Sexual experiences in early childhood: 18-year longitudinal data from the UCLA family lifestyles project - University of California, Los Angeles

Journal of Sex Research, Fall, 1997 by Paul Okami, Richard Olmstead, Paul R. Abramson

For this reason--and also because of the general scarcity of evidence supporting the notion that isolated events in childhood exert significant effects on adult behavior (Scarr, Phillips, & McCartney, 1990; Vaillant, 1977)--it is not clear why investigators have persisted in trying to find "main effects" of childhood peer sexual experiences. Indeed, even childhood sexual experiences with adults, which a priori are presumed damaging, have been shown to vary widely in effects (including no effects) as a consequence of ecological context variables such as duration and frequency, gender, family background variables, specific sexual behaviors, presence of coercion, SES, and so on (cf. Higgins & McCabe, 1994; Kilpatrick, 1992; Parker & Parker, 1991; Rind & Tromovitch, 1997).

The apparent futility of looking for long-term main effects of childhood sexual experience is expressed in the relatively few retrospective studies that do exist--for example, Greenwald and Leitenberg (1989), Leitenberg et al. (1989), and Kilpatrick (1992). These investigators uniformly reported conclusions that form a common sense proposition: Interactive peer sexual experiences in childhood, when viewed apart from the ecological context and phenomenology of the events, are not associated with any correlates of adult experience--be they beneficial or harmful. Indeed, in the Greenwald and Leitenberg (1989) and Leitenberg et al. (1989) studies, no differences between "experienced" and "nonexperienced" groups were found even under many potentially problematic contextual conditions. On the other hand, Kilpatrick (1992) found mixed positive, neutral, and negative adult correlates as a function of very specific ecological variables. Along similar lines, Haugaard and Tilly (1988) found that characteristics of the childhood sexual experience, rather than the experience itself, were related to positive or negative self-reported responses.

In the current exploratory investigation, 200 children from the UCLA Family Lifestyle Project (cf. Weisner & Gamier, 1992) were studied to determine long-term correlates of early childhood peer sexual experiences. These children were part of an ongoing multidisciplinary investigation that currently is in its 20th year. Because criterion variables in the few existing investigations of peer childhood sexual experiences have been focused primarily on sexual adjustment, in the current study we examined a wider range of adjustment correlates at ages 17-18. Control variables included sex of participant, family SES, "conventional" versus "nonconventional" family structure, and family values such as attitudes toward sexuality. We predicated this study on the assumption that retrospective recall of sexual data are unreliable (Berk et al., 1995) and that longitudinal data provide a better record of the occurrence or nonoccurrence of childhood sexual events.

No long-term non-interactive correlates of childhood sex play were expected in the current study. However, we considered it plausible that exposure to sex play might exert effects interactively, for example, with sex of participant. Although Leitenberg et al. (1989) reported no interactions by sex in their retrospective survey of childhood sexual experiences, sex of participant interactions were found among the Family Lifestyles Project children in a concurrent study of exposure to parental nudity and scenes of parental sexuality (Okami, Olmstead, Abramson, & Pendleton, 1996). In general, these findings suggested that sexuality-related events might be experienced differently by boys and girls. Specifically, in the case of exposure to parental nudity, findings pointed toward potentially beneficial correlates of exposure both for boys and girls--for example, greater frequency of positive rather than negative sexual experiences in adolescence and fewer reports of abuse of certain recreational drugs--however, these benefits were attenuated for girls. In the case of exposure to primal scenes, findings pointed to neutral or beneficial correlates for boys--such as fewer instances of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or involvement in a woman's pregnancy--and neutral or problematic correlates for girls--such as increased frequency of STDs and pregnancy.