Child safety, trust & power

What does putting your child first actually look like?

We inherit ideas about protection, disclosure, and trust that feel comforting to adults, but often fail children. I write about what those assumptions obscure.

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The premise

For far too long, we’ve accepted inherited parenting beliefs as scripture. Passed down, repeated, rarely questioned, they shape how adults see children long before anyone stops to check whether they’re true.

The folklore is invisible

These beliefs don’t feel like beliefs. They feel like common sense, which is exactly why nobody examines them.

The cost doesn’t land on the people holding the beliefs

So much of this folklore quietly protects the comfort of adults over the safety of children. A belief that makes a parent feel safe is not the same thing as a belief that keeps a child safe.

Better questions, not new rules

I’m not here to replace old scripture with new scripture. I write to notice the assumptions we stopped noticing, hold them up against evidence, and leave you with a better question than the one we started with.

Writing

The essays

Essay 01 · Published

Parenting Folklore

A teenager faking a monitoring app and a parent who’s convinced a hug fixes everything are making the same mistake. On parenting folklore: the inherited beliefs we pass down and never check against the child in front of us.

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Next essay · In the vault

The Myth of Everyone Else’s Child

We keep meeting child abuse with more awareness and more education, as if the gap were information. Most parents already know the numbers. They just place their own child outside them. What if this is a denial problem we keep mistaking for an awareness one?

About Cher

Well-meaning adults inherit beliefs about children and call them common sense. I write about the ones that don’t survive a second look.

I’m Cher Macelhaney. I write at the intersection of child safety, disclosure, trust, and design.

My work examines the assumptions adults carry into protection: what we expect children to recognize, what we expect them to say, and whether the systems we build make the truth safer to tell.