How Should I Talk to My Daughters About #MeToo?

Editor’s Note: This article is part of Parenting in an Uncertain Age, a series about the experience of raising children in a time of great change.

For a long time, my younger daughter and her friends didn’t go to the movies or the mall. They are all post-9/11 babies, and they’ve grown up in the shadow of a violence they don’t really understand. These girls somehow intuited that public spaces could be combustible, and steered clear of them to avoid outbursts of violence. In the past four years—with about five school shootings a month, according to one count—the violence has come to them.

My daughter and her friends were also aware of another kind of vulnerability. A celebrated, charismatic English teacher at their school was found guilty of molesting two girls, one of whom claimed to have gotten pregnant by