A few days ago, a frantic mother of a three year old boy called to seek advice on how she should respond to his startling statement, “Mama, I’m going to put my PeePee in your mouth and pee in your mouth.” As she talked I could hear the panic in her voice. She said, “I don’t want to overreact, but is this normal for a three year old?”
I assured her that three year olds are very sexually curious. However, I told her that such a comment from a three year old indicated one of two possibilities, neither of which were good. There was a possibility that the three-year-old had been molested and wanted to impose on his mother the behavior imposed on him. The more likely explanation was that the older children in the family had exposed them to pornography. His little mind was trying to act out what he had seen.
From the questions I asked his mother, I determined that there were children four, five and seven years of age in the family home where he was kept during his mothers work hours. The adults in the home allowed these children to play video games on the computer with the door to the computer room closed and no adult supervision.
Since the mother knew the family very well, I suggested that she searched the computer to see the kinds of material the children were actually watching. I referred her to a chapter in my book, “Teaching Your Children the Truth about Sex” where I give parents several addresses that will help them to trace the computer activities of their children. I told her, that if she found what I thought she would find she would need to print out the history of the computer activity and share it with the adults in the home. If they were typical of many parents, they would never have dreamed their children to be viewing this kind of mind polluting pornography.
Unfortunately, experiences like this are not unusual in today’s families where children are allowed to have computers in their bedrooms play with them unsupervised by adults. In my book, there is a whole chapter devoted to the electronic invasion of the home. I give parents several addresses that will allow them to trace the computer activities of their children. Although many children have developed more advanced computer skills of their parents, only about one in three know how to totally erase the tracks of their computer history.
If there was no sexual history on the computer I advise this mother to become more suspicious of the possibility her three year old had been sexually abused. I pointed her to the chapter in my book that deals child molesting and how the parent should manage such a situation. In any event, the parents of this little three-year-old boy will need to supervise this social activity much more closely.
This is another example of why it is so important that parents be taught how to be the primary sex educators of their children. For more information on this program this it: www.teachthetruthaboutsex.com. Your comments and questions are welcomed!
