DIFFICULTIES AND MISTAKES IN SEX EDUCATION
To the theoretical teacher or parent eager to reform the world on paper, it may seem easy to introduce sex education into the nursery training of the home, and into the curriculum of our schools. It appears a comparatively easy matter to tell the little child the truth about its own body, and as it grows older, to give carefully prepared lessons about plants and animals, which shall lead it slowly and beautifully into the way of knowledge.
Text books have been written, pamphlets officially issued, schemes drawn up for home and school instruction, and rules laid down—new finger-posts to right conduct, whereby the younger generation may be enlightened and (as we hope) by this means saved from making the mistakes that we ourselves have made.
I wish it were as simple as this. That sex instruction could be taken from books.
Of late various attempts have been made to focus attention on this aspect of the question or on that; we have been told how this teaching should be given, and with still greater assurance how it should not be given; this must be done and that must not be done; this said and that left unsaid. And groups of earnest-minded parents and teachers, in almost every town, have met together to discuss and decide debatable points; lecturers have been applied for, and their utterances have been listened to as a new gospel; yet I venture to think that, as in all other experimental and debatable questions, the very multitude of counsel and the earnestness that is expended, indicates the uncertainty of our knowledge and the doubtful value of many of our affirmations.
I find a tendency amongst most grown-ups, and especially teachers and advanced parents who ought to know better, to place too firm a reliance on their own power to educate the young in sex. I myself have done this. Like those drowning in deep water where they cannot swim, we have clutched at any plank of hope. You see so many of the old planks—religion, social barriers, chaperones, home restrictions, and so many more, on which our parents used to rely, have failed us; been broken in our hands by the vigorous destroying grasp of the young generation; and, therefore, we have clutched with frantic fingers at this new fair-looking life-raft, in pursuit of the one aim, to protect our children.
But will it save them? I doubt if it will except in a limited and very different way from what is usually accepted. We cannot help the young very far or deeply by any of our teaching. Not only do they want their own experience, not ours, but it is right for them to have it. The urge of adolescence carries them away out of our detaining hands. And I think it may be well that at once we realize and acknowledge the very narrow limits of our power.
Thus I have nothing new or very striking to bring to the solution of this difficult problem. I shall endeavour, however, to look at the matter broadly and practically, and attempt to indicate in what direction, as it seems to me, further progress may be made at the present stage of our very faulty knowledge.
One of the most disturbing features that we have to recognise in relation to the child is the very early age at which sex manifests itself. It was formerly supposed that the sex-life began at the age of puberty. Nothing is more untrue. Every child is born with instincts and desires—feelings of love, of hate, of jealousy, which furnish the motives of conduct, and are accompanied by physical manifestations of pleasure or discomfort which express themselves, often in a veiled way, as wishes and cravings, that find relief in action, and must therefore be yoked either to some burden of utility or to some car of vanity.
It should be noted, however, that the word sexual is somewhat ambiguous, because I want to stretch it to include the very germs that afterwards blossom into the adult sex-life. The little girl with her doll is maternal, and the boy with a tin sword is showing the crudest manifestation of the male protective instinct.
The baby whenever it enjoys the satisfaction of realising its infantile wants gurgles with delight. “Every nurse, and every mother who tends her child herself knows this, and recognises as a necessary task in the training of the child, almost from the day of its birth, the winning of it away from this egocentric concentration on its own body.”[2]
We are always trying not to admit that we have to recognise in relation to sex the very early age at which it manifests itself. We do not believe this, because we dislike to believe it. Our fear causes us to neglect in a quite wrong way the deeply affective results of the early childish emotions.
To the uninstructed eye, early desires and feelings connected with sex are often so unlike their final form that they pass unrecognised. But the mother who has eyes to see and knowledge to understand knows that the child can hide no secret. When the lips speak not, the faces in twitching mouth and blinking eyes; the hands, in telling gestures; the biting nails; the sucking thumb; the shuffling feet; the toes that are played with and sucked—all these utter the truth; and betrayal escapes out of every nervous movement of hands, and feet, and face.
We will not see and acknowledge the presence of these early emotions because we want to see the child an angel. We cannot surrender the picture of childhood as a period of delightful ignorance and innocence.
The very reverse is the truth. The child has brought with it much from more primitive times; just in the same way as its body still shows traces of earlier developments in life, so its emotions, its instincts, its wishes and desires, revert back, in many particulars, to lower stages of growth. Always the child has to fight its way upwards, and indeed, it has no easy task to find and keep the right path, in its short journey of discovery to reach from the savagery of the babe to the level of a civilised social man or woman. If we do not help it, the way becomes doubly hard and often the path is lost or, in other words, the savage triumphs.
We are now in a better position to answer the question, so much debated, as to the age at which the sex education of the child should begin. Instead of this being a matter that can be put off until the child is older, and the angel innocence has been sullied by contact with an evil and ugly world, it becomes overwhelmingly important that no time whatever should be lost. Every effort must be made to educate from the very hour of birth these primitive instincts, which, though permissible in the savage and the little child, are wholly wrong if allowed to remain active in the later adult years. Delay is fatal. Time lost now never can be regained: mistakes made cannot be put right. A wrong direction may most easily be given by a careless act. I cannot emphasise this too strongly, or too often. The character, the life history and the entire fate of every child is fixed in the nursery.
The mistake we have been making for so long is in regarding this instruction in sex as something we can impart to children or with-hold from them; a subject we may teach or not teach; enlightenment we may give to them or conceal from them. This view is entirely erroneous. In one sense, the whole matter really lies outside of our wills. Sex education cannot be omitted by any parent or any teacher from the training of any child, for it is given by not being given, just as surely as the other way about. There is no escape for anyone who has to do with a child.
You will see what I mean. It is not the good and wise lessons you may give, of nicely arranged explanations, with flower illustrations or stories of the mating of birds and animals; still less is it warnings or goody-goody talks about purity; nor is it any kind of formal or even conscious instruction that will have the true moulding influence on the character and emotional state of the child; but what most influences him, or in other words, teaches him, and helps or hinders him, is the peculiarly affective state—I mean, the emotional attitude—which usually is totally unknown to the parents and educators, and is also quite incomprehensible to the child himself. It is all the things that the grown-ups are trying hardest to hide from the children and perhaps also covering away from themselves that are the real directing forces in their character. The concealed enmity, or even small disharmonies between the parents, the repressed tempers, the strangled temptations, the secret longing of one or other parent, the miseries that are hidden—all these inevitably arouse a response in the children, which acting continuously and unconsciously bring them to a state corresponding with that of the parents. Their shame and want of joy in sex will become the children’s shame and want of joy; their unhappiness in love will be the children’s unhappiness; their most hidden wishes will escape to create disharmonies in these young and tender souls.
The parents, and especially the mother, impress deeply into the child’s being the seal of their characters, and the more sensitive and mouldable the child the deeper is the impression. Take, for instance, the only or favourite child, who suffers under an anxious excess of tenderness, so that his love is so fixed on the mother, that not only does he become restless with too heavy a burden of emotional stress, and often really ill, but in later life he has the greatest difficulty in establishing his own character, freeing himself from the mother’s influence, or finding his own love-mate. Again, in the exact opposite position, there is the neglected and unwanted child, who, missing his rightful possession of love, suffers from a sense of inferiority, which dark and hindering shadow dogs his footsteps through life, finding a positive expression in shyness and incapacity for action, or a negative expression in bombastic and disagreeable self-assertion. So I might continue with countless examples. Adult traits can, in almost all cases, be traced back to the child’s early experiences in connection with its parents and in its home.
The child is like a flower, and the banks where it grows are its world—its home and the friends with whom it comes in contact; the sky above is the surrounding love on which it is dependent, and to which it looks up as the flower to the sun for gladness and for life. What I mean is this: the child has desires and impulses of its own, but it reflects the changing needs and atmosphere of the small world in which it lives, and is terribly dependent on that world. It is forming and selecting a character. It very largely tries what the effect is of different kinds of conduct—different characters. The child does not itself know what it is or would wish to be. Whenever there is, as often there must be, a mistake made, a wrong step taken—a conflict inevitably occurs, and must find some quick response in childish naughtiness; otherwise dullness and unhappiness will arise; and this, if continued, will tend to bring the dangerous condition of the repressed and introverted child.
We have established now that the love-life of the child starts at a very early age; it begins in the home, and I want to investigate this love-life. To do this we must examine with some care the child’s emotional relationships to the members of his family.
These relationships are not as amicable or peaceful as at first sight would appear. At a very early age jealousy as well as love stirs in the baby’s soul. This may surprise you. But I would ask you for a moment to consider the baby’s position. The child is in a small shut-up world with its mother. At first she occupies all its life. She is the earliest love object and of supreme importance in the infantile constellation. Everything starts from her. She is the source of nutrition and as such the first object towards which the hunger-wish is directed. She is also the supplier of warmth, of comfort, of rest—the personification of shelter and happiness—the starting point of all those interests of the child which lie outside its own body. Who can wonder at the child’s possessive feelings in relation to its mother. But we have seen already, in an earlier essay, how the superfluous father comes as an intruder into this mother-child circle. And it is in this way jealousy begins to awaken, at a very early age, and sometimes is almost unbelievably active in the baby soul. For these feelings will increase if the baby is a boy, and the love of the mother may grow to great intensity, which coupled with the jealousy of the father may work great evil, especially if the mother is unwise, too tenderly solicitous, too possessive in her love, herself neurotic. In the case of the girl the position is different. The baby fixation upon the mother is, as a rule, relieved with growth, as a part of the love-fund is transferred to the father. Sometimes this does not happen, especially when the jealousy of the little girl is roused, usually by a brother or sister more loved by the mother than herself. Then, indeed, a fixation happens, either in a too passionate tenderness for the mother, which, persisting acts as an insurmountable hindrance in the later life in preventing the normal out-going of love to a member of the opposite sex. I know of one such case and it may make my meaning plainer if I tell it to you. A little girl was born in a home where there was already a brother, passionately loved by a too good mother. The little girl soon felt, for no one feels so quickly as a little child, that the brother had a place of greater importance than herself. She did not hate outwardly this brother, had she done this all might have been well, as she would have gained relief in expression. She developed the usual device of the unhappily jealous child and took to phantasy making—pretending that she had another mother, or, at other times, that she was doing some wonderful deed, being very clever, very good, very beautiful, so as to gain the love and admiration of her mother. This was the inner life of make-believe. The outer life was one of continuous nervous trouble, which culminated in St. Vitus’s Dance. What is, however most interesting, is the later love-life and the startling way it reflects this early emotional conflict. This child is now a woman nearing thirty, very charming, very nice-looking; but she is utterly unable to settle on her love-mate. Engagement has followed engagement, in each case the lover has been discarded for no adequate reason. In all other connections of life capable and good, she behaves in her love affairs with a capricious unkindness, very difficult to pardon if one did not understand.
It may be worth while to refer to another case known to me. Two daughters, with a mother and father between whom there was trouble, the father having an affection for another woman. Though the trouble was most carefully hidden from the little girls it formed the decisive factor in their lives. It is not clear to me whether the love-object was the father, though I think that this was so. It was, however, the mother who was, as, indeed, usually she is, the central figure in this nursery drama. Both children suffered jealousy, probably of the lady loved by the father, transferred to the mother. The effect was directly opposite on each daughter. The elder, stronger and more forceful charactered girl developed a passionate rebellion against the mother, a specially sweet and long-suffering woman, of so violent and unreasonable character that she could not live at home; while the other child was the absolute type of the perfect daughter, self-sacrificing and passionately loving. But why this case is interesting is that it was the good child who suffered while the bad child triumphed. The rebellious daughter was able to establish her own adult life, to work successfully and to marry happily; the dutiful daughter lost her own power to live and to love, and was not liberated even by the death of the mother. I would ask you to note this very specially as it is exceedingly important. A too great devotion and anxious excess of tenderness on the part of any one, but especially on the part of a child to a parent, covers always, and even under the most improbable circumstances, as when it appears that there is the closest sympathy and harmony of will, an intense hostile tendency. And because vice will not be choked by virtue, this over submissive state is much more dangerous and likely to destroy the springs of life than open hostility.
We have much less need to be afraid of the future for the rebellious, even the unkind and ungrateful child, than for the good and devoted child who apparently knows no will but ours, and lives in outward perfect submission. Every parent who is wise will recognise such a state as one of the greatest danger, and at any cost to herself will separate herself from the child. Mind, I do not mean send the child away. That plan may, indeed, be tried, but often, especially with sensitive children, the absence will but forge the fetters firmer. Something like this happens whenever a child who goes to school, is continuously homesick and becomes ill, not necessarily with a specified illness, but grows nervous, fails in work and in play. Such a mother has before her, perhaps the hardest task in parenthood. She has to take the child home and dissipate and send from herself the over-tender love, accepting in its place the rebellious hatred that it covers. Does she fail in this task of sacrifice, made necessary, remember, by some early mistake in the management of the child, she is simply using up for herself the energy of love, which her child ought to have to use for its own life.
I trust these two cases will have made plainer to you the kind of difficult problems that have to be met by parents. I do not think there is any family where they are not present. There are many variations, and the strength of the difficulty as well as the permanent nature of the harm suffered by the child, depends almost wholly on the wisdom and the knowledge of the mother, and, even more, on the extent to which she has been able to understand her concealed wishes and her own love-history from her childhood’s days and free herself from its heritage. You will see, I think, without my waiting to point out how complex the position is, and how hard is the task of the mother to guide the early emotional life of her children. It is obvious how easily mistakes may be made.
Hardly less difficult is the position of the father, who is at once the intruder in the family and the supporter of it. To the child, in the ordinary home, he is the final authority. He occupies the position of a god or a ruler. He is feared and rebelled against, also he is reverenced. Any omission of these qualities, and especially the last, is fatal to the child. Without this father reverence, and in absence of his needed authority, there arises an arrogant disposition that controls all the later character. As has been recognised by all modern psychologists, there is much of the childish attitude of the boy to his father in the later relations of the follower to his ruler, of the worshipper to his god, of the schoolboy to his school-master.
Every boy looks forward to the day when he can escape the rule of the father and himself usurp his power. I think you will find here the secret spring of all later rebellion against authority, either in the boy or in the man. I must give another warning. Again, it is when these childish feelings of rebellion, jealousy and hate are hidden, and work in the child’s soul without his knowledge, that the greatest harm is done.
In this connection, I may recount the case of a boy who grew out of babyhood shewing unusual affection for his step-father. He was also too much attached to his mother—being in that most unfortunate position of an only and too-much-considered child—and in consequence suffered from strongly jealous feelings towards the step-father. In this way a conflict was aroused between love and hate, and serious nervous symptoms arose. The origin of the trouble was first discovered at about ten years, when the boy developed a very passionate hatred against God. He was overheard one day swearing on his toy sword to devote his life to killing God. As he had not been brought up in an over-religious home, and had hardly ever been taken to Church, this vehement hatred, which continued for some time, was noticed as unusual. Now the specialist consulted about the nervous symptoms at once found in this God-hatred a projection of the very common boyish hatred to the father. The parents learnt that this was a sign of health, an effort the boy was making to rid himself of an unbearable inward trouble.
I would emphasise the necessity of parents having the right knowledge and the love that will enable them to recognise what is important in the development of character. Too little attention is given by parents to the spontaneous utterances of children: it is these that will give the clue to what is troubling the child. Questions never get direct and real answers. It is what the child brings out unconsciously that should be noted; his wishes hidden, as a rule, under some symbol, that the parent unaided, may find very difficult to interpret. We are too apt—and in this mothers are the worst sinners—to consider their children as unthinking beings. Always, I believe, children know more than we credit to them. This is true, in particular, of all emotional states. As I have tried to make plain, it is these emotions acting and interacting in connection with the home relations which are of lasting importance. Mothers who even in the nursery overforce the emotional growth of their little ones, with the unceasing demands of an over-demonstrative and unhealthy tenderness; fathers, who, themselves too arrogant for power, allow their boys and girls no independent possession of their own lives—such parents are the destroyers of their children. Their thoughtlessness and ignorance create problems that are tragedies of pain to children, and leave them marred, and often maimed, for their conflict with life.
I am prepared for an objection. You may some of you be thinking that this picture I have drawn for you of nursery tragedies is coloured from my imagination and without sufficient relation to truth. “Little children,” you may be saying, “cannot feel these devastating adult passions. You are projecting on to them evils created by your own diseased mind.” And you turn back to your “angel innocence” belief, which must be true, at any rate, you are convinced in the case of your own child.
But may I tell you this: you must not come to these problems of the child with an already fixed conviction that they do not exist; because this may well be, not because they are not there—active even in your own nursery—but because you shut your eyes determined not to see them. You think this about their not being present, because you want to think it, not because it is true. Also it is very easy even for the wisest parent to be led astray; for the child is the most accomplished actor, and is always hiding its real self from you.
You see the child has truly a very hard part to play, a part it can lay down only when no grown-ups are by. In surroundings very opposed to its own desires or its primitive needs, while still a savage in emotions, it has to pretend to be what you think it is, to do what you think it ought to do, and like what you think it ought to like. It has filled me often with wonder and admiration to see the really brilliant way in which even the youngest children play up to the angel-role forced upon them by grown-ups. Much naughtiness and many violent unexplained tempers are really a breakdown in this part. The right cue is forgotten at the right moment, or the correct entrance is missed. And I feel it very necessary to emphasise to you that the naughty child is not so much being naughty as being himself. He rushes at you with a knife, not because he is in a temper, but rather the temper is the liberating key which allows his real desire to kill you to break through the barricade of civilised desires that you are building around him. And it is very necessary for the grown-up to understand the intense satisfaction of creative strength which the child gains by this breaking out of his real self—a satisfaction that is greatly marred, it is true, and even turned to pain, by the consciousness of knowing he has broken adult rules of behaviour, been a naughty boy and grieved you. Always there is this conflict going on between his primitive egocentric desires and the demands of the adult world in which he has to learn to live. It is this conflict, and his success and failure in it, which determines his growth. More and more he has to learn to give up his own desires and subordinate his own will. Yet, I am not sure if his repentence, when he fails, is altogether good for him. Certainly, if it is excessive, and if it occurs too frequently, it weakens the force of life. And it is most urgent of all to remember that the parent, or nurse, or teacher, by constantly requiring from the uncivilised child the standard of conduct right for the civilised adult may, and most frequently does, produce a strain which turns the creative force of life back upon itself. It is ever thus in life when we draw back too hastily or too much coerced, from any spontaneous expression of emotion; the energy gathered for the direct expression flows back impotent. I believe that many a creative artist is destroyed in the civilising process of the child being turned into the good boy or girl.
And this brings me to a question of the most urgent importance to all parents and teachers who attempt to guide the emotional development of a child; to go slowly, and never to force an outward practice of virtue from the child, if that particular stage of virtue has not been reached. We do not expect the child to read until it has learnt to read, nor to calculate and work sums before it understands the use of figures; we do not expect it to walk until it has stumbled and fallen many times, nor to use its tiny hands with precision until it has broken many objects. Why then should we expect it to be good without learning to be good? And especially, I ask, why should we demand a standard of emotional behaviour much in advance of anything to which we ourselves have attained?
For in truth every child has a twisted and most difficult path to travel in order to reach the standard of conduct expected by the adult world. Few parents realise at all the harm that so readily may be done, from any over-hastening on the road to virtue, to the child, sensitive, responsive to every suggestion, most liable to injury; who is always balanced between the desire to be a dirty, little savage, like himself, or a clean well-behaved person, like a grown-up. For what gives every adult so tremendous a hold over the child is his never ceasing desire to push forward to a stage above what he is at. Always he is pulled in two directions, forward to effort and good conduct and the real world of action and of grown-ups, and backward towards ease and self-pleasing and the dream-world of the child, in which he thinks only of what he wants himself. If we hurry him too much there will be a regression: the uncivilised trait that has not been got rid of by experience of its uselessness and voluntarily been cast aside, will be thrust down deep into the psyche, where its unrealised power sends up primitive and uncivilised wishes, which will certainly mar the adult life, even if they do not wreck it.
It is not from sheer “contrariness” or “nastiness” that children develop “bad habits,” that they pick noses, bite nails, stammer, and other much worse things, or later are too shy or too boisterously self-assertive, or develop illness and morbid fears.[3] Such symptoms may be replacements of infantile curiosities and interests which were denied their satisfaction by the mother’s warning, often harmful, however gently given, “that is not nice, darling.” In particular harm is caused by a too early checking of the child’s delight in messy things, making mud pies, playing with water, using hands instead of knife and fork, and other nasty messy habits. The particular habit may, and usually does, disappear, but the checked and thwarted energy is still potent and at any time in after life may re-appear clothed in a fresh dress of concealment.
All that can be done with the bad habit is to turn it into new directions of rightful energy. As, for instance, the messy child should be given heaps of plasticine or wax, and sand to play with. Similarly with the desire to play with water: this is a symbolic action by which the young child frees itself from some inner hidden trouble. I know of one case where a child until quite an advanced age, always after a relapse into bad and primitive behaviour, had a curious way of blowing water through long tubes. The result was highly satisfactory and never failed to bring the child back to good and social behaviour. As an example of the terrible harm that may be done by an over fastidious niceness of behaviour, I may cite a rather curious case I happen to know, where a mother, was so afraid of nakedness, and disliking the sight of her own body, that she actually put on a bathing dress when she had a bath even in the privacy of her own bath room. This mother had a son whose adult life was rendered miserable and his happiness to a great extent injured, by horrible and haunting obscene visions. Here, in very truth, the cleanness of the mother became the uncleanness of the son.
I must hasten on. I am bound to leave out much that might well be noticed, for the subject is very difficult and very wide. I hope, however, I have made clear to you the following truths:—
(1) That any education of children in sex that is to result in success in the after life cannot be fulfilled by the imparting of set and fixed lessons on sex-enlightenment, given either in the home or in the school. (2) That this education is concerned with the entire emotional life of the child. (3) That it is continuous and unceasing. (4) And that it is a work of such complexity that for even the wisest mistakes are certain and success uncertain.
Above all else, I am sure we have to avoid an easy and lazy optimism.
And with such perils awaiting the incautious, is it any wonder that the chief element of safety often is a negative one—non-interference? By non-interference the two chief factors leading to emotional disturbance and ill-health may almost certainly be avoided; thwarted wishes are not thrust back, and repressed to work harm in the psyche, causing mental and bodily ill-health which often does not manifest itself for many years; development is not hurried on too rapidly, so that necessary primitive stages of growth are omitted or hastened over too quickly, causing, not infrequently, in the later years of life, a regression backwards to primitive and uncivilised conduct.
When interference becomes necessary it must be given wisely and with due understanding of the child’s position. I mean it must be the right instruction for the special child at that stage of its growth—not at all what the adult thinks it ought to be taught or would like to teach it. There can be no fixed rules as to sex teaching; no maxims laid down that can safely be always followed.
Take, for instance, the one apparently simple matter of satisfying the child’s certain and right curiosity at the different stages of its growth, by telling it the facts of birth, and, as it grows older, explaining the difficulties that most certainly will arise in the mind of every boy and girl in regard to these questions. So far I have said little about this matter because most people say much; holding it as the one thing implied by sex education, whereas I regard it, as I have tried to make plain, as a limited, though certainly important duty in connection with that education, which should be fulfilled by parents, and within certain limitations, by teachers in the schools.
But here, again, I am bound to utter warnings. There must be no over-forcing of knowledge not sought for by the child, this is at least as injurious to the emotional growth as over-forcing is to the intellectual growth. Any one who has read Jung’s account of his analysis of little Anna, will know what I mean. Little Anna became troubled and nervous, worried about the birth of a little brother or sister (I forget which). Telling her the truth did not help her, and it took Professor Jung many months of patient work with the child to get to the bottom of exactly what was troubling her. The most urgent rule for the mother in this matter is this: never to arouse sexual curiosity but to watch for its spontaneous expression and always satisfy it when it is present. This of course is the same as saying, always tell the child all the truth it wants to know. The difficulty here, of course, is that so rarely is the child able to ask for the knowledge he (or she) wants.
What above all else it is necessary is for the mother to watch for the child’s unconscious betrayal of its own curiosity. I mean by this, that some unconsidered remark or act is the surest hope of finding just what part of the problem is troubling him (or her) at that time; in almost all cases there is a personal element of jealousy, unknown to the child or carefully hidden, which is directed against one or other parent, usually the father, or against some brother or sister. This is why the intellectual teaching of the facts of birth, though necessary, does not help very much and often disastrously fails.
As I am trying all the time to force upon you, the real sex education is an emotional education, that is why it is so difficult. I may make this plainer by means of an illustration which I give in my book on “Sex Education and National Health.” It was told me by a very wise mother of her way of dealing with her son, who was, I think, about fourteen years old. This son showed he was thinking, and was evidently worried, about the very small families of one or at the most two children, or the childless marriages, common among his mother’s friends. He did not, however, speak of his trouble directly; instead he beat round the question, somewhat in the manner of a shying horse. After this had gone on for some time, he one day asked his mother if her friends were more delicate (meaning, of course, more refined) than other people. His mother was aware of what was troubling him; she knew what he really wanted to know was whether married people lived in celibacy when they had not children. She wisely told him the plain facts and for him at that time curiosity was quieted.
A boy of nine had a dream which he told his parents. His mother was in a shop, and a man on a bicycle, dressed as an officer came along the road; he, the little boy, rushed to the bicycle, stopped it, flung the man off, and killed him. In telling the dream the boy said, “I prevented him getting to mother.” This dream is so clear that I need not wait to interpret it beyond saying that the father of the boy was an officer. It will cause no surprise to anyone, with even a rudimentary knowledge of the emotional troubles of children, to know that this boy developed serious nervous symptoms.
It has seemed worth while to record these two instructive little stories, as a means of illustrating the kind of incident which furnishes the guide with regard to the nature of the trouble to be looked for, and shows in the first case as well the kind of help a watchful and instructed parent can give to relieve the trouble prevailing in the minds of the young. Dreams should always be noted, they throw the sharpest light on the child’s emotional conflicts. I must again urge the necessity of the parent paying the closest attention to the child’s prattle, to watching carefully his games and his behaviour, for in this way only can the clue be found to make it possible to give the kind of instruction or treatment that is wanted. I may give a few instances. Such things as the frequent childish desire to sit up with father and mother, the calling for the mother at night under the plea of fear are very certain signs of active jealousy. Again the very usual unwillingness of the child to grow up arises out of the inability to meet the necessity of separating the self from the protective tenderness of the mother. The child is always tending to turn back to safety, and, if this is encouraged by the mother, the child in after life will be unable to meet the necessities of adult action. The too fond mother perpetuates the childhood of her son or her daughter.
What the parents can do is to watch the child, and to learn themselves, in order to have the knowledge to clear up difficulties as these appear, and then it may be possible to remove obstructions to growth. Further, they can place within the child’s reach the materials—the sand and clean messy things to play with—machines to pull to pieces, swords to fight with, dolls to play with—every child will need different materials, by which, to a certain extent, liberation can be found from their primitive instincts, by giving them a free and harmless expression. In fact the real work of the parent may be likened to that of the stage scene-shifter and property manager.
Parental power guides the early years of the child like a higher controlling fate. But when the boy or girl begins to grow up there begins also the conflict between the home attachments and the need to break away in order to free the growing soul from the spell of the family. It is the war between the generations. The frequent and often very deep depression of puberty arises from this struggle. And there are the many other, and often very disturbing, symptoms, which are rooted in the difficulty of the new adjustments. The boy or girl tries often to separate himself (or herself) as much as possible from his family; he (or she) may even estrange themselves from their parents but inwardly this only binds them more firmly to the family ties. The outward break must be regarded as a dangerous sign of the inner conflict which the unselfish wisdom of the parents ought to be able to aid.
I cannot follow this important matter further. But I would wish to say that this is the time for the teacher to step forward and take up the work begun by the parent. The parents at this period are often hindrances to the child, they must push their children away from them in order to help the growing souls to gain their liberation.
The uncertain and, as I fear they may seem, unsatisfactory conclusions that must result from any honest inquiry into this difficult question of helping the young at the start of their life’s journey, is due in part to the fact that, even yet, and in spite of all the new knowledge that has been gained in the last few years, we know very little about the child’s emotional processes. Unfortunately our knowledge is not sufficient to make it possible for any dogmatic statements to be placed even tentatively before parents. There can be no ready-made prescriptions, no certain cures. We do not even know where the greatest trouble lies, whether it is in the parents and the teachers—the adults who fail to understand the child; or in the child, who fights away from the understanding that those who love and train him are able to offer. We do know, however, that the difficulties on the part of the child are very great—much greater than most of us (whether we are parents or teachers)—satisfied in an easy grown-up optimism, have cared to realise. In many ways we—the adults—the parents and the teachers, we who are a generation behind the children and already have been through the long, struggling, upward journey, by which they are now travelling, ought to manage our love and our training for them more carefully, more sympathetically, and more intelligently. I say intelligently, because the sins committed in love against children are more lastingly harmful than many of the sins committed under neglect or even under unkindness.
Thus, the final word I have to say to parents in regard to their children is this:
Do not love your children too possessively.
Try to understand and respect them—realise their existence as individuals with interests and needs apart from yourself. If necessary send them from you. Do not love your children for your own satisfaction, but for their good, and to help them to establish, with as little disaster as possible, their own lives.
SEX INSTRUCTION
THE AGE AT WHICH KNOWLEDGE SHOULD BE GIVEN
A story is recorded of a father and mother in ancient Greece, who, being concerned for the welfare of their only son, went to a renowned teacher and asked him to educate and take full charge of their child. “How old is your son?” questioned the teacher.
“Just three!”
The sage shook his head. “I am sorry but you have come to me too late: the boy’s character is decided already.”
I was reminded of this most instructive story as I read the account of the evidence given by the Rev. the Hon. Ed. Lyttelton, before the Birth Rate Commission of the National Council of Public Morals. For while I agree wholeheartedly with the late headmaster of Eton College as to the necessity of instructing the young in the facts of sex, I disagree, with his view as to the method of the teaching and, even more I disagree emphatically, as to the age at which instruction should begin.
Dr. Lyttelton holds that the first lessons should be given at the age of nine years, when the boy ought to be taught the facts of maternity, this knowledge to be supplemented by further teaching at the age of twelve or thirteen explaining the even more important (for the boy) facts of paternity.
Now it is here that I venture to disagree, and think that Dr. Lyttelton has fallen into the very common error of underestimating the child’s intelligence and boundless curiosity. It is in the very early nursery days that sex education is most urgently needed. To wait until the age of nine years has been reached is often to wait too late. In a vast number of cases, it is locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen.
In all children the activity of the intelligence begins to work at a very early age, and parents, who are not willfully blind, must know that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive desire to know many elementary facts of life, which are dependent upon sex. The primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know where “the new baby comes from.” A child of four or even younger, may begin to ask questions on this matter quite simply and spontaneously. The degree of curiosity, as also the frankness with which it is expressed, will differ, of course, in different children, but I am certain this curiosity is present and at times active in all children. If they do not question their elders, they will certainly puzzle over the matter themselves; often they will talk with older companions, and gain the information they are seeking in the worst possible way.
Thus the first teacher of the child must be the mother, the one who is most constantly with the child, tending him in washing, undressing, and in all the daily needs of his little body. It is the mother who ought to be the child’s supreme trainer.
Few of us understand the confusion and hurt that may be caused by a mother’s stupid silence and even more stupid hints and evasions and made-up fables. The false stories of babies brought by the doctor or the stork, or a little sister or brother found under the gooseberry bush are never believed. While the fantastic ideas of birth, that the child makes up for himself, fix their untruth into the immature minds. And afterwards they cannot be checked, owing to childish concealments, which always spring up so rapidly to meet any expression of adult reticence. These birth-fantasies, though the child seems to out-grow them, are not really forgotten but remain active in the unconscious mind. In this way, trouble is often started that will be determinative of the gravest evils in the later adult life.
Parents are greatly to blame for not answering the questions of their children, and being blind to their natural curiosity. And I would emphasise again that this curiosity is present even when no questions are asked. There need be no spoken words to make the child feel that its questions are discouraged. All adults are surprisingly ignorant of the affectability of children—their quick response to every kind of influence.
In the case of the birth of another child—an usurper who takes the older child’s place—this affectability is exceedingly acute on account of the emotional disturbance, in excitement and possible jealousy. And by means of the adult attitude, the very certain interest and investigation of the child into what is happening may so easily become confused and connected with what is shameful and wrong; and the trouble is aided, and usually in the worst possible manner, by the sharpest observations and deductions made by the child from unconsidered actions and overheard remarks of parents, and of servants and other adults—none of whom have any idea of the child’s watchfulness or his curiosity in this matter.
We think little children are not interested in birth because we do not want them to be interested. And they, with the almost uncanny sagacity which children show, understand this desire only too well and too quickly.
I had a striking illustration of this curious adult blindness quite recently. Two mothers, who were sisters, were pregnant at the same time. Each mother told me privately that her children were not interested in the event or in any way curious, but that her sister’s children were curious and wanting to find out what was happening. It would have been useless to tell these mothers the truth. Yet both of them were intelligent. They believed that their own children had no curiosity because they wished to believe this, not because it was true.
Thwarted curiosity is one of the most frequent causes of emotional disturbance in the first years of life. Do we not all know children who as they get older exhibit an unreasoning curiosity about everything, opening drawers, looking into the envelopes of other people’s letters, searching excitedly for what they do not want. We want to ask the question: Why does the child do this? What is it that urges him to act like a “Peeping Tom?” For he is urged. You will find this habit of needless prying almost impossible to check. It may persist into adult life. Do not we all know grown-ups who cannot refrain from prying, always curious, they are, on all occasions, seeking for knowledge they do not want.
This seeking action is symbolic. It implies that the search for the thing that is not wanted, the curiosity over something of no interest at all, is a substitute action for something that at one time was wanted—something about which knowledge was desired, and desired so much that it would not be denied. It was a curiosity so real that the thwarting of it has started emotional trouble of which these searching acts and persisting curiosity are the symbol or sign.
This substitute formation is one of the commonest emotional processes in children. The child pries, open drawers and letters, collects useless objects, aimlessly searches for knowledge he does not want because there is some knowledge he wants tremendously badly, but cannot speak about. That is why he persists in his habits of peeping and prying in spite of your scoldings and punishments. He must persist, unless you deaden his character so terribly by your ill-judged repression that even this substitute relief is closed. Your child will then, probably, find some other make-believe comfort; he will bite his nails, pick his nose, or other much worse habits may begin, or again the emotional disturbance may be so acute that it becomes impossible for the child to face, so that he fails in achieving any kind of symbolic replacement. The thwarted and emotionally over-charged curiosity is thrust back into the psyche where it remains a cause of ill-health of body and uncleanness of mind, until that time in the adult years, when the harvest of tares is reaped from the bad seed that has been sown.
The parents have the greatest responsibility, as I have said already. A child of four or even younger may begin to ask questions of its mother, simply and spontaneously. It is the child who must guide the parent. But again I would give warning. The mother must not be over-eager, or she will fall easily into the error of stimulating instead of quieting the child’s restless inquiring mind. The child at the age when such questions will first be asked and should be answered, will very quickly tire of any information that may be given to it. It will break off to run away and play and will interrupt the most beautiful and carefully prepared lessons. And if the mother is wise she will never go beyond the interest of the child, or the satisfying and nothing further, of the special curiosity which at that special time is occupying the child. If this course is pursued the child will probably continue to ask for information—though there can be no certainty that this desirable result will follow. But where such opportunities arise the right kind of sex instruction can be attempted. For the mother will be able to give answers in natural conversation, which will not force information not sought for by the child. When so treated, it will be found that children are not over-burdened by the subject, they will interrupt and break away from the answer to the question they have asked to speak about toy soldiers or dolls. This, to me, is the immense value of this form of teaching: the child has the information, and yet does not trouble about it when it is not to the point. Such a result can never be gained by means of set talks or fixed lessons, especially if these are mixed up with warnings, and much vague talk of things that the child neither cares for or understands.
I should, however, be giving a wrong impression if I left the matter here, so that this answering of children’s questions seemed to be a simple matter. It is not simple. For each child, as for each adult the problems of sex are personal problems. And the child whose problem is the hardest—who most urgently needs help, will hardly ever ask questions. Instruction in sex is not and never can be like teaching the child about other things. That is what so many of the modern advocates of sex education so entirely forget.
In every child, as I have tried to show you there are hidden conflicts of jealousy, of love, of hate, which determine beforehand its response to the teaching that is given by the parents.
I cannot here treat at all adequately this difficult question; it is one on which I have written elsewhere (Mother and Son, Sex Education and National Health, The Mind of the Naughty Child) I can say only what I have emphasised already that from the start to the end, sex education is an emotional education. That, of course, is why it is so difficult.
There is, in my opinion, too firm a belief in the efficacy of formal instruction. The way is not so easy as this to discharge our debt to the young. And sometimes I fear that parental talks about sex, in particular when such talks are delayed until the boy or the girl is reaching puberty, or until the time when the dangers of school life have to be met, involving, as it must, a sudden breaking through of the silence of years, may work for harm instead of for good. That this is so in the case of some boys and girls I know to be true. You see you cannot grow flowers in a soil choked already with weeds.