197. Is it Normal? Child and Adolescent Sexual Development

Hello, and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother, licensed professional counselor who helps Christians struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you with practical tools for developing greater peace.

We’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present, abundant life God has for you. So, let’s dive right into today’s episode.

Today, we’re talking about normal sexual development, ages zero to twenty-five. And I’m gonna break this down into different stages and ages so you can kind of know a little bit more about what to expect. I know that OCD, a lot of times, lashes on to past experience; it has a tendency to distort things. So, we’re gonna talk about how OCD gets involved at different ages.

We’ll also look at how things may have shifted or changed for someone who was sexually abused, if that’s part of your story. Now, many years ago, I was at a church program, and we were watching my friend’s son, who was probably maybe around three years old. He was standing next to a little girl in the children’s program.

Towards the end of the program, he just kind of got this look on his face and just pulled up the skirt slightly of the girl next to him, and I think my friend was a little embarrassed. He did that in front of the whole church. We all got a good laugh, right? Children at this age, they’re just curious.

They’re just trying to find answers to their questions. They’re learning about their bodies—how they move, how they work. As a part of just that curious exploration, children may explore their own bodies and touch themselves. They may show an interest in other people’s bodies. If you have really little kids, sometimes they’ll just rip off their clothes or rip off a diaper and run around the house naked.

They don’t even think twice about it. All of that is very normal behavior for this age, and so, at this stage, it’s just really important for caregivers to talk about appropriate boundaries—what types of things are okay to do on your own, by yourself, or in the bathroom, and what types of things you don’t want to do in front of other people.

Children just begin to understand that boys and girls are different and may start to understand that they have different private parts. I think it’s really important for child safety, for children to know the correct name of their body parts, just weaving it into general conversation about their body so it doesn’t have to be a strange or uncomfortable thing.

A weird thing—if they’re washing, just say, like, “Okay, did you wash your leg? Did you wash your penis? Did you wash your arm?” And just by weaving that into conversation, normalizing it, we don’t make up funny, strange names for other parts of our body, so why would we make up funny, strange names for our genitals?

There’s a really great book called Your Body Belongs to You, which just provides a very casual overview about bathing suits, covering up private parts, and kind of goes into a little bit of safe and unsafe touching. It’s required, mandatory preschool curriculum in the U.S.—I know at least in Tennessee it is.

Anyway, if your child is in any kind of public preschool or Head Start program, they start at age three and start communicating some of these messages—who it is appropriate to touch you in certain areas of your body. And I think that all of this is really great for sexual abuse prevention and helps increase kids’ ability to be able to report if something does happen.

What you want to do is just provide age-appropriate explanations if children come to you with questions—just to be able to tell them something on their level, like, “Boys and girls have different parts.” “No, you can’t go into the bathroom with Dad because boys and girls have different parts,” and that type of language.

Now, if you have a child who has been abused in the preschool age range, oftentimes that may lead to them touching themselves more often than you would see in a normal child because, as we said before, even children who have not been abused—it is very typical for them to touch themselves, explore their bodies.

It’s not sexual; it’s not to be referred to as what we would call masturbation. That’s not what we’re talking about here. All that child has learned at a very young age is that, if I have stimulation to a certain area of my body, it feels good. And so, they are going to want to replicate that, and they may act that out or play that out with stuffed animals. If they have seen particular sexual content, you may see that come out in their play.

That’s how children essentially think, reason, and understand their world—through play. And so, it is important for them to get that specific type of therapy if they’ve been abused at a very young age—for them to be able to work through the things that are coming up for them and also, along with parents and therapists, to get healthy education surrounding who is allowed to touch them and so forth.

Now, let’s talk about the elementary ages, ages six to ten, for healthy sexual development. Over ten years ago now, my first husband and I were foster parents. Our very first placement was an eight-year-old girl, and she had asked me, probably on the third day of me parenting anybody, where babies come from.

I don’t remember exactly how I responded to that. I think I just kind of responded with, “Are you asking me where babies come from?” and then moved on and changed the subject because, as a foster parent, I just wasn’t quite sure if I should even be the one answering that and how to respond. Those types of questions, obviously, are very typical for this age range.

They’re going to have more questions about getting married, about where babies come from. When my daughter was taking swimming lessons at the Y, some of the elementary school kids were convinced that the swimming instructors were married or were dating, and they told them several times, “No, we’re not together. We’re just coworkers. We’re not married; we’re not in a relationship.” Somehow, the kids really didn’t believe them. I don’t know why.

But these are the kinds of things that children have. There are a lot of stories and fairy tales and princesses and princes, etc. It’s very common for kids to maybe compare their bodies with someone else’s, notice differences between peers, and have an increased sense of modesty.

They’re no longer just ripping off their clothes and running around the house naked. Now, they don’t want anybody in the bathroom with them. They want to change on their own, etc. All of that is very normal. Some females will start the puberty process towards the end of this age range, but I’m going to save talking about puberty for the next section—adolescence.

It’s really important at this age, as things come up, to just talk about how we treat our bodies, how others treat our bodies, how we treat others, etc.—friendships, appropriate touching. My daughter just ran around one day (she’s younger), but she ran around and slapped me on the butt, and I just said, “Please don’t touch my butt.”

She got kind of upset by it or whatever, but her dad came and talked to her and said, “All Mommy asked was that you just not touch her butt.” That’s it. We’re kind of teaching things like tickling—if you’re tickling a child or wrestling or something like that and they ask you to stop, it’s really important that you respect their boundaries as a parent and stop.

Sometimes my daughter will go through this like, “Tickle me!”—she wants to be tickled—and then other times she doesn’t want to be, and it can change in five seconds flat. So, it’s like, “Hey, tickle me!” “No, don’t tickle me at all!” But just in that process, we’re teaching her that she can ask for what she wants in regard to how other people treat her body, and that we’re going to respect her boundaries.

It’s really important for younger children to know that if they do feel uncomfortable with anybody for any reason, they can come and talk to you about that. I know it can be really boring at times when your kids want to talk to you about Minecraft or whatever else is popular out there—what’s happening on a Bluey episode—but if you really plug in and listen to your children and talk with them and communicate about all of these little things, they’re going to feel more safe and comfortable to come and talk to you about bigger issues.

If you minimize their concerns, then it’s going to be really hard for them to bring up something that maybe is a bigger concern. It’s really important that we’re plugged in and that we’re invested.

If a child has been abused in these elementary ages, you’re going to see some different things happening than what would happen in the typical sexual development. You may see kids that are more comfortable with exposing their bodies. You may see kids who are reenacting certain sexual acts, and, of course, this can be very scary and uncomfortable. They may try things out with other children that have been done to them. That’s sexually reactive behavior.

If this has happened to you or you have gone through sexual abuse and you reacted, that was what your brain and body were trying to do to process what you experienced at a younger age that you were never meant to experience at that age. It’s really important because OCD will come in and potentially shame you if you acted out reactively, either with another child or if you reacted by masturbating, which I wouldn’t even feel like it’s fair to call it that at that age, because going back to what we talked about before—if a child is touching themselves, all they know is, “Hey, that feels good, and I’m trying to repeat that process that feels good to my body.”

They’re not thinking of that in a sexual nature. It can often be misconstrued by other people, especially if other parents are aware that that’s going on. There’s a lot of secrecy and shame if you have experienced abuse. You may have felt like you couldn’t tell anybody, like you were going to get in trouble. You may have had a lot of repeated thoughts about it. It affects how you view others, how you view the world, how you view yourself.

That’s why it’s so important to get help if you have experienced sexual abuse. But just know that OCD may have taken some of those traumatic experiences and twisted them, or made them say something sexually about you. OCD may have convinced you that you are oversexualized in some way, shape, or form.

Just know that once these things essentially get turned on in our body, it changes the trajectory of your path.

Now, let’s talk about middle school—the early adolescent ages, around eleven to thirteen. And I want to spend some time talking about puberty because I know, for many clients that I’ve worked with, there weren’t healthy conversations for them about puberty. Maybe they learned about it at school. Maybe their parents just kind of handed them a book and walked away and didn’t really go into it. Maybe it was a total shock to them.

There’s all kinds of different scenarios and things that can happen in families, but it’s really important—and what should happen—is for someone to communicate with you about puberty before it starts because it’s obviously a very uncomfortable time. People are very insecure; their bodies are changing very rapidly. Girls will have crushes on boys and vice versa. With puberty and all the hormonal changes, there’s an increased interest in sex and romance.

What adolescents view as romance, obviously, is a little bit different than what adults view as romance, but that’s where all of this puberty stuff gets turned on. And going through the process of becoming, from a child to a man or a woman, there’s a lot of exploration of identity, and with that, some of that comes with experimentation.

I want to say something here for Christians who may have had some same-sex experimentation and OCD is now using that as evidence that, yes, you kissed a girl when you were in middle school, and so therefore you must be gay, or you fooled around with that boy of the same sex, and so then that means you’re gay.

And what I want to say about that is that not all experiences are aligned with your identity of who you are today, but we have to focus on where you are today and not allow OCD to pull in all of this other evidence.

OCD will also say things around this time about POCD—“Remember when you were eleven and you had a crush on that nine-year-old, and therefore that somehow means that you’re a pedophile.” OCD says some really strange stuff when it comes to the sex department, so pretty much nothing is off-limits for it.

Of course, if you’re eleven years old and you like someone who is nine, obviously, logistically, we know that’s only a two-year age difference and does not make you a pedophile. But just know that sometimes OCD will pull in some of these past experiences, whether it’s experimentation, whether it’s liking somebody that was younger than you, to somehow prove something about who you are now.

Now, in ICBT, we like to look at what is the sense of data of where you’re at right now. And people who are dealing with sexual orientation OCD are struggling because they feel like OCD is convincing them that they’re attracted to the same sex, even though they would tell you, in a clear-headed moment, “No, I’m attracted to the opposite sex.”

Masturbation is really common in adolescents, young adolescents, and older adolescents. Some of that can increase over time. There are very mixed views about masturbation among Christians. You’ll find some who will tell you it’s okay, others who will tell you it’s not okay at all. Some will tell you it depends on the content of what your thoughts are when you’re doing that, regarding lusting and other things.

It’s really somewhat of a gray area. I’m not here to settle or unsettle the masturbation debate. I probably land somewhere in the middle of the extremes because I do believe it’s a gray area. I also have compassionate understanding that people are desiring to be sexually pure, save themselves for marriage, and that’s very, very hard to do when your hormones are kicked in.

We also know that the media plays a role, and friendships and relationships play a role in beliefs about sex in the adolescent time period. It’s really important, if you are a parent, to know that your kids are already getting information about sex. And so, if you don’t want to be that void, you want to be that voice of truth and of wisdom and understanding, kind of meeting them where they’re at—not overly scaring them, but just letting them know, like, “Hey, sex is a beautiful thing. Here’s why it’s beneficial for you to hold off and wait to have sex.”

We know that parents who actually talk with their children about sex are more likely to have teenagers who delay having sex until later than if it’s not talked about at all. I think sometimes parents just think, “Oh, we won’t talk about that, and then they won’t do that.” Well, no—it’s the opposite.

If kids know that they can come to their parents and ask questions, or their parents can provide them certain resources so they don’t always have to come to their parents, if you can provide some of those things, that just continues to open those lines of communication to where there can be healthy conversations surrounding sex.

We also know that more and more children and adolescents are being exposed to pornography via the internet. This has essentially become a huge thing, and pornography is a billion-dollar business—it makes more than all of the major sports leagues combined. You can look that up, those statistics.

We want to make sure that you have safeguards in place on electronic devices that your children are using and accessing. Be very careful even about some of the things that are targeted toward kids. Even some YouTube content is not necessarily healthy. I would not give a kid unfettered access to YouTube for them to just look up whatever. Even what was labeled as YouTube Kids—I don’t know if they have changed some of those parameters—but I know that there was a lot of disturbing stuff that kids could still access.

You obviously want to talk with them about online communications—that, hey, not everybody on the internet is who they say they are. They may say that they’re a thirteen-year-old boy but really be some seventy-five-year-old man. You just want to be careful about what information you’re sharing.

Things like camera phones—adolescents don’t always make the best choices, so we really need to talk through and think through that. There’s a lot of sexting that is happening in today’s day and age that, of course, is very troubling, and so we want to talk about our body in a healthy way but, hey, let’s keep some things private. We don’t need to be sharing and exposing ourselves to everybody.

If you have someone who has been abused, either as a child or as an adolescent, they can be more prone to sexually act out, to have multiple partners, to engage in sexting behavior. For them, sexual behavior has become more normalized, and they may not have that same sense of self-respect for their body. So, it’s important to build that into someone—to say, like, “Hey, this is your body. You get to decide what happens to it.”

It’s not the only way to engage in a relationship—to show yourself—or the only way to be close to someone is to have sex with them. A lot of times, there’ll just be this empty void where girls have been trying to find that connection and acceptance, and they feel like the only way that they can do that is to be used sexually.

We also want to have conversations about adolescent boys and respecting women. I think those conversations are obviously really impactful as well. I think helping adolescents understand the potential gravity of some of their choices sexually is important and helpful.

Now, with high school and later adolescents, ages fourteen to eighteen, obviously there’s a more heightened interest in sex, discussions about sex, learning things from peers, more likely to be dating or engaging in relationships, and teens are starting to develop more and more solidified ideas and values surrounding sex.

I think it’s just a continuation of the conversation. If you look at this as a lifespan situation where you’re communicating to your child about sex, then it doesn’t have to be just this uncomfortable conversation that we bring out in early and late adolescence—now we gotta have “the talk.” No, it’s a continuation of conversations that you’ve had about their body when they were younger, conversations that you’ve had about boundaries, conversations about having babies or getting married, or those types of conversations, to where your children now hopefully feel like they can come to you when they have concerns about these issues.

And I also know that a lot of people didn’t receive that. A lot of people may have grown up in a home where sex wasn’t discussed, or there were some things happening in the home where their boundaries weren’t respected. Maybe it wasn’t overt abuse, but maybe people were walking around naked, and it caused them to feel uncomfortable, or maybe comments were made about their bodies that caused them to feel uncomfortable.

So just know, if any of those things happened to you, that may have impacted how you view yourself and how you view sex. When we talk about OCD, this is also where, because of all the hormonal changes that are happening, sometimes OCD can get worse during this period of adolescence, and kids can really be in a place where they can have certain sexual themes come up, such as POCD, such as HOCD, or sexual orientation OCD.

Those may become really, really heightened around this time—just like some of those themes can be heightened around pregnancy and postpartum. If an adolescent that’s dealing with OCD feels a strong, like, connection—even just like a mentor relationship—to a younger child, OCD may twist that and say, “No, you’re really attracted to that child.”

Someone may have a platonic friendship, and OCD may get them very confused about whether or not they really like that person, and that’s really hard to tease out, because obviously, that could be potentially an everyday doubt that someone might experience: “Do I really have feelings for this person or not?”

Of course, with OCD, you’re looking at, is this creating some type of problem that I need to solve? Is this causing an intense, heightened anxiety, and I can’t seem to get out of this loop? Once again, I really just want to stress and emphasize that kids whose parents talk to them about sex are more likely to not have sex than kids whose parents don’t talk with them about it at all.

So, having comprehensive education, talking with your child about what the Bible says about sex, talking to your child about things like contraception not being a hundred percent on preventing pregnancy, the emotional side of having sex, the spiritual connectedness that you have with another person, and that we don’t want to just have that with anybody—that there are reasons that God has put boundaries in place for us.

There are really great reasons to save sex for marriage and to note that not everyone is out there having sex, even though that is the lie that is perpetuated by our society to adolescents and to young adults. Next week, I’m going to be talking about “How Do I Deal With Sexual Thoughts as a Christian,” but what I want to say about this young adult period, from, say, 18 to 25, is that I’ve met many young people who are Christians who are somewhat troubled by normal sexual thoughts. Usually, they’ll tell me, “Oh, I have these sexual thoughts, and it’s not good.” And I’ll say, like, “Okay, you’re a warm-blooded young person—congratulations!” It is completely normal at this age if you are desiring to connect with another person sexually; that’s completely normal, and it’s okay.

It can be really hard to be a single young adult and desiring to be married and not having that experience yet, and being in that sense of waiting and wondering, “Is God going to bring me a spouse, or what is happening here?” And so, just know that all of those pieces can be very frustrating if you’re single and you’re a young adult.

Also, know that it’s very challenging in our culture to remain pure and to have a godly sexuality if that is something that you are wanting to strive for. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more next week, but I just wanted you to know that it’s totally normal to have sexual desires, urges, thought processes, desires to masturbate, and sexual dreams.

All of these things are very normal for young adults—almost like if you didn’t have some of these experiences in adolescence and young adulthood, we would really kind of wonder, “Why? What is that about? Is there a lack of desire of connecting with other people in this way?” I think that wraps it up for today’s conversation.

Thanks for hanging in here with me on the podcast. If you have questions, I’d love to have some more Q and A. I’ve received some from those who are on our email list that I’m going to be addressing in a future episode. But if you have questions, you can always reach out to us via the website at careba.com.

Definitely get on our email list, because you’re the first to know about new things that are happening in the podcast. I try to send out a little encouraging devotional-type message, letting you know when new podcast episodes are coming out. We typically, in a normal cycle, only email about once a week—unless we have some other juicy, good stuff going on—and then I may email you a little bit more. But you can always opt out and unsubscribe if you try it and dislike it.

It’s okay. We all are trying to clean up our email inboxes at one time or another, and so I want that content that I’m sending out to be valuable to you. I hope that you will tune in next time for more of this Healthy Perspectives on Sex series. Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you.

Christian Faith in OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.