Children from the age of 6 to puberty engage in a variety of heterosexual and homosexual play. It is common during this period to engage in sex games, such as “spin the bottle” (spinning a bottle in a circle while asking a question such as, “Who is going to kiss Lisa?”; then the person whom the bottle points to must perform the task), allowing children to make sexual contact under the guise of a game. Play, in a sense, is the “work” of childhood, teaching interpersonal and physical skills that will be developed as we mature. Sex play helps the child discover the differences and similarities between the sexes and is tolerated to a greater or lesser degree in different cultures. Children at this age have some knowledge about sex and are curious about it, but they often have incomplete or erroneous ideas, as expressed by the 12-year-old in the accompanying Personal Voices, “My Sex Life, Chapter One.”
Rates of sexual contact among school-age children are difficult to come by, and most experts still cite Kinsey’s data of 1948 and 1953. Kinsey found that 57% of men and 46% of women remembered engaging in some kind of sex play in the preadolescent years. By the age of 12, about 1 boy in 4 reported having at least attempted heterosexual intercourse, and about 10% had their first ejaculation in sex play with a girl. Girls’ activity tended to taper off as they approached preadolescence, and they reported the majority of their experiences before the age of 8. Greenwald & Leitenberg (1989) found that, of 526 undergraduates questioned about sexual activity prior to age 13, about 5% reported having had a sibling sexual encounter; 12% reported having had both a sibling and a nonsibling childhood sexual experience; and 45% reported having had only a nonsibling sexual experience. Thirty-nine percent reported no sexual experience with another child prior to age 13. Both the Kinsey and the Greenwald & Leitenberg studies suffer from being retrospective (i. e., they asked older adults to remember what they did when they were young), and there are many reasons to think people’s recollections of childhood sexuality may not be entirely accurate.
Both boys and girls exhibit a range of same-sex sexual behaviors as they move through childhood, from casual rubbing and contact during horseplay to more focused attention on the genitals. The figures for prepubescent contact are difficult to obtain, both because it is difficult at this age to define homosexual behavior and because there is sensitivity among parents in asking children about it. Although girls’ heterosexual activity declines as they reach puberty, they report a steadily increasing rate of same-sex activity as they approach adolescence.