This entry to the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer comes from Amber Strocel, who blogs about parenting, life with kids, and maternity leave at Strocel.com.

As the title implies, this post is about Amber’s struggle with first encouraging and then finding herself afraid of her daughter “talking to strangers”. She discusses her own socialization to both fear and avoid offending strangers, and neatly elucidates both how and why teaching “stranger danger” is not only ineffective but potentially dangerous.

Although she doesn’t explicitly relate her desire for “my daughter to feel confident, to be able to trust herself instead of being nice at all costs” to feminism, her reasonings and decisions are emphatically founded in womanist/feminist ideology. The patriarchy would have us — all of us, but especially women, children, and most especially girls — give up our own autonomy and healthy interdependence in favor of unfounded fear and a frightening disregard for our own feelings. Raising a child, then, to trust herself, and to trust those she feels comfortable with, is revolutionary.