Prepubertal boys' sexual behavior and behavior problems.

The increasingly early initiation of penetrative sexual practices and the implication for prevention of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases requires the study of childhood sexual behavior and its determinants. In adolescence, early sexual initiation is associated with other "problem behaviors" (Jessor & Jessor, 1977). To explore an analogous association for the middle childhood years, we studied 126 boys aged 5 to 11 years at increased risk for the development of conduct-disorder-related behavior with the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL)/4-18 (Achenbach, 1991) and reevaluated 112 of them 15 months later. At both time points, the boys scored higher on the Sex Problems scale as well as on the nonsexual CBCL scales than Achenbach's nonclinical norm sample. Within the at-risk sample, the Sex Problems scale was significantly related to externalizing problem behaviors, but also to the other CBCL scales of behavioral/emotional problems. These data point to childhood precursors of the association observed by Jessor and Jessor (1977) in adolescence.

Gender-related assessment of childhood play.

Parent-report based scales for the assessment of sex-dimorphic behavior are an important tool in research on psychosexual differentiation and its disorders. This paper presents the factor analysis and corresponding scale development for the slightly expanded Child Game Participation Questionnaire (Bates & Bentler, 1973), based on the parents of a demographically diverse school sample of 355 girls and 333 boys aged 6 to 10 years. Evidence supporting each of three theoretical positions in gender assessment--unidimensional bipolar, two-dimensional unipolar, and multidimensional--was provided. Effect sizes were unusually large for gender, but small for age, socioeconomic level, and race/ethnicity.