A professionally grounded children's book.
The author of the book is a trained psychologist and she teaches future social educators. Professional knowledge made the author aware of the potential negative consequences when children are prevented from gradually learning about their sexuality and the norms surrounding it.
The girl Elba asks: "Dad, will you rub my vulva – I think that would be lovely." This is the start of a longer story, where Elba and her parents look at an anatomical atlas. Later, Elba has a play with sexual content along with a few other children. Here a conflict occurs and the teacher regulates and guides the children so that they can continue their play – happy and an experience richer.
Very naturally, children transgress each other's boundaries. This is also the case in games with sexual content, and therefore, as in all other games, there is a need for adults to help children be receptive of each other and society’s norms. This is one of the topics in a short postscript, which also talks about sexual development and points out the importance of recognizing children's emerging sexuality.
Learning about one's own body - along with confidentiality when talking to close adults about sexuality - is preventive in relation to sexual abuse. Through the children's book, children gain knowledge about what is right and wrong and learn that it’s easy and helpful to go to an adult when something becomes uncomfortable or too difficult to handle.
Excerpts of reviews:
"...we need that"
”Frida Nøddebo Nyrup's book about Elba, is a refreshing contribution to the still very limited stack of children's books about children's sexuality; especially because tabooing children's sexual curiosity and doctor games is non-existent in the book - and we need that! ” (Anne Fricke Rudbeck, Master of Education in Educational Anthropology, UCSyd)
"It was hard for me to get through"
“A beautifully illustrated book that shows everything with text that matches. It was hard for me to get through, but I managed it, despite my inner conflicts with the topic of child sexuality. However, the postscript made the whole thing come together. ” (Jørgen Nancke - Forlaget Muse)
Thanks to Frida Nyrup for speaking on behalf of the children and helping us "old people" to understand how we can help our children to have the best relationship with their own sexuality, so that they can have the best start in their sexual life. ❤️ If I were a book reviewer, I would give the book 5 hearts out of 5 possible ... ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ (Else Olesen - Specialist in disease and sexuality and dealer of sexual aids, teacher, lecturer. In addition, part of the Sexological Center AUH).
A professional input: Sexual development take place primarily during childhood and adolescence: thoughts, fantasies, emotional relationships, social and culturally determined norms / understandings are coupled with the physical-sexual events. The physical-sexual events are, for example, that you several times during the course of a day spontaneously get erections of respectively the penis and clitoris or an event can be playing with other children. At bedtime, the child will typically let thoughts and perhaps fantasies about the day's events unfold.
Here it seems that couplings can occur, because there along with thought activity is enough stillness to feel the body’s reaction during spontaneous erections, which can also “invite” self-stimulation.
The couplings typically occur through highly emotional experiences, that are thought about often during a period of time. The fact that it is thoughts that arise frequently over a period of time means that the couplings are strengthened by repetition. This is a suggestion of how we form patterns of arousal (Mitchell, 2021). Children's sexuality is thus essentially different from the adult's sexuality in that it is solely a sensory quantity. To help this development in the best possible way, adult guidance and correction is needed. Exactly as we guide and correct when children play in the sandbox and may disagree on who is entitled to the shovel.
Mitchell, R. W. (2021). High and Tight, Please: Self-explanations for Experiencing Short Haircuts as Erotic. Sexuality & Culture. doi:10.1007/s12119-021-09815-y
