We recently found out our 5-year-old’s friend (also 5) is very interested in finding a private spot to show off his penis and scrotum. To our surprise, we interrupted him doing this in public and again recently during a get-together. I assume this is normal behavior for a kid in this developmental stage, and we aren’t aware of a reason to be concerned about him.
Nevertheless, we want to emphasize to our child that someone trying to get you alone to expose themselves to you and vice versa is not okay. After this happened, we obviously talked to our child in an attempt to be open and to enforce healthy boundaries about our bodies and other people’s. Since then, our kid has brought it up in little bits and pieces (his friend’s penis is circumcised, it’s skinny, etc.). Do I continue to remind my child that his friend should not have done what he did? I don’t want to become a broken record that stops my child from sharing important things like this with me. What’s the balance between listening and reinforcing things my kid needs to understand?
—Helping Not Harping
https://slate.com/advice/2024/06/parenting-advice-five-year-old-exposes-himself.html