Safe Kids Path ad: All Parents MUST Read This! 👆

A 6 year old paid the price of schools removing safety books from the library.. I'm a librarian at an elementary school. I've been there nine years. I also have a daughter, she's six, and honestly being a school librarian and a mom at the same time has started messing with my head in ways I did not anticipate when I took this job a few months ago there was a situation at my school between two students. I can't go into detail about what happened because it involves minors and there are things I legally cannot say and I still need this job. but what I can tell you is that it involved a younger child and an older child and it happened during the school day inside the building. and the part that has kept me up at night is not what happened between the two kids. it's what happened AFTER. when the counselor sat down with the younger child to try to figure out what had occurred, the child could not explain it. and I don't mean wouldn't. I mean could not. she didn't have a single word for any of it. she kept saying "he did the thing" and "the bad thing" and she would point at herself but she could not say a sentence that anyone could actually do anything with. I know this because the counselor's office shares a wall with my workroom and our building was built in 1987 and you can hear everything through those walls whether you want to or not I sat there for maybe fifteen minutes listening to this counselor — who is genuinely good at her job — try every approach. gentle questions. dolls. yes or no. and this little girl just kept saying "the thing" because that was literally the only word she had and here's the part that most parents don't know because why would you, nobody tells you this there are criteria in most school districts for how these situations get categorized and how they get reported. and those criteria basically depend on what the child can describe. a child who says "he did a bad thing" does not give the school enough to trigger certain protocols. a child who can say the actual words — the body part, what happened, who did it — does. those are different levels of response. different paperwork. different obligations about who gets notified. a child without vocabulary gives the school "the thing." and "the thing" gets a quieter response than an actual description. that is how it works. I've watched it work that way for nine years. so I'm sitting in my workroom listening to this through the wall and I'm looking at my shelves. and something started connecting for me that I honest to god had never put together before even though I'd been staring at it for years. about three years before this happened, my school pulled a handful of books off the library shelves. picture books. the kind for four and five year olds. they got challenged by some parents and the administration removed them and at the time I remember thinking it was kind of silly but whatever, parents complain about books all the time, that's just how it goes. do you know what those books taught? body part names. boundaries. the concept that your body belongs to you. what safe and unsafe secrets are. and specifically the language a young child could use to tell an adult if something happened. those were the books that got pulled. not captain underpants. not diary of a wimpy kid. not the book about a boy who fights crime in his underwear that literally every kid in my school has read. the books that teach a five year old to say "my body is mine" and "body secrets aren't safe secrets" — those were the ones that got removed. and I remember when it happened I just kind of shrugged it off. parents get uncomfortable about body stuff, whatever. I didn't think about it that deeply. but sitting in that workroom three years later listening to a five year old try to say "the thing" fourteen times because nobody ever gave her better words, I thought about those books for the first time since they'd been taken off my shelves. and something clicked that I really wish hadn't. because those books would have given that girl the exact sentence she needed. "he touched my [body part] and told me not to tell." that sentence triggers a completely different response than "he did the bad thing." that sentence goes in a file. that sentence gets reported to parents. that sentence starts something. and the books that would have taught her that sentence were removed from my library three years before she needed them. I've been looking into this since that day. not in some conspiracy way, just trying to understand what's actually going on. and the pattern is not subtle. the books that keep getting challenged and pulled from school libraries across the country — at an accelerating rate, in thousands of districts — are disproportionately the ones that give children vocabulary about their bodies. books that teach a child to recognize unsafe situations and report them. those are the ones coming off shelves. and I keep coming back to one simple thing. a child with body safety vocabulary reports. and a report becomes a problem for somebody. and the books that give kids the vocabulary to report keep getting quietly removed. the system just naturally slides toward fewer words for children because fewer words means fewer problems for adults. I don't know if anyone is sitting in an office deciding this on purpose. I don't think it matters. the effect is the same either way. and I need you to hear me when I tell you this is not a bad-school problem. I work in a good school. our district is well-rated. parents here have money. people move to this area for the schools. and this happened in my building during school hours with a teacher thirty feet away. the research is really clear that this stuff happens across every income level, every school rating, every kind of neighborhood. if you're reading this thinking "my kid goes to a good school" — so does the child who sat in that counselor's office saying "the thing." I went home that night and I could not stop thinking about Lena. Lena is my daughter. she goes to school in the same district where I work. the same district that pulled the body safety books. the same district where that little girl couldn't describe what happened to her. nobody at Lena's school is teaching body safety. it's not in the curriculum. I know because I work in this system and I've looked. the library doesn't stock it. I know because I'm a librarian in this district and my own shelves have gaps where those books used to be. so if Lena is going to have the words it has to come from me. at home. at bedtime. I ordered a set called Safe Kids Path about a year and a half ago. three picture books for young kids. they teach body part names, boundaries, your body belongs to you, safe and unsafe secrets, what to say and who to tell. they do it in rhyme with silly illustrations and my daughter thinks they are bedtime stories. she has absolutely no idea she's learning anything. she just likes the books and gets mad at me when I try to skip a page. these are exactly the kind of books that get pulled from school libraries. and I am a school librarian who cannot put them on her own shelves telling you to put them on yours. Lena uses the language like it's just something she knows. last month my dad went to pick her up and she said "you have to ask me before you pick me up, my body is my body." dead serious. like she was informing him of a policy. my dad looked at me like what have you done to this child and honestly I almost laughed because that is exactly what I've done to this child and I'm not sorry. she told me about a boy who kept pulling her braid and she said she told him to stop and then told her teacher because "that's what you do." she told me this at dinner between bites of mac and cheese like it was nothing. like reporting is just a thing you do on a tuesday. she's six and she has vocabulary that I have personally watched get removed from library shelves in the district she attends. and I think about that other girl all the time. same age. same district. same school system. same gaps in what the school teaches. the only difference is that I read Lena the words at bedtime and nobody read them to the other girl. the books that would have given her the words were in a storage room in my school instead of on the shelf where her parents could have found them. I don't know how to end this because there's no clean ending. the books are still off my shelves. the curriculum still doesn't include body safety. and there are kids in my building right now who will go through this entire year without a single adult in the school system giving them a word for their own body. so it's on you. I wish it wasn't but it is. the books we use are called Safe Kids Path. I'll link them below. read them at bedtime. your kid will think it's a story. they'll memorize the phrases because they rhyme. and then those phrases will be in their head in every room you're not in. which is the part that makes certain people uncomfortable. and exactly the part that matters. https://safekidspath.com/pages/5-reasons-you-wont-regret-safe-kids-path