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Why is it hard to recognize the problem? There are few problems as difficult for parents, teachers, and daycare staff as deciding how to deal with children in their care who are imposing sexual activity on other children. There are many questions to consider. Should you simply ignore the behavior and hope the child will ‘grow out of it’? Or should you attempt to correct the behavior, and run the risk of making the child feel guilty about normal sexual curiosity? How do you deal with your own discomfort in addressing the problem? Many adults in charge of young children come from homes where sex was never discussed. In today’s society there is a great emphasis on sex, so we may assume that our children are sexually sophisticated. We may risk viewing children’s sexual behavior and language as a sign of the times, and do nothing about it. Or we may envy their supposed ‘openness‘, and compare it unfavourably with our own ‘repressed’ childhoods. Children today do have access to more information about sex, but it is also true that they are exposed to more misinformation. They also experience a lot of sexual pressure from the media and from society as a whole. To help children in trouble, we must base our decisions on what we know as fact, not what we imagine to be true. To know whether a child is being sexually aggressive or simply curious, we need to understand children’s normal sexual development. There is a world of difference, for example, between two children in a daycare pulling their pants down to look at one another’s genitals and a child forcing a pencil into another child’s anus.
