Boys already know about consent. Using it is the hard part.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy was speaking to parents worried about raising boys to respect consent when she walked them through the familiar script. Should you respect someone's no, she asked, and the imagined boy answers, yeah, Mom. Then she asked whether he would stop if someone changed their mind. He said yes again. Then she offered the line she believes reframes the whole task: "Knowing the right answer and being able to access what you know in an emotionally charged moment are two very different things."

Kennedy argues that parents work hard to teach the correct answers. She believes they spend too little effort helping boys follow through when belonging or acceptance is on the line. A boy may know he should speak up when friends are disrespectful, she says, but in the moment he is weighing rejection, the desire to belong, and the fear that friends will turn on him.

Her proof, she says, is parents themselves. She says she still yells sometimes, even when overwhelmed or triggered, though she knows she should not yell at her kids. In her words, "None of us have a knowledge problem." Knowing the right thing is only a precursor to doing it.

What a boy carries into a high stakes moment, she argues, is years of practiced emotional patterns, not facts. She distills the work to three skills built in low stakes moments at home: handling not getting what he wants, paying attention to others, and learning to heed and act on an inner sense of unease.

Kennedy adds a limit she wants parents to take seriously. She says sexual violence extends beyond what any single family can prevent on its own, because boys grow up immersed in wider influences that shape them constantly. What sits between knowing and doing, in her view, is practice.