1) Really? A year or so ago, on a thread about a 9 or 10 year old who'd been charged with sexual assault, a FReeper mother expressed amazement about his precocious physical capability, and inquired how much longer she might have before her then 6-7 year old son would have said capability. Parents are often clueless, especially if they've led sheltered lives such as opponents of this Girls Inc. site are suggesting are ideal. And such cluelessness can lead them to answer questions from their children in ways that make a perfectly normal child think there's something abnormal and/or bad about him/herself.
2) Probably from observation of young children hospitalized for conditions requiring close monitoring including during sleep and/or with EEGs.
3) Earth to Tuesday Afternoon: What do you think infant and toddler boys are doing when they rub their crotches? And some parents ignore it as normal, while others intervene urgently and verbally express disapproval in the same sort of tone they would use if the infant hit or bit a sibling.
4) Nobody said they were hermaphrodites. The article says they don't clearly KNOW which they are until age 2-3, and for a couple of years after that are often unsure that it's a permanent feature. They're just beginning to grapple with concepts like the fact that their parents were once children and they themselves will one day be adults. Many very basic things are unclear to preschoolers. A college professor of mine told a story about a friend's preschool aged son who was taken to a beach for the first time, and was greatly impressed by the motion of the waves. As they were driving home, he asked his parents "Did they turn the ocean off now that I'm gone?"
5) No, they're encouraging comfortable acceptance of the fact that girls' bodies and minds DO begin to change at around age 8, and that common manifestations of that are an interest in other girls bodies (mainly for reassurance that the perplexing changes in their own bodies are normal), and intensified emotional attachments to friends, who at that age are usually mostly same sex friends.
Parents are often clueless, especially if they've led sheltered lives such as opponents of this Girls Inc. site are suggesting are ideal.
I am clueless about this sentence. Could you please rephrase it?
2) Somehow I doubt infants hooked up to monitors are stimulating themselves to orgasm. There is no reference link on the report. It is hearsay, or, worse, drawn from Kinsey's infamous Table 34.
3) The artilce talks about infant's sexual behavior, genital and nongenital. Infants. What kind of nongenital behavior does an infant exhibit? What is their definiton of an infant? Why the emphasis on infants?
3) The article first refers to infants, then says body exploration centers on the genitals in toddlers. Again, why this emphasis on infant sexuality? Yes, toddlers' grab their crotches occasionally but taking a child's hand away doesn't scar a child forever. Alternatively, my friend's daughter used to masturbate constantly. All the doctors said it wsa normal. Turned out she was being molested.
4) I admit I misread this one. But it seems to have been put in there for purely political reasons, i.e. gender is fluid. In my expereince I have not seen this gender confusion except in one boy whose father rejected him for his sister. Besides, the article says "many," not often or usually. Many is not definitive.
5) Well, I'm female and I didn't need "reassurance that the perplexing changes in their own bodies are normal." I knew they were normal and were anticipated.
This whole article has an agenda starting off with its emphasis on infant sexuality and ending with a call for reproductive rights and lessons about sexual desire for girls as young as 8. The only other articles I've seen like this come from pedophilia groups and Planned Barrenhood (which at least leaves infants out of their call for sexualization of children).