Child’s Play: Why Parents Should Encourage Child Masturbation

Childhood sexual experiences can be healthy.

(Originally submitted to Prof. Jennifer Manner on 5 March 2014 in an undergraduate Family Studies class.)

Almost never do the positive aspects of children’s sexuality arise in popular discussion. This may lead a person to think that “children” and “sexuality” may never meet in a positive context. How could we believe otherwise when the first 51 results that Google returns for “child sex” pertain exclusively to news reports on the sexual exploitation of children and on the trials of child sex offenders? (Result #52 deals with the topic of sex education but is followed by 10 more results pertaining to abuse.)

Despite this strong negative association, childhood sexual experiences can be healthy; moreover, having healthy and safe sexual experiences as a child is valuable for personal development. In this short paper, I will explain why adults ought to accept and encourage one particular sexual behavior in children: masturbation.

1. Children are not asexual.

Although children have no reproductive capacity, they are not asexual. According to Crooks and Baur, infants and children voluntarily masturbate even if their parents discourage it (348–349). Clearly, children feel a need to pleasure themselves in this way. Granted, children are too emotionally immature to contemplate love or romance in the same way that adults do, but this does not negate their genuine desire to explore their bodies.

2. Early sexual experience builds sexual intelligence.

Allowing children to engage in such activity respects their autonomy and allows them to gain sexual intelligence at an early age. Although children depend on their parents for the satisfaction of many needs, they obviously cannot depend on them for sexual gratification. Nevertheless, the need persists, so it must find expression and satisfaction in another way. If parents allow and even expect their children to satisfy their own needs for sexual pleasure, those children may gain a valuable sense of self-efficacy and sexual independence.

A big part of sexual intelligence is “understanding oneself sexually” (2). The younger the age at which children are allowed to explore and enjoy their bodies, the more deeply and intuitively they will understand their own sexuality. By contrast, if children learn not to masturbate for fear of punishment, they may enter adolescence or adulthood lacking sexual skills that play a key role in the development of intimate relationships. Not only that, but they may learn to association sex with guilt, which may bar them from sexual fulfillment later in life. By allowing children to spend quality time with themselves at an early age, parents help their children to discover and understand an essential part of themselves.

3. What are the risks?

With this profound benefit there come few, if any, risks. One might argue that children whose parents encourage them to masturbate may masturbate in public. However, Crooks and Baur say there is no need to worry about this, for “[most children] are much more capable of making important discriminations than parents sometimes acknowledge” (349). Even if a child did masturbate in public, the behavior would probably not persist beyond the first offense, so long as parents teach their children to keep masturbation private. Another might object that children are simply “not ready” for sexual pleasure. But it seems evident from toddlers’ habits of humping dolls and pillows that they are eager to learn.

In light of the small risks and large rewards, it is clear that the mainstream treatment of children’s sexuality must make a positive shift. The failure of parents to encourage healthy sexual behavior in their children reflects a passive endorsement of an archaic sex-negativity. Since masturbation has no negative physical or mental side-effects, and since it both satisfies a need for pleasure and builds sexual intelligence, parents ought to allow their children to enjoy their own bodies, provided the children learn to respect social expectations for sexual privacy. Only by learning to embrace our whole selves as children can we hope to embrace our whole selves as adults.