Misdiagnosis of Masturbatory Behavior in Children
I found this study particularly interesting as this is behavior I have noticed before. A friend’s 3-year-old daughter used to sit at the dinner table, clearly day dreaming, and tense and relax her lower body in a way that seemed like she wasn’t aware of it. I asked her mother about it and she said she thought it was just her way of soothing herself. This study seems to confirm my friends hunch.
An article published in December’s Pediatrics describes 12 cases of children who were referred to pediatric movement disorder clinics for evaluation of paroxysmal dystonic posturing (which is characterized by involuntary muscle contractions that force the body into particular movements and positions). The children were, in many cases, subjected to invasive testing and medication before neurologists discovered the dystonic-like symptoms were actually normal muscle contractions that accompany masturbation.
All the cases were young girls, and the researchers suggest that this may be because boys masturbatory behavior most often involves direct touching of the genitals where girls don’t necessarily touch the genitals when masturbating.
The study makes note of the fact that the masturbatory behavior is completely healthy, “Masturbation is a normal human behavior. It’s not harmful to anybody,” said Jonathan W. Mink, M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the article and Chief of Child Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Golisano Children’s Hospital at Strong. “It also doesn’t portend any sexual deviancy later in life,” Mink said. “It’s such a common and normal behavior that it’s nothing to worry about. It’s not appropriate to punish children for it. They associate it with comfort, like thumb-sucking.”
Comforting Behavior Mistaken for Movement Disorder (via Forbes)
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