadership for Empowerment and Abuse Prevention.

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This post originally appeared on our November/December 2022 Magazine

Asking Permission Empowers Youth

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