I just want to add here that I am in no way saying it's ok for an older male sibling to engage in this behavior. My point was more about how children find themselves and explore and while there can be trepidation about it, they do not understand it from an adult perspective. I made sure to talk about it with my daughter because I was concerned about her possibly being encouraged to explore with other children and I wanted her to know it was wrong and to say no. Because I had talked to her about it she came to me and told me about a friend of hers that was in my little brownie troup who's brother and his friend were trying to get her to explore with them, the mother was clueless and tended to leave them alone at home too much. I informed the mother and my daughter told this friend "do not do this it's wrong". Truth is, a lot of parents fail to talk about this with their children and "may" talk about don't allow an adult to touch you in certain ways but notoriously fail to tell them the same about other children and not to explore with them in this nature too.

The other thing that happens is that as children get older and they are observing their parents, they begin to realize something their parents do, sometimes they hear it or accidentally see it happening, say they get up at night to go to the bathroom and see something happening with mom and dad. Children are far from stupid and they actually pick up on a lot more than we realize. And they notoriously want to imitate and explore. I actually remember when my daughter was only around 6 years old and played with a little boy her age that lived on our street. One day this boy was walking home and suddenly turned around and exposed himself to my daughter and he said something like, "you know I have this and it's special". My daughter was shocked and I have to be honest, I watched him do this myself and it frightened my daughter and she cried. However this little boy who was an only child must have picked this up from seeing his parents somehow talking about this not knowing he was watching them. So somehow he figured what he had was important. He clearly did not know what he did that day was very wrong. Again, something I had to discuss with his mother and she was shocked and embarrassed. Well, he saw something she wasn't aware he saw. Just saying IT HAPPENS.