Education Guide

The development of sexuality is similar in children with and without disabilities, the difference is in how and when it is revealed because parents tend to take actions that delay the onset of sexual behavior until puberty and adolescence.

In general, the signals given by the child are not perceived by adults who care for her in the first year of life. The desire of disabled children to play and discover their own body is the same, however, the opportunity to live it is reduced by the lack of attention from educators and caregivers to that reality.

According to Ana Claudia Bortolozzo psychologist, professor at Unesp Bauru, author of Sexuality and Disability, children with disabilities is more controlled and monitored. Parents are always around taking care of aspects related to the fragility of health due to disability and end up neglecting the development of sexuality.

Children and adolescents with disabilities are victims of prejudice because they are not oriented to social interaction with sexuality. In denying the experience of finding and touching the body as all children need parents fail to educate them and adapt them to social life and often they are seen as exaggerated and disadvantages in their sexual expression.

Ana Claudia Bortolozzo explains that the difficulties to teach a child not to masturbate in front of everyone are the same as the parents are to prepare them for other everyday behaviors such as eating, using the bathroom, change clothes.

According to the psychologist, the condition of dependent, common to children with disabilities, robs them many opportunities to gain autonomy. Parents often infantilize other children with disabilities, preventing them to grow and develop according to the potential they have.

This belief that they are not capable of doing things alone is repeated in the development of sexuality. Many parents do not believe that children with disabilities are sexual. And worse, do not realize that the child will be a teenager and an adult capable of love, dating and marriage, able to live a healthy and happy sexuality.

The words of psychologist Ana Claudia Bortolozzo deserve attention of us all we need to recognize and understand the need and right of the child with disabilities to live their sexuality.

This conversation continues, we talk about the benefit of a good development for the future of sexuality of people with disabilities and the school’s role in this matter.