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Get consent.
I once read that tickling is actually a really excellent way to teach kids about consent, and to keep them safe by teaching them there’s something wrong when someone does not respect a repeated and firm “no.”
EDIT: Short article from a nanny explaining it better than I can.
This article doesn't really acknowledge that for some people, tickling can be really painful. "without control or autonomy. It can start to feel bad or scary pretty quickly." -- This can just as well apply to restraining someone. Which is why I'm not sure I agree with the premise. Most things, such as restraining someone, hitting someone, hugging someone, we can sympathise with as kids and therefore approach the notion of consent with sympathy. But tickling is a very different experience for someone who can enjoy it vs someone who can't.
Yeah, if tickling someone causes them pain or any other negative feeling I don’t think anyone is saying you should keep doing it. Especially since in that case it would be non-consensual in every instance, which defeats the purpose of using it as a tool to teach consent. There are other tools out there revolving around a variety of forms of touch or permission asking, tickling is just one.
EDIT: rereading my first comment I think it’s coming across like I was somewhat disagreeing with your first comment and that we should use tickling to teach consent even in the absence of consent. My reply was meant to be in total agreement, that consent is vital and that consent in tickling can lead to healthy attitudes towards consent in a wide variety of other cases.
I'm not saying the article is telling you to push boundaries. I'm saying the article is treating it like other forms of autonomy restricting actions, rather than as assault. This is accurate for most people and the lens kids will intuitively understand, but it's not accurate for everyone. Therefore it's an unintuitive lens for teaching.
OK, so you’re saying because tickling is painful for some number of people, it shouldn’t be the default first way to teach consent since hugging or other less invasive/painful forms of touch can do the same thing with less risk of harm?
That makes sense, and I can understand needing to treat it with more caution because of that.
Yes, that's exactly what I wanted to communicate.