In plain tyke’s site

Empowering our children to communicate better, especially on abuse, comes this website by a mother of two

Child sexual abuse is a reality that every parent dreads but can’t run away from. But how does one discuss such sensitive subjects with children, who are mentally not equipped to understand the dangers? This is exactly the thought that crossed Bengaluru-based Deepa Kumar’s mind and led to the creation of her website, HowToTellYourChild.com. “I started the site because I realised that there are some conversations that even in this day and age, we find difficult to have with our children. Conversations on topics like sexual abuse, puberty, reproduction, safe sex and so on.

And these are really important life skill lessons. And even when we do have these conversations, it’s important to not carry our baggage to handle it. So, the aim of HowToTellYourChild was to create a platform that enables easy, fun and truthful conversations with children on tough topics,” explains Deepa, who is the mother of two little girls, aged nine and seven.

While she politely refuses to share their names to protect their privacy, Deepa admits that the girls, “just love the format. They love the fact that there is a dragon that teaches them and not their boring mum giving them another set of Do’s and Don’ts list to follow. They watch it like watching cartoons. Now, that’s really powerful as they are learning these awkward life skill lessons in a positive way. I got a lot of inputs from my girls, my nieces, nephews and friends’ kids.”

But before you dismiss this as a website created by an indulgent mother with inputs from her daughters, think again. Deepa and her team did extensive research online and even spoke to counsellors. “I have read through recommendations put forward by CDC (USA) to the Indian POCSO law. We have researched incidents where people who have come forward and talked about their abuse incidents during childhood to paedophiles’ confessions and support groups.

One thing that became very clear in this was that the risk DID get lower if the child was confident and said, “NO.” The whole concept is to make the child confident and strong in a positive way. The whole project took about a year-and-a-half from ideation stage to being launch ready,” she explains.

The feedback has been phenomenal and Deepa has even received emails from Arsenet Solana, a kindergarten teacher in Mexico, who wanted to translate the same in Spanish. “Our content has been downloaded by schools from India, Egypt, Mexico, Iran, USA, Philippines and the UK,” says Deepa who firmly believes that child sexual abuse is a global issue.

“We humans are for some reason ashamed of the act of procreation. And this shame is not India-centric, it’s world-wide. We carry this natural act with connotations of shame, that we don’t want to talk to our children about it. And as we don’t talk to them about it, we expose them to the risks associated with it, be it sexual abuse, experimentation, low self esteem etc. Our platform respects the fact that we have trouble talking to our children about some topics and have given parents and educators tools like videos and books to make these conversations easy. The responses we have received from parents’ the world over, has been very encouraging,” she adds.

It’s not just outsiders but even a supportive spouse that can make a huge difference. “My husband is a supportive yet not a ‘Yes-To-All’ person who always challenges me to push my boundaries. He has been very supportive of this project. So, I think it was good to have critical feedback at every stage to finally deliver the product that we have. He is pleasantly surprised by how ‘sticky’ the vocabulary of ALONE, HOLD, SEE, TALK and TOUCH ALERTS is and how effortlessly the children are able to use and communicate with it and sees the stickiness as validation of the idea,” she concludes.