By The Daily Caller (U.S.) | Created at 2026-07-23 20:23:21 | Updated at 2026-08-04 05:08:09
1 week ago
A California father is going viral for advice he gave his young daughter, and it’s the perfect illustration of how modern parenting has lost its mind.
A man who goes by Vikingr1776 posted a story about his five-year-old daughter’s experience at a summer day camp in California where a boy her size allegedly touched her butt repeatedly against her will.
He informs the staff, shrugs at the likelihood they will do anything effective to protect her, but because he trained his daughter in jiu-jitsu, decides, despite the unwanted touching, to send her back the next day to continue camp. Before she goes, he gives her explicit permission to use her training to break the boy’s arm if it happens again.
While he believes this is some form of valiant empowerment, in reality it’s ultimately more dangerous than the weak institutional response he criticizes.
Incoming rage post. May delete later. Could use advice from fellow girl dads.
My wife homeschools. She does a great job. My girls do extra curricular activities like jiu-jitsu and other fun stuff.
Yesterday we dropped my 5 year old daughter off at some summer day camp thing… pic.twitter.com/UVl6VZl6Ej
It’s entirely possible that at five years old, a small girl who has trained in grappling might get lucky and defend herself against another child her size. But that is almost irrelevant. The real damage is not whether she can temporarily stop one peer on one day, but rather the mindset being instilled in her. By sending her off to a place where she is very clearly not being protected by the adults in charge, he is teaching her a deadly false confidence that gets adult women into dangerous situations.
It’s important to be clear here. The issue is not teaching girls self-defense training because it is a great alternative to having a victim mentality. The problem is that the training alone is not enough. It is the implication that she can handle all violent men and that she has nothing to fear. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
Sexual assault is rarely a fair fight. A woman who has spent years training can still be overpowered by a larger, stronger, more aggressive man who initiates violence without warning in a parking garage, a hotel room, or a foreign street. Technique helps in some scenarios. But it does not rewrite physics or biology. Average adult male upper-body strength, grip strength, and reach remain unbelievable advantages over women. In the majority of real-world sexual assaults, training does not eliminate a woman’s physical vulnerability.
He is raising her to believe there is no reason to be cautious, and if this continues, it will lead to an inflated sense of her ability to handle a physical threat.
“I can walk through this poorly lit neighborhood, on the wrong side of town at night because I train.”
Women like this find themselves in situations by rejecting and dismissing gut-level intuition that something is wrong because their training has taught them that fear is something to overcome.
Again, it’s not that training women to defend themselves is wrong or will always result in danger, but he’s failing to teach her that, with this training, she still ought to avoid situations like the one she experienced at camp.
If a parent’s first instinct upon learning that a peer sexually touched their small child is to coach the child in self-defense and then return her to the scene, that parent has already conceded the field. The proper instinct is rage directed at removing the child and confronting the adults who allowed the situation. And if it’s clear that the child will not be protected from harm, in no reality do you send them back. Unwanted sexual touching is not a problem for a five-year-old to fix.
Even worse, her father is teaching her that her safety is her own responsibility and that her parents and the adults in charge will only offer support. She’s five. (ROOKE: I Helped Other Women Create More Babies While Drinking Dirty Martinis)
“Sorry, honey, I know I promised to protect you from harm, but the best I can do is give you some self-defense training.”
Few things in this world are more sacred than a father’s responsibility to protect his daughter from danger. Men used to understand this. But modern parenting means that instead of protecting them, they’ll boast about teaching them to fight on the internet so others can praise him for raising a “boss.” He gets to feel like a good father at the expense of his daughter’s safety.
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