At some point children become aware of a major distraction that results from stimulating the genitals. Baby boys are sometimes seem bumping their crotches on the floor and little girls, while straddling someone's leg or the arm of a chair, rock back and forth.
Children stumble on that behavior at widely varying ages. Research indicates that self-stimulation, exhibitionism and rubbing against others continues until the age of five or so and then drops off until about age eleven, at which time it recommences.
While modern science often approves of masturbation on such grounds as that it relieves sexual tension, there is far more to the story than is perceived by sexually active scientists who are not capable of being truly objective in this particular area of human behavior. While it is true that masturbation does relieve sexual tension, that relief is short lived. When people masturbate, they create a physiological need to masturbate which, if it is not satisfied, results in considerable sexual tension, similar to withdrawal from drugs. Moreover, according to the principles of behaviorism, masturbation, being rewarding, creates triggers for sexual arousal. Persons or events which occur during or which are fastasized about during masturbation will subsequently cause arousal unless behaviorism is far off the mark. Therefore, it is quite possible that a young lad, who has been daydreaming about the local girl with the largest mammary glands while masturbating, will be aroused at the sight of her, in person, and will be more likely to aggress if he has not relieved himself for awhile and has nowhere to go to affect that relief.
Another issue that is seldom mentioned is the impact on male behavior of the fantasies which they entertain during masturbation. In an effort to achieve an orgasm, as is well known, hetersexual males DO NOT USUALLY imagine scenarios in which they engage in lengthy courting rituals filled with scenes of expensive dinner dates, boquets of flowers and the like. Rather, they tend to think about women as degraded sex objects, perhaps a dozen or so at a time, who act like wild animals in heat and do whatever--that is, ANYTHING--the male demands. It would seem that guys who are repeatedly rewarded, with orgasms, for dwelling on the degradation of women would tend to have thoughts like that when they are with women in the real world.