I think at age 6, or 4 or 3, some corrective action is necessary.
But at 18 months or two years, there's not a whole lot of argument you can make (or that I can) that will really sink in, because for the most part you've hit a language and cognitive development wall. But in the cases of younger children, explaining that my breasts were in fact defective and that I had no milk seemed to make enough sense to them. But it wasn't a repeat problem, fwiw.
And this is not to say that it shouldn't bother you, or that you shouldn't have had an entirely different reaction. My own reaction was informed by the fact that, after childbirth, I never really thought of my breasts as sexual again; functional, yes; I assumed that small children who are not hormonal would see them the same way, because they were nursing or had nursed.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2008-04-22 09:41 pm (UTC)But at 18 months or two years, there's not a whole lot of argument you can make (or that I can) that will really sink in, because for the most part you've hit a language and cognitive development wall. But in the cases of younger children, explaining that my breasts were in fact defective and that I had no milk seemed to make enough sense to them. But it wasn't a repeat problem, fwiw.
And this is not to say that it shouldn't bother you, or that you shouldn't have had an entirely different reaction. My own reaction was informed by the fact that, after childbirth, I never really thought of my breasts as sexual again; functional, yes; I assumed that small children who are not hormonal would see them the same way, because they were nursing or had nursed.