This week’s question:

Yes. And yes.

A few of the girls have recently begun a new game called “Huggies”. They run up to each other and ask “Huggie?” and as they wrap their arms around each other, they fall down to the ground. While the boys tend to want to wrestle and roughhouse without much of a “theme” needed, they’ve joined the girls in this game.

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Giving both girls and boys equal opportunity and exposure to rough and tumble play is critical for their development physically, but also socially and emotionally as well. Rough housing gives children the opportunity firsthand to learn about power, control, boundaries, and consent. All children should be freely allowed to learn these skills. The benefits of rough and tumble play should not be gendered.

Learning physical boundaries begins with reinforcing the idea that no means no and that children are not allowed to touch another person without permission.

When one child asks another if they can give a “huggie” and the other child says NO, BOTH children are learning vital social cues. The asker is learning about consent, respecting the choices of others, and self-regulation while the child who has said no is learning how to speak up, to stand up for themselves, and their right to body autonomy.

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It can be difficult at times to watch this sort of roughhousing when it happens to be boy/girl. When boys roughhouse with girls, it is simply children playing. It is not done out of anger or malicious intent. I think the key thing to remember is that we sometimes look at innocent children’s play through our own adult filters and personal life experiences.

When you give children the opportunity to learn that they have the power of choice when it comes to their own bodies, they learn to listen to their intuition, and will know that they are in control of their own boundaries. What better way to reinforce these skills than through rough and tumble PLAY.