The Sexual Life Of Children

Annotation A study of children's sexual development that begins with the fetus and extends through puberty, with accounts by children of their sexual experiences, behavior, and attitudes.

Going beyond the hype and controversy, Elliott examines how a diverse group of American parents of teenagers understand teen sexuality, showing that, in contrast to the idea that parents are polarized in their beliefs, parents are confused, anxious, and ambivalent about teen sexual activity and how best to guide their own childrens' sexuality.

Linda and Richard Eyre stress that it's never too soon-or too late-to start discussing sex and values with your children, and they've got proven strategies to make it easier. For parents who want to go beyond the birds and the bees talk, How to Talk to Your Child About Sex provides thoughtful, clear, specific guidance on when and, most important, how to help children begin to learn and understand sex, love, and commitment from the most positive viewpoint possible. Preliminary "as needed" talks with three-to eight-year-olds The age eight Big Talk Follow-up talks with eight-to thirteen-year-olds Behavior discussions and guidelines with eleven-to sixteen-year-olds Discussions of perspective and personal standards with fifteen-to nineteen-year-olds

This volume presents a ground-breaking collection of interdisciplinary chapters from international scholars which complicate, and offers new ways to make sense of, children's sexual cultures across complex political, social and cultural terrains.

The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development is a carefully curated conversation that brings together the top researchers in child and adolescent sexual development to redefine the issues, conflicts, and debates in the field. The Handbook is organized around three foundational questions: first, what is sexual development? Second, how do we study sexual development? And third, what roles might adults - including the institutions of the media, family, and education - play in the sexual development of children and adolescents? As the first of its kind, this collection integrates work from sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, education, cultural studies, and allied fields. Writing from different disciplinary traditions and about a range of international contexts, the contributors explore the role of sexuality in children's and adolescents' everyday experiences of identity, family, school, neighborhood, religion, and popular media.

Sexuality Explained: a guide for parents and children underpins parents in their role as first educators of their children. It draws on the latest knowledge of the human body to show how mind, heart and body interplay in our sexual makeup, and how the life-giving and love-making aspects of the sexual act are each designed for permanence. The Guide works at many levels. By drawing the reader into a succession of conversations between a mother and her daughter, her father and her brother, a full picture of the biology of reproduction is created in a friendly way. The stories give parents ideas on how they might converse with their own children. The text is necessarily comprehensive, to answer possible questions, and to make sure that the parents know more than what is now taught in school biology, which can be checked for accuracy. Children vary enormously in their maturity, which is one reason why it is best that they are taught about sex and sexuality individually and, if possible, by members of their own family who know and love them. The age range set against each chapter is for guidance only. Parents may use the Guide in a variety of ways. They can let the Guide do most of the work for them, reading it out loud with their children. They can give a chapter to older children to read on their own, being ready for questions. Or they can absorb ideas to speak in their own words as occasion arises. To aid discussion and to give a framework for homemade lessons, each chapter ends with a glossary and a list of points to remember. The hand-drawn biological drawings, all of which have been specially commissioned, have been reproduced at the back of the book to be cut out and arranged in any order. The Guide is principally designed for parents, but it can also be read by young people on their own, and later chapters might be used by teachers and youth leaders for student workshops. There is no religious teaching but the Guide starts from the premise that all human life is of equal dignity and worthy of respect.

Translated by Derek and Inge Jordan In Children of the Future, Wilhelm Reich shows how disastrous the exclusion of genitality is to the young and its important influence on their development. In his 1932 work The Sexual Rights of Youth, published here in its revised form, Reich speaks in terms of what he sees as the real meaning of the sexual enlightenment of youth: it is not the mystery and dangers of procreation, but the essential nature of sexuality and the right of youth to genital gratification. Reich presents a new way of seeing the parental compulsion to teach. In other chapters, Reich examines attitudes toward infantile masturbation, the source of the human no, and special disturbances of the young. Reichs work is substantiated by his concrete observations and experiences with children, including case studies from the Orgonomic Infant Research Center.