This evening was rather…eventful for me. I ended up having a conversation I didn’t expect to have for at least another eight years.
I went upstairs to check on my daughter and get her settled in bed for the evening after her chill time. I didn’t expect to see her rubbing herself. Now, I’ve been reading a lot of things to expect with a child as they develop and I already knew that masturbation is extremely common around this age. It just caught me off guard. My first reaction was fear…fear over who taught her how to do that. Instead of an aggressive reaction, like I grew getting, I sat down on the couch in the room and had my daughter sit next me. I had to calm her down because she was crying, she thought she was in trouble. I did not want to make her feel ashamed of herself at all because to me it was not something to be ashamed about. I calmly told her she wasn’t in trouble and asked her if anyone taught her how to do that. She told me no. That was a relief because I know for that to be a fear for all parents. I explained to her that what she did was natural and she did nothing wrong. I just told her that she should only do it in her room, not around others because it’s impolite.
Now, I know many people would disagree with my parenting there and frankly, I don’t care. How do you expect your child to trust you if your reactions are always angry? I want my daughter to be able to come to without fear of being punished just for asking. I want her to come to me about stuff like that or I will never know what is actually hurting my daughter. I grew up in an environment where I couldn’t even mention certain things without getting my face slapped. Instead of turning to my parents for guidance, I just did it myself and often got hurt doing it. I don’t want that for my daughter. I want her to know that she can come to be for anything and know she can rely on me for helping her.
I’m sure I’m going to get fire for how I handled the situation and if you feel you have to tell me I’m wrong and my daughter needs to be ashamed of her body, calmly navigate away from my blog.
So…yeah…there’s that. I’m thinking I’ll have to give my daughter “the talk” sooner than originally planned. I just need to figure out how to do that. I was never given a talk, so this is uncharted territory for me.
Farewell, readers.
Until next time.
Deep Water 