Teaching Children to Trust Their Feelings: What Child Abuse Prevention Month Is Really About

My BodyMy MindMy Spirit
Written By Joy Stephenson-Laws, JD, Founder

By: Joy Stephenson-Laws, JD, Founder



Every April, Child Abuse Prevention Month invites us to ask a difficult question: what are we actually doing to protect children — and is it working?

The answer, for most families and institutions, is that we are teaching children rules.

Tell a trusted adult. Say no. Don't keep secrets from your parents.

These rules are necessary. They are also incomplete.

They assume a child can recognize what is happening, articulate it clearly, and deliver that information to the right person at the right moment. For most young children — particularly those between the ages of 5 and 8 — that assumption does not hold.

How Children Actually Experience the World

Young children do not process experience through language first. They process it through physical and emotional sensation.

Before a child can explain what is happening, they already feel whether something is light or whether something is wrong. A child may sense profound discomfort — confusion, unease, a heaviness that doesn't go away — long before they have a single word to describe it.

This is not a limitation. It is simply how children are built at this stage of development. The prefrontal cortex — responsible for reasoning, language, and decision-making — is still in its earliest stages of development during these years. What is fully online, however, is the body's capacity to feel.

That feeling is information.

When something feels wrong — when there is confusion or isolation or a heaviness that lingers — that is the body sending a signal. The problem is not that children don't receive that signal. The problem is that we have never taught them to trust it — or to understand that the signal itself is reason enough to speak.

The Gap That Grooming Exploits

According to the CDC, at least one in four girls and one in twenty boys in the United States will experience child sexual abuse. In roughly nine out of ten cases, the perpetrator is someone the child already knows and trusts.

This is where the rules break down entirely.

Children are not being harmed by strangers. They are being harmed by family members, coaches, family friends — people they have been taught to respect and trust. In those situations, there is no clear moment where a rule presents itself. There is no obvious signal that the rules were designed to address.

What exists instead is a feeling. Something that doesn't sit right. Something confusing. Something that creates unease the child cannot explain.

Grooming works precisely because it operates through familiarity and gradualism — dismantling a child's instincts in the context of a relationship that feels safe. Rules are not designed to navigate that. Feelings are.

That gap — between what a child feels and what they can say — is the most dangerous window in child safety. And it is the one we have done the least to close.

Giving Children a Framework

This is exactly the gap that Secrets That Sparkle (and Secrets That Sting) was written to address.

The book introduces a simple but powerful framework for children ages 5–8. Some secrets feel light — a surprise party, a hidden gift, something joyful and temporary. These are sparkle secrets.

Other secrets feel different. Heavy. Confusing. Isolating. Like something that doesn't want to come out but can't stay inside either. These are sting secrets.

Children already recognize that difference internally. What they often don't have is a name for it — or the understanding that the feeling itself is enough of a reason to speak.

One passage in the book describes a sting secret as feeling like "a sock in your shoe that's been there too long." A child who cannot yet explain discomfort can recognize that feeling immediately. That recognition is where protection begins.


What Adults Can Do

Teaching children to trust their feelings is only half of the equation. The other half is creating the conditions where children feel safe enough to share what they feel.

That means responding to disclosure with calm and clarity — not alarm, not disbelief, not questions that put the burden of proof on the child. It means saying "I'm really glad you told me" and meaning it. It means building the kind of ongoing, low-stakes conversation where a child already knows, before anything happens, that their voice matters.

A child's job is to tell someone they trust. What happens after that belongs to the adults. The child never has to prove anything.

This Month and Beyond

April 30th marks the end of Child Abuse Prevention Month. But the window it opens — for honest conversation, for teaching children to trust what they feel, for building the kind of safety that exists before anything goes wrong — that window should never close.

The children who learn to trust their feelings are the children most likely to speak. The children who speak early are the children who get help sooner. And the children who get help sooner are the ones whose stories don't have to end the way too many already have.

That is not a child safety argument alone. It is a public health argument. It is a family wellness argument. And it is exactly what Proactive Health Labs has always stood for — giving individuals and families the knowledge and tools to recognize what their body is already telling them.

This month, we invite every parent, teacher, caregiver, and community member to start the conversation.

Before the words arrive. Before something happens. Before it's too late.




Sources



Joy Stephenson-Laws, Esq., is the founding and managing partner of Stephenson, Acquisto & Colman and the founder and executive director of Proactive Health Labs (pH Labs). She is the author of Secrets That Sparkle (and Secrets That Sting), Minerals: The Forgotten Nutrient, From Chains to Wings: A Poetry Revolution for Healing, and the forthcoming Your Labs Are Fine. You're Not. Learn more at secretsthatsparkle.com and phlabs.org.




Joy Stephenson-Laws, JD, Founder
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