It may be surprising for some to find that an organization which works to fight abuse also actively advocates that you raise your children in a freegoing, relaxed nature concerning sexual issues. After all, conventional wisdom is that you lock your child up with bolt and key to protect them from any harm. As we’re about to show you, conventional wisdom can be DEAD WRONG.
For decades now, experts have advocated that children be raised in a sexually healthy manner. Yet few seem to be listening. Every day that goes by we seem to be getting more and more uptight as a society, marching further in the wrong direction. Since the subject of sexual abuse was more or less “discovered” in the 1970s, there has been a steady push to criminalize and stigmatize sexual behavior, especially when it comes to kids. It all started out with noble intentions – cases of 5-year-olds being repeatedly raped, fathers forcing themselves onto their children, or adults turning kids into sex slaves; this all caught our attention and prompted action. But since then, things have gone astray… with disastrous outcomes.
In society’s attempts to prevent sexual abuse, we’ve focused on the “sexual” part and forgot the key word: Abuse. Children are born with an active sexual instinct, and are prone to a variety of self-initiated sexual behaviors. No matter how much adults bury their heads in the sand about this or wish this fact were otherwise, it doesn’t go away. Sexual behavior is a basic human instinct, and it’s a part of that little organism you’re charged with raising. When sexual behaviors are suppressed, shunned, shamed, devilified, scolded, regarded as dirty or evil, and so on, it’s every bit as abusive as when an adult attacks a child physically, verbally, or sexually.
“Children are emotionally abused in sexual areas everyday because of repressive, guilt-ridden, punitive ideas that are transmitted to them under the guise of sex education.”
– Child abuse specialist David R. Walters (1975, p. 131)
It’s important that parents understand just how important this issue really is. With that in mind, we wanted to start out with 5 very good reasons to raise a sexually healthy child:
1. To protect them
Children who are raised in a sexually healthy manner harbor no body shame, and so they’re perfectly comfortable talking about their penis/vulva just as easily as they would their fingers or toes. As a result, they make poor secret keepers to someone who might abuse them. Raising a free going, open child doesn’t invite abuse, it protects them from it.
Raising children in a sexually healthy manner protects them from legitimate abuse. Molesters want kids who are good secret keepers, and what better way to get this than the child who was scolded for touching herself? One who was punished for sexual play? She knows better than to let her parents know, and in fact, may try just as hard as the molester to keep it from them. What better way to keep secrets than a child who can’t even say the word penis or vulva without blushing and shying away? One whose parents continually evade simple questions she may have on such subjects? How likely is such a child to muster the bravado to talk with their parents about a sexual experience? It’s a sad indicator of how severe of a disconnect we have when putting up with legitimate abuse is less painful than talking with a parent about sexual issues.
The last thing a molester wants is an outgoing child who can talk freely about her vulva or any other body part just as easily as she would talk about her cheek. The last thing a molester wants is a sexually healthy child. They also take advantage of the fact that children are born uninhibited, and have a natural desire to explore and be fully accepted. This next sentence may be unpopular, but it’s accurate to many situations: In many cases, the cold hard truth is that molesters are often successful because they start out giving children something they’ve desired from others all along and haven’t received. By allowing sexual curiosity or promoting acceptance to begin with, parents make it less likely a child will be enticed into something by someone who has ulterior motives.
2. To prevent future turmoil
Darn near all of the damage from sexual abuse, should it happen, has little to do with the actual acts, and everything to do with the shameful and harmful ways in which a child is taught to interpret them. Raising a sexually healthy child ensures that no matter what occurs, your child can be spared any lasting harm. The truth is that the problem of molestation would be a minor and insignificant issue if we raised kids in a sexually healthy and open environments to begin with.
Eventually your child is going to enter puberty. For girls, this is happening as young as six or seven years old these days. Those who aren’t early bloomers will generally start to mature by 12-years-old. The bottom line is that sooner or later, your child is going to become a fully sexual being (as opposed to the partially sexual being they are from birth) with all of the nuances that come with it. When children are raised in a prudish environment, this transition brings an awful lot of turbulence. Being raised in a sexually healthy environment from a young age makes adolescence much less stressful, and makes all of the potentially negative messages from peers, the media or others much less tormenting. Coming into one’s sexuality is much easier when it’s been embraced all along. Just like everything else, security in this area comes from loving support from adults.
From dating mishaps to regretful encounters to the possibility of being raped as an adult, sexuality touches life in many aspects, and a sexually healthy upbringing can filter out as much as 95% of the harm from whatever future adversity they are bound to encounter. We all hope that our children will live adversity free lives, but the reality is that stuff happens. When it does, the difference between resiliency and despair is largely due to attitudes and viewpoints. When it comes to sexual issues, a large amount of that resiliency is built through raising a sexually healthy child.
3. For their emotional health
Most parents go out of their way to burden their kids with the same body shame they were burdened with as youngsters. Kids are scolded for touching themselves, shamed if they go without clothes, and taught to feel embarrassed about the body that God (or nature,) endowed them with. However, such attitudes are A) Unnecessary, and B) Very likely to lead to both short- and long-term psychological and emotional harm. In other words, SUCH ACTIONS FIT WITHIN THE VERY DEFINITION OF CHILD ABUSE! It’s a silent and popular abuse epidemic, and it may be socially accepted, but this sexual neurosis can harm a child far more in the long-term than the molestations parents fear.
4. Because it’s your job
Most parents shirk off the responsibility of sexual education with their child. It’s either ignored completely, or relegated to uncomfortable talks at a time when the parental influence is waning and kids are already consumed by raging hormones and sexual desire. This, put quite frankly, is neglectful. A parent’s job is to educate and guide their child about life, so until babies are made in test-tubes and humans lose all desire to be intimate with each other, sexuality is part of that education you’re in charge of. Sex should be talked about early and often, discussed as the ordinary part of life it is, not left to uncomfortable and ineffective talks as your child enters adolescence.
Raising a child is a daunting task that requires you prepare them for life and teach them every aspect about this world. You can’t do that when you skip what is a significant portion of their nature, not to mention a basic fact of life that all of existence is based upon..
From the time your children start asking questions, it’s your job to begin answering them fully. All of them. It’s your job to confront (not evade) the subject, and to tell them about anything and everything their little hearts desire. In fact, it’s your job to go out of your way to teach them everything you can about life and LOOK for the opportunities for such discussions if they don’t bring it up on their own.
By the time your child reaches puberty, it’s too late for them to start learning about sexuality. This is the time in which nature designed them to head out and start mating. Their hormones are raging and they are coming into their adulthood, naturally starting to break away from their parents’ influence. This is not the time to begin teaching them about sex. That needs to start in the preschool years and continue throughout childhood as the youngster’s curiosity, experiences, and capacity for learning dictate.
To be neglectful on this issue is to be neglectful of your duties as a parent. Just like any other form of neglect, it can be quite serious in its consequences.
5. Because it’s natural
Sexual instinct is a naturally occurring behavior that manifests itself in a variety of different ways, in people of all ages. When we stigmatize sexual behavior, we stigmatize a large part of our natural humanity. Just as if you encouraged a child to be ashamed of their eyes or hair color or skin color, stigmatizing what is a natural part of them is a harmful behavior which is sure to lead to future damage for years to come. It’s child abuse. Like it or not, the reality is that sexual behavior is something naturally observed in old and young alike.
Research has shown that preschoolers routinely masturbate, engage in sex play, and seek to explore the bodies of the opposite sex. Kids begin getting crushes at around age 4 or 5 and continue to be stricken with them periodically throughout childhood. Researchers have even documented fetuses masturbating inside the womb. Such evidence raises a legitimate philosophical question we ask you to ponder: Which is it? Is the God who lovingly created us perverting our fetuses and driving our preschoolers into ‘sin,’ or could it be that we are the ones perverting sexuality and defacing what was meant to be a natural, basic part of human behavior?
Let’s face it: whether you believe in a grand creator or the marvelous forces of nature, it’s safe to say that nothing man does can even come close to touching the level of complex perfection that is seen in the natural world all around us. If you need a reminder, just look at the flowers and trees, or marvel at how your child grows and their skinned knee heals, all without any of our own toiling. For all of our genius, we still can’t replicate the everyday miracles of nature. The best we do is give it a helping hand every now and then.
If you’re inclined to believe that our creator knows what he, she, or it is doing, then it’s prudent to question the shameful attitudes humans pile onto sexuality… something that is a basic part of our very nature. It seems inconceivable that people who profess a love and faith for a creator who is deemed responsible for everything we see and who it is said created us “in his image,” in the same breath then turn around and call such an important aspect of his work sinful. If your faith requires a respect for God, taking issue with how he made us by disrespecting our own nature seems an odd way to show a love for his work
When humans try to tinker with what’s natural, more often than not we mess things up. Just look at what we’re doing to the earth and environment, not to mention what we do to each other. You’ll hear pleas to “save the rainforest,” or “save the environment,” when in reality the rainforest doesn’t need our help, but our absence. It was doing just fine on its own until we came along and mucked it up. The next time you hold a child, pick up their hand. Trace the lines in their fingers, and marvel at how intricately they were put together. A healthy upbringing requires we embrace our child’s nature and let it be, not that we tinker with it or surround their natural impulses in shame.
The way people talk about sex, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was some sort of manifestation of a hideous human deformity as opposed to a natural, basic behavior that arises our of fondness and affection. It’s a sad but telling sign that an act of violence is considered more acceptable by society than an act of sexual affection. In referring to the media, Philip Slater points out “it’s perfectly all right for a man to shoot, knife, strangle, beat, or kick a woman so long as he doesn’t make love to her.” Yet every ounce of this shame or embarrassment regarding our sexual nature is something that humans have thrown into the mix. Like smog or pollution, it’s how we’ve corrupted and made dirty what is otherwise a natural instinct and behavior. It’s gotten so bad that many people now consider the mere sight of a human in their natural state to be corrupting or abusive.
Beliefs can run deep into the soul, and everyone tends to be highly prejudiced toward what is familiar to them. We’re not trying to favor one belief system over another, but to merely urge caution in whatever beliefs you have. We are creatures that have been created with a strong penchant towards sexual behavior. Our children have been created with a penchant to explore, and even have the capacity to experience sexual pleasure themselves. These are scientific facts that don’t go away.
If God truly deemed sexuality to be shameful, there are a million other ways he could have used as a means for reproduction. If he thought certain areas of our bodies were un-presentable to others, he could have designed our DNA to grow clothes. If sexuality were a form of worldly corruption, it wouldn’t be seen in young children who are the very definition of innocence. If God thought it horrible that a two-year-old to have sexual experiences, he could snap his fingers and remove the capacity for sexual pleasure at such tender ages. God could have turned off such systems until puberty. Instead children are born with wholy functional systems that are ‘turned on’ inside the womb making it all but certain that kids will have a wide variety of early sexual experiences, both of the intentional variety and through incidental contact with others. God could have done many things. He/she/it didn’t. Given the evidence, it seems a lot more likely that sexuality was never meant to be shameful, unless you in turn make God into a type of sadistic deity who lays a toy before a child and then scolds them for playing with it. In whatever belief structure you ascribe to, we ask merely that you ponder such questions to come to a deeper understanding of your faith.
From a scientific standpoint, all of this shame and neurosis is human created social pollution…our efforts at mucking up what’s natural. Like all pollution, this type of toxicity can be quite harmful to a child’s nature and to society as a whole. When it comes to a sexually healthy upbringing, it’s a question of how polluted you want your child’s perception about themselves to be. We urge you to remove as much of this toxic pollution as is possible, to the fullest extent that your beliefs will allow.