Children may rub themselves against stuffed toys or blankets or the arm of the sofa, she said. ![]() “Parents will report kids touching genitals when they’re bored, or self-stimulating,” she said. In the toddler stage, she said, small children discover, “this is a part of my body that feels different when I touch it.” Elizabeth Erickson, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Duke, who was an author of a review article on how pediatricians can help families understand masturbation. “This really is a normal thing, we could be talking about it more than we are to normalize things for parents,” said Dr. They’re still doing it, but they have learned to keep it private. Herbenick said in studies in which college students are asked to recollect sexual behavior from childhood and adolescence, there are lots of recollections of that behavior from 5 to 9. Those reports decrease markedly in slightly older children, she said, from the “older 4s” on up. Herbenick said, it is very common to see observations of toddlers touching their own genitals or playing games with their peers that involve some touching. If you look at reports from day care providers and parents, Dr. And in an informal survey of pediatric colleagues, there seems to be a lot of variation in whether doctors bring up the subject. ![]() Parents and children sometimes bring their questions and concerns to the pediatrician, but there is surprisingly little guidance or information available in the pediatric literature. Let’s face it, masturbation can indeed be fun, but it turns out to be a subject that many parents feel awkward about discussing with their children. That was helpful when, soon after, I acquired the original cast album of the musical “Hair,” which presented a new set of vocabulary challenges at least I understood the line, “Masturbation can be fun.” I asked my mother, what is masturbation? And I remember her answer: “Touching yourself for sexual pleasure,” she said, neutral and nonjudgmental like the English professor she was. I first came across the word, naturally, by reading ahead of my grade level at age 10, I was ostentatiously reading my father’s copy of Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa, ” the book that had convinced him to become an anthropologist.
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