dren learn that sexuality can be used to intimidate other children, to defy authority with adults, as a form of play, or, in the cases of abuse, as a means to gain love. See the ac­companying Sex in Real Life, “What Do Children Want to Know, and What Are They Ready For?” for the kinds […]

Children get information from many different sources, much of it contradictory. They use this information to construct a sexual script (Plummer, 1991). The sexual script can have different themes, depending on the sexual ideas and values communicated to the child by the culture and his or her specific environment. Sexual scripts refer to explicit things […]

Children as young as 4 or 5 have fantasies with erotic content, and children between the ages of 6 and 10 can become physically aroused by thinking about these fantasies (Langfeldt, 1981a). Children are sometimes fearful of their fantasies, worrying that thinking about certain acts would lead them to actually perform them (Langfeldt, 1981b). As […]

Children through the middle and late childhood years continue to masturbate, engage in heterosexual and homosexual contact, enjoy displaying their genitals and seeing those of other children, and sometimes even attempt intercourse. Prepubescence is the age of sexual discovery; most children learn about adult sexual behaviors such as inter­course at this age and assimilate cultural […]

Freud believed that children enter a sexual “latency” period after about age 6, when sexual issues remain fairly unimportant; they reemerge with the coming of puberty (see Chapter 2). The latency thesis may have been formulated because as the child matures, overt sexual behavior lessens. However, such behavior may lessen because it becomes less tolerated […]

Until a child’s body starts the enormous changes involved in puberty, the sexual or­gans grow in size only to keep up with general body growth and change very little in their physiological activity. Though the body begins internal changes to prepare for puberty as early as age 6 or 7, the first outward signs of […]

Between the ages of 6 and 12, the first outward signs of puberty often occur, and both boys and girls become more private about their bodies. Children begin building a larger knowledge base about sexual information—and acquire information from many sources, including their parents/caregivers, peers, and siblings. During the middle childhood to preteen years, children […]

During this period of early childhood, children learn that the genitals are different from the rest of the body. They remain covered up, at least in public, and touching or playing with them is either discouraged or to be done only in private. This is the beginning of the sense of secrecy surrounding sexuality. Children […]

Toddlers are not yet aware of the idea of sexuality or genital sexual relations. Like infants, toddlers and young children engage in many behaviors that involve exploring their bod­ies and doing things that feel good. Both girls and boys engage in self-stimulation. Over 70% of mothers in one study reported that their children under age […]