Then I don't see the issue too, unless they get too invasive and don't allow me to have some personal space for a prolonged period of time. I don't consider it a sexual or romantic experience on their part, and I love to share some warmth with them. They need that care and love and attention, and I'm there to do exactly that. I will allow them to hug, crawl, play with my hair, even kiss in the cheek if that's their vibe and if they behave this way with others.

Normally this doesn't overload me, but if it does (like if my deep child crush does it repeatedly) or if the child starts going to inappropriate territory, I can always excuse myself and leave for a while, while processing it and planning ways to calm the child down.

Well, pedophilia refers to attraction to pre-puberty children generally, and more exactly - to children between age of ~4 and puberty. For pedophiles, I've heard a saying "7 is heaven, 8 is great, 9 is fine", and it's about as golden rang-y as you'll get. Personal experiences differ a lot, some will prefer the younger range, some the older, I personally would call 9-10 my perfect one.

There are other terms related to other age ranges in minors, like infantophilia/nepiophilia (up to about 4 years old; often considered as part of pedophilia, but has distinct features), hebephilia (attraction to children going through puberty), and ephebophilia (attraction to post-puberty minors, i.e. ~15-17).

Ephebophilia is straight up super common, especially in males, and most ephebophiles don't consider this as something off - after all, 18 years old is a legal boundary, not natural one, and 17yo person barely differs from 18yo.

In any way, should you academically define pedophilia, you already only look at the range from 0(4) to about 12.

Hey again, not OP, but also a pedophile. Those are great questions!

For myself, innocently interacting with kids is usually fine, but I am constantly aware of myself. If it ever feels like too much or it's not fine, I excuse myself and have actually gotten irritable with children if they won't leave me alone. Teaching kids boundaries with their own bodies sometimes looks like enforcing boundaries with your own body. If Saint says, "That's enough for me, I'm done tickling/wrestling/playing/whatever" and a kid doesn't resect that I mean it, they're going to hear me raise my voice and walk away to enforce my boundary. This is good for me as well as the kid, so that they learn they can and should set redline boundaries for how people interact with them if they ever get uncomfortable.

As to age ranges... there is great variety. Pedophiles are one slice of what are called "chronophilias," that is, people who are attracted to certain age ranges or Tanner Stages. In ascending order we have infantophilia (infants and babies), nepiophilia (2-4), pedophilia (prepubescent children), hebephilia (pubescent children), ephebophilia (teens, also this one is where attraction spots being a paraphilia as most of the population typically has some sexual interest in teens), teleiophilia (this is the "typical" age that people are attracted to each other something like 18-35), mesophilia (like 35-55?), and gerontophilia (people in their 70s+). There's another one that I missed in between meso and geronto, I think.

I am a pedophile, but I'm other things too. If we were to look at the ages that I'm attracted to, the bell of the curve would be 6-16, but it doesn't cut off sharply on either end of the curve, particularly as we get older. I'm attracted to some people in their 20s or even early 30s, and I've been attracted to kids in the nepiophile range. Age of attention is a little fuzzy for me also, because I'm at least halfway a cartoonophile. Cartoons are drawn with cutesy proportions and it can be difficult to tell the "age" of a character depicted.

Many people use the term "Minor Attracted Person" or "MAP" because it more broadly encompasses everyone with an attraction to children, not just people attracted to pre-pubescent children.

There are other community labels that we use for those of us that like boys, girls, both, or neither, as well as those of us that exclusively like children, or those of us that like adults too. There are other things, too, but this post has gone on long enough. 😅

I'm aware that some of that probably sounds super gross. It's not anything that any of us chose to have. This is something that we experience. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and were suddenly one of these things. It would be pretty difficult. Almost none of us have had an easy experience.