Sex For Dummies by Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer & Pierre A. Lehu

Author:Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer & Pierre A. Lehu
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781119596585
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Masturbation: Good for All Ages

Today people know that masturbation is a healthy part of growing up. The practice can start in infancy and continue right through adulthood.

Childhood: Figuring out what’s “down there”

Did you know that some baby boys are born with an erection, and some baby girls are born lubricating? And sometimes the way that the doctor can tell the sex of a baby in the womb is when doing the ultrasound, he or she notices that the boy fetus has an erection.

Many children touch themselves “down there” because doing so feels good, even though they can’t yet derive the full pleasure of masturbation by having an orgasm. Most parents stop their children when they catch them playing with themselves. That reaction’s okay, but how the parents put the kibosh on this behavior can be very important to their children’s sexual development.

Teaching children that our society frowns on enjoying any form of sexual pleasure in public is fine. But, I hope you can pass along this information without giving children the idea that masturbation (or sex) is bad, per se. If you yell at your children when they play with themselves or slap their hands, they’re going to get the wrong message: that sexual pleasure, in and of itself, is bad. As a result, when these children become adults, they may not allow themselves to fully enjoy sex.

You can teach children not to pick their noses in front of others without giving them a complex, so you should be able to do the same thing about touching their “private parts” by saying, “We touch our private parts in private places.” Probably the reason that many parents have difficulties in this particular area is that they were made to feel ashamed when they were little, and they still haven’t overcome those feelings themselves. So parents end up passing on these feelings of shame to their children. But if you can make yourself aware of what you’re doing, then, hopefully, you can tone down the way you admonish your child in order not to give him or her the same sense of shame that you may have. I provide more guidance on talking to your child about masturbation in Chapter 26.

What parents must explain to their children is that touching one’s own genitals is okay, but only in private. How many parents actually give the first half of the masturbation speech, the part that says the practice is okay? Probably very few. And how many parents actually give their children the privacy to masturbate; in other words, knocking before they walk into their child’s room and walking away if asked to do so, without asking all sorts of questions? Also probably very few. And so, in the vast majority of cases, masturbation starts out as something forbidden that a person must do on the sly, and these early experiences shape much of our society’s attitudes about sex in general.

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