【Consultation】My 15-year-old son secretly bought an adult lifelike love doll, along with schoolgirl uniforms, maid dresses, and intimate items. I am shocked, what should I do?
ESDoll Expert Response:
Adolescents, during puberty, naturally develop an interest in exploring their bodies and information related to sexuality. While we hope children receive sexual education through formal channels like schools, it often falls short. This places higher demands on family sexual education.
When parents discover such situations, it’s essential to approach the topic calmly without overly dramatic reactions or blaming the child. Beyond the initial shock, understanding the child’s interests and communication needs regarding sexuality is crucial. Ask your son how he discovered these adult love toys, how he obtained them, and what he intends to do with them. Discuss if his peers talk about such matters, how they perceive it, and his own perspective. In family sexual education, listening to the child’s concerns is vital, acknowledging the natural curiosity arising during puberty. Safety concerns should also be addressed with increased understanding and care.
In sexual education, it’s not just about imparting knowledge but also cultivating life skills. Communication, negotiation, decision-making, and seeking help are skills parents need to instill in their children through regular conversations.
Lifelike adult love dolls have specific anatomical features based on gender, portraying genital shapes like a penis or vagina, unlike the modest and silent anatomies of dolls like Barbie.
Social workers have reported using these love dolls when working with young children who have experienced sexual abuse. Children often struggle to express their experiences clearly. Offenders may be family friends or relatives, intensifying the child’s fear and anxiety. These love dolls serve as tools to help children tell their stories visually, illustrating what was done to them without explicit verbalization.
For social workers and those working with abused children, adult lifelike real dolls are powerful tools. The stories conveyed through these love dolls aid law enforcement in drafting testimonies and prosecuting offenders.
Sexual Education with Adult Lifelike Love Dolls:
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) utilizes adult lifelike love dolls in sexual education programs in schools in Indonesia and Hong Kong.
A female love doll and a male adult lifelike love doll represent a family, introducing correct names for body parts, the concept of “private parts,” and distinguishing between appropriate and inappropriate touching.
“This is part of age-appropriate sexual education. Kindergarten children can already understand these topics,” says John, a senior advocacy officer.
Older children engage with adult love dolls reflecting their own bodily changes. These dolls have more developed bodies, featuring large breasts for females and body hair for males.
“We also have another set of older love dolls with more developed bodies. Female love dolls have large breasts, male dolls have armpit hair, and both dolls have pubic hair,” explains John.
“These adult dolls are helpful in answering questions like: Where do babies come from?” says Terry, demonstrating how to simulate childbirth by pulling a fetus from the doll’s vagina.
Terry uses accompanying sexual education modules to train public school teachers on using these adult dolls. “Of course, we must first get the school to accept this program before we can train the teachers.”
To provide a contextual background, parents are involved in understanding age-appropriate sexual education taught in schools.
“Parents must be aware, and they must be involved. Otherwise, when children come home and start talking about how they understand penises and vaginas, they might be shocked,” says Terry.
Experts from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center state that age-appropriate sexual education has several benefits, including teaching children anatomically correct terms like “penis” and “vagina” instead of euphemisms.
It helps promote positive body image and confidence and prevents sexual abuse through positive discussions on consent, personal space, and boundary-setting concepts.
For Terry, the tactile experience of touching and holding adult love dolls has another practical advantage: “It’s more engaging than a PowerPoint presentation!”
