I am very sorry to hear that, I am also a survivor of childhood SA. I understand the long term effects of that kind of trauma.

However our daughter is fine. She has no context to know what she saw because she hasn't been sexually abused. And from reading other comments here it seems not uncommon that little kids might walk in on something and since they have no idea what they saw they are not traumatized, in fact a few comments have described their kids thought they were just playing or they simply forget this kind of five second issue where they were not in harms way. There was no fear involved to create trauma.

I understand in our brains, which have been warped by being betrayed in such a fundamental way by an adult who we should have been able to trust, that stable foundation is gone which would change the context perhaps for witnessing this on accident. But my daughter is not me and she is ok.

Oh and it gets worse than that. She lives in a stable home with food security, has two loving parents to care for her, who love her unconditionally, who don’t neglect or abuse her, and who also love each other. She might turn out to be a kind a wonderful person, the shame.

Past 2yrs we started to say years. Under 2yrs we say months. It's what their doctors do and other parents we've come across in play groups. Maybe it's a regional thing.

I can neither confirm nor deny. You know how those NDA's are... Keep It Secret. Keep It Safe.

At 2 years old we switched from months to years. Babies do a lot of growing in 24 months so it conveys developmental milestones by giving months even past 1yr of age; a 12 month old will be very different from a 23 month old but both would be 1yr olds. It’s too complicated to try and do decimals for each month past 12mo, for example a 13 month old would be 1.08 years, but no one talks like that. Past 2yrs, once she reached the 1/2 way then I add it on for 2.5 until she’s 3, etc. Past 5 years the 1/2’s probably aren’t necessary any longer, then we can just say 5, 6, 7…

And now I need bleach to clean that from my brain

We tried for dada and papa but she would not say papa. For a while we were dada and baba, the suddenly it was dada and dawd. We got a kick out of it.

Yes, that’s generally our approach. We tell her the truth in an age appropriate way and use the correct terminology for what body parts are called. I don’t feel it does anyone any favors to be raised overly sheltered and especially to have biologically/medically important information kept a secret in a way that makes it seem shameful. But, uh, we definitely didn’t want her to see that.

Our hope is that if we make the incident inconsequential by not giving it any extra attention if she never brings it up, or if she does ask then we give very simple age appropriate answers and act unbothered, then hopefully it will just fade from her memory from being unimportant to her

My mother used to give us Benadryl to get us to fall asleep on road trips

Fair, we would of course still be there for her if she knocked or called out to us from the other side a locked door

We're horrified wondering how long she was standing there trying to decide what was going on before settling on "doing something"