Help! Is it normal that... my four-year old daughter is a flirt?

Please, mums’ brains trust, share your thoughts on this sticky parenting problem…

My daughter is a flirt. And she’s four. And it makes me anxious.

It’s a bit awkward. One of my friends was looking after her for a couple of hours recently. ‘How’s my girl?’ I texted. ‘Being good?’.

‘She’s fine,’ texted my friend. ‘But she’s flirting outrageously with my husband.’ Oh, dear.

When she’s identified a ‘target’, she behaves like a love-struck adolescent. She hair-twirls, she bats her eyelids, she punches them playfully on the arm, angling for a wrestle. She giggles and runs away to hide, only to run back to tickle them and blush. This is how I know that it’s not behaviour she’s seen at home. Look, her dad and I really like each other and everything, but we don’t behave like that.

My daughter’s got good taste. Her favourite preschool teacher is a pretty handsome guy. A lot of the mums flirt with him, too. And she seems to do it with her friend’s dads who she really likes, all of whom are lovely men, poor things. I worry that her behaviour is a bit embarrassing to them, not to mention irritating. I can really see those barbecue invitations drying up if this keeps on…

Happily, my girl also moves on pretty quickly. Sometimes she’ll pull out her inner flirt for a few intense weeks and then the next time she sees them, they’re dropped.

So, it’s all pretty harmless fun, right?  But it makes me worried that she’s growing up too fast, that she’s becoming  ‘sexualised’ too early (not that her behaviour is sexual, but it’s certainly, um, romantic), and, that, in the words of pretty much every mum I know “You’re in SO much trouble when she’s a teenager!”

Help! Do I need to do anything about my daughter’s behaviour? Is it normal or should I be worried?