He Only Does That Because He Likes You

“He only does that because he likes you.”

Pop Tart is 10. She just started a karate class that’s offered by a group working with the school district. On the first night (the only night parents are allowed to remain for the class), I noticed a boy kind of picking on her. I thought it might be one of her classmates, as a number of kids from her school had talked about coming to the class.

I asked her afterward if she knew him. She said no, but that he was picking on her all night. And my first thought, my honest first thought was “he must think you’re cute” or something along those lines, because she’s 10. He’s around 10, and that’s that age? I can’t be the only one who remembers the adage of “that boy only picks on you because he likes you.”

This boy’s version of picking on her was to bop her upside the head. What I did tell her was to tell him to stop, and if he did not, to tell Sensei. That was last week.

This week, I did not get to observe class, but I did ask her about the boy. She said he was making as if to trip her early on, but she moved away from him and that was fine. I again told her that if he is picking on her, she needs to tell him to stop, and that if he doesn’t, she needs to tell Sensei.

But it occurred to me this week, in a way it did not last week, that this idea of “he only hits you because he likes you” at age 10 very likely feeds in to our daughters not telling us when they are being harassed as they get older, or even in their unwillingness to tell us about rape.

And our acceptance of boys picking on girls at a young age “because they like them” also then feeds into our permissiveness of men harassing and raping women. After all, they only do it because they like them, right?

I won’t to tell my daughter that it’s okay if a boy picks on her at 10 “because he likes her”, because I don’t want her to think it is okay for a boy to be hitting her or harassing her at 15 or 20 “because he likes her”. In fact, I don’t even want to tell her to “ask” him to stop, as if she needs his permission to be left alone. For her agency, she has to know she has the right to TELL him to stop, and expect it to be complied with, and if it isn’t, than she needs to seek out the authority figure – she needs to tell someone what is happening. (Telling me is good, but I’d like her to tell Sensei on her own. Still, if it continues to happen, trust me, I will go with her to tell Sensei.) I don’t want her, or the boy, to think that this is acceptable behavior- for any reason.

Maybe I am over thinking this, but it is one of those contradictory things we teach our daughters and our sons when they are 10, but we expect them to grow out of on their own, without necessarily teaching them something different.

What would it hurt, honestly, if instead, we taught our children from the beginning, that it is never okay to hit or pick on another person. That “he must like you” is not an excuse for a boy being mean to a girl. To give our daughters permission to tell the boy to stop, to have them believe that this is something worthy of being brought to an authority figure, not something trivial to be dismissed. To teach our sons that hitting or picking on another person is not acceptable, ever, and that if they “like” someone, hurting them is NOT the way show it.

I won’t say this will prevent all rape or harassment, but it might help shift the paradigm if we stop telling our children that it is all right to hit or harass, or that it’s not a big deal to be hit or harassed, because “he only does it because he likes you”.