Make a Different Face: What to Do When You Find Your Daughter Touching Herself
Body autonomy, pleasure permission, and breaking the cycles of shame
A companion to The Small Verdict.
In my last post, I wrote about the adult women I sit with who are meeting, often for the first time in decades, the small moment that taught them to be afraid of their own bodies. More than one parent has written since to ask a version of the same question: And what should I do instead? How do I keep my daughter safe without passing on the message that did so much damage to me?
It’s a powerful, brave question. And the research, it turns out, is reassuring: there is a different way, and it’s not complicated. The hard part is mostly internal — the work of self-reflection that’s required — so you can avoid passing forward what was passed on to you.
As cultural awareness grows around adverse early childhood experiences, and as parents become consciously aware of their own wounds and strive to do better for their children, there is a divine/quantum opportunity available to the collective.
This is very exciting because if you’re reading this, you can relax a bit, knowing that God’s plan is moving the current forward and you don’t have to struggle upstream.
That said, there are few things I want parents to know about early pleasure imprinting.
1. What you’re seeing is almost certainly developmentally normal.
William Friedrich’s research with the Child Sexual Behavior Inventory — the most widely used tool of its kind — found that self-touching and genital curiosity are among the most commonly observed behaviors in children ages 2 through 9. Majorities of children in non-clinical samples do this. If you’ve just discovered that your three-year-old has figured out that some parts of her body feel good, you have not discovered a problem. You have simply discovered a three-year-old.
The single biggest shift for most parents is understanding that what feels shocking is, in fact, ordinary. That understanding alone changes the face the child sees.
2. Check your face before you act.
This is a bigger deal than it sounds. Allan Schore’s work on early development shows that a caregiver’s face functions as a kind of second nervous system for the child — she reads your expression and learns, from it, how to feel about herself. If your face registers disgust or horror, she will not conclude that the thing she did was disgusting. She will conclude that she is.
Before you say anything, take a breath. Soften. If what rises in you is shock, that’s information about your own history, not about your daughter. She doesn’t need to inherit it. You can prevent this and that’s empowering news!
3. Name privacy, not wrongness.
The script most child-development educators recommend — Deborah Roffman, Debra Haffner, and others — goes something like this: “Touching your body feels nice. That’s something we do in our own room, not in the living room — kind of like how we close the door when we use the bathroom.”
Notice what this does. It affirms the sensation (feels nice). It doesn’t pathologize the behavior. And it teaches a real social norm (privacy) without framing the body as dirty or bad. The child learns a skill; she does not learn shame.
This might require some work on your part, because you must be okay with your daughter exploring pleasure, and if this was robbed from you it could be a spicy edge. Just keep the bigger picture in mind, which I will outline below. You’ve got this.
4. Use real names for body parts.
This one surprises people. The research on child safety — from the American Academy of Pediatrics, Darkness to Light, and other prevention organizations — consistently finds that children who know accurate names for their body parts are less vulnerable to abuse and more likely to disclose if something happens. Vulva, vagina, penis. Matter-of-fact, from toddlerhood.
Vague language does not protect children. It’s blurry, and so boundaries become blurry. Accurate anatomical language is proven to protect them.
5. Body autonomy is the safety infrastructure.
Teaching children early that their body belongs to them — that they can decline tickles, hugs, and lap-sitting, even from family or the Easter Bunny — builds what prevention researchers (see Maureen Kenny’s work) call bodily agency. It is the same muscle they will later use to name and refuse unsafe touch. ‘Your body, your choice’ is not a political slogan when said to a four-year-old. It’s a protective factor.
This, again, can irk some parents because it challenges their internalized people-pleasing behaviours. Saying no thank you is a very important skill to teach a child early, so they can become attuned to their body’s cues, and honor them.
Imagine how important this could be later in her life, when a man makes advances. If she has been taught to lock up, and allow unwelcome touch, how do you think she will respond?
6. Earlier and more honest is safer, not riskier.
If you take nothing else from this post, take this.
The old intuition — that silence protects children — has been tested. It doesn’t. Silenced children are more vulnerable, not less. They have no language to name what is happening, no permission to tell, and no sense of their body as their own.
So if you are a parent sitting with a small uncomfortable moment — your daughter on the carpet, your own heart pounding — here is what I want you to remember. You are not choosing between her safety and her discovery. They are the same work. What keeps her safe is precisely what allows her to stay at home inside herself: language, autonomy, and a parent who can meet her with warmth instead of fear.
The shame inheritance stops with you, if you want it to. That is an extraordinary thing. It can and will change the world.
I love you and I’m so impressed with you.
Thank you for doing this big work, to break cycles, and to empower her.
She’s going to thank you one day, maybe not explicitly, but by sharing the deeper details of her life, by letting you know when something did occur, and by coming to you when she’s in trouble.
She’ll repay you by returning the trust and respect you showed her all those years ago.
There’s no better payment than that.
Love, love,
Sarah WM
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Further reading
Friedrich, W. N., et al. (1998). Normative sexual behavior in children: A contemporary sample. Pediatrics, 101(4).
Haffner, D. W. (2008). From Diapers to Dating: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Children. Newmarket Press.
Roffman, D. M. (2012). Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to Know to Become Your Kids’ “Go-To” Person About Sex. Da Capo Lifelong.
Kenny, M. C., et al. (2008). Child sexual abuse: From prevention to self-protection. Child Abuse Review, 17(1).
de Graaf, H., et al. — ongoing research at Rutgers (Netherlands) on comprehensive sexuality education outcomes.