Childhood Sexual Socialization

In our textbook Kimmel discusses how children learn about sex and sexuality.  I really enjoyed reading his definition about how children do not make their own sexualities by ourselves and really agree with that.  I wanted to explore more further how children learn what is right and wrong and how sex is continued to be seen as shameful and secret to our children. According to an article published by Fabes (2013) children are already aware of their gender by age 3.  His article talks about how children learn a lot from their peers and tend to adopt similar ideas and thoughts from their peers.  This makes sense, but where does gender come in? The study found that gender segregation plays a role where boys hang out with boys and become more boy-like and the same with girls.

I think society helps perpetuate this and the innocence of children by having children not learn about sex and telling them “that is dirty,” or “we don’t do that.”  This continues to send messages of shame to our children, the child begins to think, “is something wrong with me?”  and questions why he/she can’t do that.  Through gender segregation, the children reinforce these rules our parents and society teach us which continues this cycle.  Even if we had the “odd” child out, he/she would be ridiculed in our society and might face negative social consequences. 

Is this right? Certainly not.  Is this reality?  Unfortunately.  Reading the textbook and these studies, makes me wonder where does the action come in?  In schools?  At home?  Where do we start to make the difference.  

 

Works cited:

http://www.child-encyclopedia.com/documents/Hanish-FabesANGxp1.pdf

Sexualities, Identities, Behaviors, and Society by Michael Kimmel