Advice on 5 year old being “curious” cross posted

🚨TW! Sexual assault 🚨

I was abused as a child, that being said I had some sexual trauma mentally. Anytime I was exposed to anything sexual as a child (a scene on tv, masturbation, being curious myself) I was punished, I felt disgusting, it was not a healthy way to learn about sex or sexuality as you can probably guess. Anyway, luckily, none of my children have experienced anything even remotely closely to what my childhood was like. (My childhood was seriously sh*t okay, it just was. But I’m going to therapy soon, I’m healing). My middle child has had a few curious encounters with little boys her age and is very interested in her privates, people kissing on tv, saying boys are cute etc and I recently found her rubbing herself with one of her stuffies at nap time. Now according to a lot of .orgs, pediatricians, child psychiatrists, and studies on the web, this is developmentally normal for her age. The articles I read go onto say that, because this is normal behavior for her age, it’s important not to overreact, punish, or be upset when you find your child doing these things because it can lead to an unhealthy sexual development and sex life as an adult. It’ll stunt their sexual growth, so to speak. Like mine, which took me 10 years to even remotely heal and I’m admittedly still not fully comfortable with sexuality. Which brings me to the point of this post.

My automatic reaction is to freak out. It makes me uncomfortable to think of children and sexual behavior in the same vicinity of each other because of the trauma I experienced. How do I talk to my children about sexuality in a healthy way? We’ve talked about body safety, good touches vs bad touches, how they should tell me right away about someone touching their privates, looking at or showing, or asking them to touch theirs. Which is how I know about the encounters my child and the little boys have had. She told me. We talked about how there are people who may try to hurt them and what can happen, and why they should always tell mommy about anything and also to stay close and follow safety directions in public, so nothing bad can happen to them. (All things not talked about with me because any talk of sex was dirty, sinful, bad). How do I talk to them about it being normal when it wasn’t for me? How do I teach them healthy habits and discuss healthy and private behavior when I’ve never known it at that age and it makes me feel disgusting, once again, to have the terms “children” and “sexual behavior” in the same sentence?

Any advice is appreciated with my whole heart and if you read all this, thank you so much ❤️