Recently my wife and I caught on more then one occassion our 2 year old daughter in our baby son's (her brother) room with his diaper down look at and touching his penis and when we confronted her and ask why she was doing this she would only reply "I don't know". We tried to explain to her that what she was doing is a No! No! we've given her timeouts and sent her to her room with no toys but that doesn't seem to stop her fascination with looking at her brother's genitals. My wife and I are really between a rock and a hard place right now and don't know what else we can do. Any advice from other parents would be deeply appreciated.
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I think she's just fascinated with the fact that he's different than she is. Telling her it's a "no no" probably makes her even more curious.
Why not ask her to help you bathe the baby? At some point you might begin bathing them together. That should do away with all curiosity on both sides.
Secrets only serve to invite secrecy about the act of getting around them. I was an only boy and I had only girls in my neighborhood for playmates. Our parents never knew the fun we had secretly checking out our differences ---- when we were between 6 and 10 years old. If those differences had not been kept so secret when we were younger we probably wouldn't have been doing that.
Why not ask her to help you bathe the baby? At some point you might begin bathing them together. That should do away with all curiosity on both sides.
Secrets only serve to invite secrecy about the act of getting around them. I was an only boy and I had only girls in my neighborhood for playmates. Our parents never knew the fun we had secretly checking out our differences ---- when we were between 6 and 10 years old. If those differences had not been kept so secret when we were younger we probably wouldn't have been doing that.
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Let her view his penis. Let her touch and explore. She's at a very inquisitive age. It's just like learning about butterflies or rocks.
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Look at the date on this. Today the daughter is 15 (physically a young woman) and the son is at least 13 (physically a boy, or a man or in-between, depending on whether he is an early bloomer or late bloomer), and probably neither one of them remembers these incidents, depending on how long they went on. I would assume that the daughter was already out of diapers, since in dressing herself she becomes familiar with what she has. I wouldn't bother with the why question for her. I would just chalk it up to a natural curiosity. I would use this situation to begin her first session of sex education. I would tell her, "That's what makes a boy a boy, and what you have is what makes a girl a girl." If you are lucky, that, and perhaps some names will be plenty for right now, and the next need for a sex education won't be until she is about 10 and about to start turning into a woman. If it's not too awkward, I would start bathing them together and, since she has already begun touching him, I would allow her to touch, if he seemed to be indifferent to it. (I would tell her, "If I'm going to let you touch him, then it's only fair that I let him touch you if he wants to, so if you don't want to let him touch you, then you must stop touching him.) That may be enough to to fill her need to compare.
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