We can’t address touch and sexual desire without talking about the M word. Although most parents will cringe (or even stop reading right here!) at the thought of discussing masturbation with their child, most children have already discovered it to some degree.

First, take a deep breath. We realize that talking about your daughter’s growing sexual desire is not easy, but we commend you for even considering it.

By age 13 or 14, girls may seek touch from females and males in their peer group. By 14 or 15, many girls find older boys more mature than the boys in their peer group, and look to the older ones for attention and relationships. Sexual experimentation is very common in the early to mid teen years. Most early experimentation involves kissing and intimate touching, but teens today move quickly, and 25% have had oral sex or sexual intercourse by age 15. It is frighteningly easy for teen girls to give and receive touch that may not be healthy or fulfilling, particularly if there is a touch hungry boy in her life.

So, whether or not your daughter has a boyfriend by adolescence, it’s time to help her set personal boundaries and limits on intimate touch. You can help your daughter understand that sexual activity is not a healthy way to nourish her touch hunger and that even sexual desire is not fulfilled in a satisfying way unless there is a relationship that builds emotional intimacy before physical intimacy.

At first, it may seem like a no win situation. You’ve completely lost your cool factor in your teen daughter’s eyes, particularly when it comes to public displays of affection. Your hand is no longer needed to cross the street and your proud parent embrace is an unwelcome gesture after the school play. Don’t let the rebuff stop you! It’s important for parents to continue to feed their daughter’s touch hunger. Surely, there’s plenty of private time to find good opportunities. At home, when her friends aren’t around, keep giving her big bear hugs or little “I love you” hugs, even though she may protest. Give her a back scratch or shoulder massage. Hang out at her bedside and rub her feet. Invest in the flow of touch as you would verbal communication.

While you’re busy in the present, don’t forget the past. Keep at the forefront of your mind the amount of touch your daughter sought as a child and continue to provide a similar amount or more to her as an adolescent. Recognize that most people enjoy affectionate touch to some degree, but some more than others. Even if your daughter is in the “less touchy” category, she will still appreciate and feel nourished by brief episodes of affectionate touch. Something that once came naturally to you as the parent, an instinctive impulse, must now be delivered in more thoughtful and steady doses.

Touch alternatives

On the flip side of calculated affection, many girls’ touch hunger can be fulfilled in wonderfully innocent and rewarding ways. Having a dog, horse, guinea pig or other pet to cuddle and care for can provide rewarding touch within an emotional connection. Caring for a pet or volunteering with animals in some way can also model important aspects of healthy relationships such as responsibility, affection, trust and loyalty. Babysitting can similarly fill your daughters touch tank and teach important relationship qualities. Using these types of examples, you can help your daughter see the importance of establishing trust before touching and of building trust through non-threatening touch. These are important lessons that will help her as she begins to explore romantic relationships.

Where do her peers come in?

As she begins to spend more time with her friends, she will naturally seek touch from them. Preteen girls tend to give and receive friendly and playful touch from their female friends. They can feel nourished by fixing each other’s hair, giving manicures, or even exercising together. At this age, however, it is not unusual for sexual exploration (homosexual or heterosexual) to occur if they are left unsupervised, but it is usually related to their growing curiosity about bodily changes. Girls at this age are particularly interested in how their body changes look compared to their friends. If you find your daughter involved in such exploration, it’s a good time to provide some images of normal bodily changes and to discuss the importance of privacy and limit setting.

So, how are we doing so far? Odds are that up until now you’ve probably been on board and in sync with our conversation about touch hunger. Sure, you might have winced a little here and there, but for the most part you’re probably saying, “I can do that.” Not so fast. Remember the boy we chatted about in the first blog, his arm looped around your daughter’s waist, her hands affectionately wrapped around his? Well, don’t look now, but he’s sitting in your living room. And in one form or another, he’s here to stay. Check back tomorrow for more.

Denial seems like a quick fix for the aging child, but it only works for so long. No matter how hard we wish away the teen years, and the angst that comes with them, it’s going to happen. And let’s be honest, most parents don’t really want to know that their little girl is having big girl desires. In turn, most adolescent girls don’t necessarily recognize sexual energy and desire as such, but it does affect the way they think and behave. Sometimes these new feelings show up as interest in a boy, new attention to clothes and make up, or a heightened focus on body image. Sometimes it surfaces as her first crush or dreams of her first kiss. In other instances, it leads to sexual experimentation without an understanding of the emotional and physical consequences of sexual activity.

Starting with the day your baby was born, gentle contact and instinctive gestures fulfilled the need for physical affection. But have you ever wondered what becomes of that "touch hunger" when your daughter turns 11 or 15 or 18? Certainly, the need to be touched doesn’t dissipate with age—in fact, it only increases. So who or what replaces that urge as time moves forward, situations change, and different opportunities to satisfy touch hunger come her way? Throughout this series of articles, we’ll explore touch hunger, offering insights and solutions to a tricky topic that every parent and teen encounters.

Let’s start from the middle, with that 15-year old and the heart stopping “whoa” that jerks to the surface the first time you see your daughter lean comfortably into a boy, his arms looped around her waist while her hands wrap tightly around his. As uncomfortable as it is for you, it’s couldn’t be more natural for them. For most parents, that scene leads to automatic shift into protective mode, brainstorming for ways to stop it. But before you ship her off to boarding school or ban the boy from your front porch, remember that it’s also only natural for your daughter to be hungry for affectionate touch.