There comes a point in every parenthood journey where another child does something to harm your child. Maybe it’s a kid who pushes yours at the playground, or maybe it’s a classroom bully. Regardless, you have to teach your child how to defend themselves.

During a recent appearance on Ellen, Mila Kunis recently revealed her self-defense philosophy differs from that of her husband, Ashton Kutcher.

There are often two schools of thought in cases of physical harm between kids: tell the teacher or hit them back. As someone who was bullied as a kid, in my experience if you tell the teacher, the bullying gets worse. When you return the act of aggression back upon the initial aggressor, it usually stops (kids are often better at understanding limitations than adults are).

Mila is #TeamPushBack.

“Well, here’s a story that’s about to get me in trouble,” she begins. “There was a little kid in my kid’s preschool that wasn’t very kind and pushed my daughter.”

“My daughter came back and was like, ‘Such and such little kiddo pushed me,'” Mila explained. “And I instinctually said, ‘Did you push her back?’ And my daughter’s like, ‘No!'”

Mila then says she explained the best way to go about doing this.

“‘You push her back, and you say, ‘No, thank you,’ and you walk away,'” she said.

Well, apparently Ashton was horrified by the advice from his wife. LOL.

“I turned around, and I see Ashton’s face, and he was like, ‘No!'” she says, impersonating her husband.

That didn’t deter her from sticking to her guns. She says she told her daughter not to push that person “off a swing, off a ladder, or off a slide” but if that kid is on the ground, well, it’s “even Stevens” to just push them back.

My own daughter came home from her second day of kindergarten last month and told us that a girl hit her in the head with her water bottle “three times on purpose.” A teacher saw it and intervened, which is good. But we both basically repeated the Mila Kunis Approach To Children’s Self Defense. My daughter looked at both of us in total shock (we are very much a No Hitting household), but we talked it through with her and explained why self-defense is a very different thing. I hope it never happens to her again, but if and when it does—she’ll handle it. (What works for one family and one child may not work for another, and that’s OK! This is just how we feel about it. Plenty of others likely disagree.)

Kunis and Kutcher are no strangers to controversial parenting topics (The Great Bath Debate of ’21 was just a few months ago after all), but they definitely both have a good sense of humor about it!

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