It’s important for us parents to know first what is normal, and then only we can understand what is abnormal for a particular child. You see, when child grows, we asses two things one is growth and second is development. Growth is measured by weight, height etc, and development is assessed in 4 quadrants ie. motor, fine motor, language and social.
What you are talking now is related to social part of it. Normally a child of 3 years knows about his/her gender, whether male or female, and during that only he develops this curiosity to know his/her body parts, for which he/she was unaware till now.
Commonly the common questions raised by these small children are like:
i. Curious about where babies come from?
ii. May explore other children’s and adult’s bodies out of curiosity.
iii. By age four, children may show significant attachment to the opposite-sex parents.
iv. Children begin to have a sense of modesty and of the differences between private and public behaviours.
v. For some children, genital touching increases, especially when they are tired or upset.
So, one thing is sure that these are normal behaviour for his age. And these erections are off course normal for his age. Ok, now how to handle this as a mother. You have to prepare your own answers to his questions, but the bottom line is don’t give much attention to that, so he doesn’t feel that something interesting is there in this, so all are concerned(which will further increase his curiosity). Just behave normally with your casual answers, and I am sure gradually he will understand this, that this is just like any other body part of mine. Sexual development in a child depends on two things : one is the biological factors and second is the social and cultural factors, second factor is more important for children more than 6 years, then of course we need to see, what all our children are watching on tv, net and in surroundings, cos everything will affect their future behavior.
Courtesy: Dr. Sanjay Verma @ Indian Parenting.
No comments:
Post a Comment