"PLEASE, DON'T TOUCH MY BABY": Why so many people should not feel entitled to touch children and how that is going to get you in trouble.

This is a rant, but it needs to be said.

Picture it: you are at brunch with family or out and about with your child. You're enjoying the company when a person, a relative stranger, reaches over to touch your baby. You freeze up, everything seemingly goes into slow motion. You look at the person, bristling. You even pull your baby away from the person. They persist. You glare at them, still putting your body between them and your little one. The mood changes and you feel like it's your fault. You may feel guilt: for not doing more, or for doing too much.

This happened to me. Twice. With two different people. And I am pissed.

I don't understand why people who don't know me or my baby do not know not to just go around touching babies they don't know.

Do you just walk up to strangers you don't know and touch them? 

How would you feel if someone you didn't know came up to you and felt entitled to touch you?

Not just that, but why are you touching my baby's hands? The same hands that she will rub her eye with or stick into her mouth. Why do you think it's a good idea to place your adult hand, that has touched doorknobs and handles, elevator buttons and bag handles, and everything else, on this tiny hand of a baby?

Not just that, but we are currently in the throes of Covid and entering flu season. Why on earth would you think it's appropriate to touch a child and a child you don't know and a child that you don't know in the middle of all of that?

There is his strange attitude towards children that denies their personhood. We force them to hug relatives they don't know when they could be uncomfortable. We discount their discomfort. We ignore their feelings, shrugging them away as tantrums or being spoiled. We don't give them the right to say no. We don't acknowledge their right to say no. We force them to feign politeness for our own ego, saying "Don't you embarrass me.", teaching them in these thousands of small but painful acts that their 'no' doesn't matter, that their own discomfort doesn't matter, that their discomfort with this person doesn't matter.

I call bullshit. 

I am my daughter's fiercest ally and advocate, her sharpest sword, and her shield until she no longer needs them. If my daughter does not want to hug, she has every right to not hug. If she would rather stay with mommy and daddy because she is in a new place, she has every right to do so and is welcome to. If she is uncomfortable with a person who is trying to touch her, which she has the right to feel, especially from someone who has not earned her trust, she has that right and I as her mother will enforce her right to feel how she feels. 

And if I back away from you, or push your hand aside when you attempt to cross her boundaries without asking or tell you "She does not feel like hugging right now." or "Please do not touch her.", know that I am doing my job. I am her guardian, and if that means guarding her personhood, her feelings, or her boundaries, for as long as she will have me to until she has a voice of her own, then I will do so.

So please, do not touch my baby.