Ugh. It’s been a week to regret bringing children into this world. Have boy children? Worry that they will be falsely accused of wrongdoing against a woman. Worry more that the accusations won’t be false?

Have girl children? Worry about when and where and how they will eventually be harassed, or worse, assaulted, just because they’re a woman. Not if … WHEN.

Since I have both, I’m worried on both accounts. It’s so easy for someone to toss off a, “Well, if you raise them right, you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

All things considered, I was raised “right.” I was raised in a house where we were taught to respect other people, to treat other people as we would like to be treated. We were raised to have awareness of other people’s differences, and to respect them, and to try to make the world a better place for everyone living in it.

I’ve always been smart around alcohol. I knew to never take a drink from someone else, or to drink anything that I didn’t open myself. I have been lucky enough to always have a close-knit group of friends who enjoyed going out together, and we had each other’s backs. None of this prevented me from being sexually harassed at various points in time, whether on the job, while out with friends, or while walking down the street, minding my own business.

Maybe being “raised right” helped me to process what happened to me, helped me to prevent harassment from turning into something worse, helped me to put would-be harassers in their place before things got out of hand. Or, maybe I’ve just been lucky. So far.

Sadly, being married to a good man, having a loving family, and being a mature adult doesn’t necessarily rule out that I could be assaulted or abused at any point in the near to far future.

I’m doing my best to raise my kids right. If I catch my boys being disrespectful to anyone, male or female, young or old, there is hell to pay. My daughter is held to the same standard. At the same time, I don’t want them to be doormats, or people who can be taken advantage of because they appear to be “nice.”

It’s a fine line. Once, when I was out for the evening with some friends, a man came up and sat next to me at a bar. He offered to buy me a drink. I was annoyed, because I was clearly there with my friends, and I wasn’t about to accept a drink from a stranger. I rudely turned him down and made it clear that I was not looking for male companionship.

It turned out that the “strange man” was a co-worker from another department that I didn’t recognize out of his work uniform and he was actually just being polite. Thankfully, he was polite enough to overlook my rudeness and reintroduced himself to me. (Some of our departments are always required to wear safety glasses and hard hats, and sometimes, you don’t realize what color hair a person has out in the “real world.”)

Clearly, being on the defensive, and always assuming that someone is trying to take advantage of you isn’t a fun way to go through life.

You would think, in 200,000 years of evolution, men and women might have figured how to get along better with each other. We all know women who are conniving and manipulative, and we all know men who act like they are entitled to the best of everything, and vice versa. When you throw something else like power or alcohol into the mix and it’s a recipe for disaster and shattered lives.

Over the course of coaching for many years, I’ve seen many kids who were “raised right” take a turn down a dark road. I’ve also seen kids who were nowhere near “raised right” turn out to be some of the most compassionate, caring, good people in the world. All in all, it feels like a crap shoot. Raising my kids “right” in one way may harm them in another way. As we sit on the cusp of the teenage years, I sense that I have a lot of sleepless nights in my future.

Truthfully, I don’t think that much has changed in male/female relationships over the years. I think “this sort of thing” has always gone on. What has changed now is that there is a conversation about it. Hopefully, this will lead to more understanding and compassion. Frequently, when my friends and I start talking about various forms of harassment we’ve been subject to or witnessed over the years, our significant others will comment that “they had no idea” that we went through something like that, or that the actions we’re describing can have long-lasting impacts, or that harassment is as prevalent as it is.

I know that prefrontal cortex development doesn’t happen at the same time between boys and girls, but I’d still like to believe that I can raise my boys to know that forcing themselves on a girl is wrong, wrong, wrong. I am hopefully raising them to see that treating anyone other than how they’d like to be treated is wrong. I’d like to believe that I can raise my daughter to stand up for herself, although, I’d prefer that she’s never placed in a position where she needs to. I’m relying on every other parent out there to do the same thing. Maybe someday we won’t have to argue about who should worry more: girl parents or boy parents, and we can just enjoy our kids being kids and let the adults be adults.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.