If you look at reports from day care providers and parents, Dr. And in an informal survey of pediatric colleagues, there seems to be a lot of variation in whether doctors bring up the subject. Parents and children sometimes bring their questions and concerns to the pediatrician, but there is surprisingly little guidance or information available in the pediatric literature. Let’s face it, masturbation can indeed be fun, but it turns out to be a subject that many parents feel awkward about discussing with their children. That was helpful when, soon after, I acquired the original cast album of the musical “Hair,” which presented a new set of vocabulary challenges at least I understood the line, “Masturbation can be fun.” I asked my mother, what is masturbation? And I remember her answer: “Touching yourself for sexual pleasure,” she said, neutral and nonjudgmental like the English professor she was. I first came across the word, naturally, by reading ahead of my grade level at age 10, I was ostentatiously reading my father’s copy of Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa, ” the book that had convinced him to become an anthropologist.
