Hello everyone. Welcome to the Sex, Love, and SuperPowers podcast show. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei, and I have a very special guest with me today, Miss Neva Lee Recla. If you don’t already know her from Super Power Kids, go and check her out, but we have a really important conversation that we’re going to be having today. Our topic today is teaching children self-respect through consent. She and I got into a very interesting conversation, so I wanted to have her on the show about it. But before we dive into this topic, let me tell you a little bit about Neva.
Neva Lee Recla is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, and inspiration. She’s on a mission to inspire one million kids to do business and encourage adults to support them. She believes that “Even if kids don’t want to do business, if they know they can, then they’ll believe they can do anything.” At the age of two, she asked for her own business cards and never looked back. From her veteran philanthropy, Spreading Light, Love, and Pixie Dust, to hosting the Super Power Kids podcast, she delights and impacts the world one connection at a time. Her motto is, “We all have superpowers, and we can change the world.”
Welcome to the show, Miss Neva Lee.
Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.
I’m so excited to have you, madam. Before we dive into this really important conversation, will you tell our listeners what your super powers are?
I can tap into the energy in situations.
I will. One of my super powers is I have the chameleon ability. So, I can tap into the energy in situations. For example, the energy in our conversation today may be completely different than the conversation I’ll go and have with my mom.
So, you see that as your ability to just adapt and change to different situations?
Yeah.
Beautiful. I love it.
Thank you.
Well, I wanted to give our listeners a little bit of a background of how this conversation came to be because a few weeks back, my daughter, and I were visiting your family, and Sanaa started talking about a boy in her class who was trying to kiss all of the girls. We started to talk about how that made her feel, and things that she could say or do in that kind of situation. And then it led us to a really interesting conversation about consent and children. Will you share maybe a little bit about what you remember from that conversation and what stuck out to you as really important?
We talked about how that little boy maybe, that was the only way he knew how to connect. So, we shared with Sanaa that if you don’t want him to kiss you, you can tell him to stop. If it gets to the point where he doesn’t stop, you can go talk to a teacher or something, but the biggest part is being in it for yourself, and not having someone immediately come in to help you.
Yeah, and as a child yourself, why do you see that as being so important as not just having the adult come in right away, but you being able to say no yourself as a child and be respected in that?
I don’t need my parents or my teacher to come in to help me. I can be in it for myself.
Because I feel like some adults may look at kids as may be, we are kind of innocent. So, we don’t have that power. So, taking a step back and going, wait I can hold myself in this. I don’t need my parents or my teacher to come in to help me. I can be in it for myself. That, I know being able to hold myself is really good.
What do you feel like it gives you, being able to hold yourself? How does it make you feel?
I know for me, it gives me a lot of courage. I know that I don’t have to necessarily be rude when I’m standing up for myself, but it’s that courage aspect that I have a lot in that situation.
Do you think that there are things that your parents did or continue to do and encourage you to do that makes it more likely that you will stand up for yourself instead of looking to an adult to help you?
Yes. We’ve had many conversations about if I get in a fight with someone. We talk about the power escalator, a little bit. How if, let’s say I’m in a fight with someone and they’re punching me or something, and something I can do is say no. If it gets to the point where they keep going, I can say, “I told you, I said no.” If I can’t … If they still are going, I can try to walk away. If it gets to the point where I cannot walk away, I can use more force.
What would that look like?
Fighting back or fighting back in my own way. I’ve never been in a fight, so I would figure it out in the moment.
I’m glad you’ve never been in a fight. I hope you never have to figure that out in the moment. But I think there is, and you and your mom and I have talked about this, about I think a lot of times we can have this concept that fighting is never a good idea. And of course, it’s not where we want to go to first. But just for anyone listening to this, I think there is, especially with our girls, there’s something to this concept of allowing that to be an option, to fight back, and having that be an option as a last resort. It’s a very different mindset shift, but I think it gives you that feeling of courage that you were talking about earlier, to know that if you had to, you could do that.
Yeah. But it’s not like someone tickles you and you immediately punch them.
Right.
That’s escalated.
You and your parents have talked about when that becomes an appropriate choice.
Yeah.
And it’s at the very end, right?
Yeah, because like you were talking about, it’s a completely different mindset, and I know some people live their lives, they always have to be in that fight or flight mindset. So, either you’re not in fear and you’re flying, or you’re constantly in fear and you feel like you always have to fight. So, being able to have that option and knowing that I could if I needed to, gives me all that courage.
And that it would be a choice. Yeah. So, we’re going to talk a little bit more about consent when we get back from the break because Neva has a really cool story to share with everyone about her experience at Burning Man. But we are going to go to a quick break. Neva, before we do that, can you tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you?
You can go to my website, NevaLeeRecla.com. And I’m all over social media, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Awesome. And check out her show on SuperPowerExperts.com, Super Power Kids because Neva does really, really great stuff over there. All right. We’re talking with Neva Lee Recla about teaching children self-respect through consent more when we get back. Stay tuned.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Music Credit: All instruments played by Amanda Turk. Engineered and produced by Tatiana Berindei and Daniel Plane reelcello.com
Podcast: Play in new window
