My daughter is 6 years old and from the day she mastered the correct pronunciation of the "br"-sound as in - you may have guessed it - the word "breast" she seems to be obsessed with the word as well as the body part. While this might be cute and funny at the age of three, it's become quite annoying by now. Let me give you a couple of examples:
- She randomly says the word "breast" or her own variations ("breasty") of it, often multiple times without any apparent reason.
- She addresses people - mostly her mother - with the term "breast". (Instead of "Hello, Mom!" she greets her with "Hello, breast.")
- In a conversation she replaces random words with "breast" or a variation. ("What would you like to eat?" - "Breast!", "How are you?" - "Breasty!") She also does that when she's playing alone of when singing a song.
- She touches and gropes other people's - mostly, but not only my wife's - breast frequently. Sometimes she's quite gentle, sometimes not. It's not that she's actively trying to inflict pain, though.
- Any touching is limited to people she knows very well, but it's not limited to women. (She likes to touch my breast, too.) While doing so, she often repeats the word "breast" over and over.
- When told to stop, she just giggles and really seems to be enjoying herself. Raising one's voice up to outright shouting tends to makes things worse so we learned to better refrain from that.
- She shows that behavior at home and in public.
We don't have the problem with the behavior itself, but with the intensity/frequency. Since we found it cute at first - when she was three/four - we laughed with her when she did that and didn't mind. Occasionally I responded by tickling her breast usually making her giggle. As she grew older, we tried to explain to her in various ways why we don't like her behavior:
- While she may think it's funny, we consider it really, really annoying.
- It can be painful.
- It's inappropriate - especially in public.
- She's not a baby any more.
- It's not ok to do this without permission of the other person.
- There are circumstances under which we allow her to do that, if she follows certain "rules" such as being gentle.
We are aware that our daughter is quite sensitive and she may need more cuddling and hugging than other children. She's also quite smart and witty.
She's about to enter school half a year from now and we're really looking for a way to stop or at least limit her behavior until then.
