I would like to say a great deal more about this danger. The part played by servants in the sexual initiation of boys carelessly left in their charge, and often when they are still children, is much larger than usually is credited. It is folly to close our eyes to the evils that may, and often do, arise. Perhaps in no other matter has the ignorance of mothers worked greater evils or been more culpable than it has been here. Nor is it servants alone that have to be feared in this connection: many boys have been seduced by women, who would be least suspected of such an act. I could give cases from my own knowledge: men, at least, will know that I speak the truth. The facts are ugly, but they may not be overlooked. No mother should be ignorant on these matters. For myself I would trust my little adopted son—he is twelve years old—with no servant and with very few women. This may seem a hard saying, but it is based on a wide knowledge of what happens to many boys. We expose our children to manifold dangers which only now are we coming to understand. We have to accept these things unless we are ready to act.
Even if no such great evil happens, much harm may be done by vulgar speech. Beautiful and sacred emotions, marvellous processes of nature, legitimate and essential longings, become associated in the tender expanding mind of the healthy boy with the unseemly, the shameful, and the unclean. Where the child should learn to wonder, he is taught to know shame and to deride. The results are terrible in many cases.
It is the mother’s duty and privilege unceasingly to watch her child, but this she can do only if she has knowledge and is wise.
It must not be thought that I am unmindful of the many and great difficulties that hinder the actions of parents. Under our present conditions of almost universal concealments, the sexual education of our children is, indeed, so difficult a problem that I am conscious of all manner of obstacles as I attempt to suggest a solution. Of one thing only am I certain: we can no longer leave this matter safely to the hazard of chance.
I know well that there are many parents who, fully recognising the importance of safeguarding their children, yet hold back in fear of what they think may be the danger of bringing the sex impulses too early into the child’s focus of consciousness. It is also thought, though less often said, that in previous generations boys and girls got on very well without this fad of sex-instruction. But the question is whether they really did. The widespread prevalence of sexual troubles (which are only now beginning to be understood and to gain the attention that for so long they have claimed) is to a large extent the corollary of our hypocritical or cynical attitude as adults to the difficulties of youth. We ourselves have “muddled through,” and we placate our consciences with the whisper, “What we have done, the youngsters can do also. Let them alone, it’s a beastly awkward subject to tackle.”
It would be waste of time to answer such arguments. I would point out only one result of such criminal and cold-blooded indifference: it is generally the most promising children who are destroyed through sex struggles. The coarser-fibred children may escape and come through without great hurt: it is the sensitive children—who fight and recoil and thus suffer—who are sacrificed by the total lack of appreciation on the part of their elders of their difficulties and blind gropings for light, sacrificed sometimes to the slaying of the body and the soul.
The first objection needs more careful consideration. Here, as I have pointed out already, the greatest difference of opinion arises in connection with the questions as to when and how sexual instruction should be given to children. Some, like myself, plead for the enlightenment to be as early as possible, in the first years of the child’s life, so that never may there be a conscious period in which the child does not know. There are, however, many who disagree and hold it better, for the reasons I have shown, to defer sexual instruction till the child is older, to the onset of puberty, or even later. Perhaps the attitude common to most parents is one of hesitation, that may be expressed in the question: For how long can we safely leave this matter alone?
No one will wisely give a dogmatic answer to this question. Yet I think we can come to a better understanding if we at once put out of our minds any idea of formal instruction. Sex is not something outside of life—a subject that we can teach or not teach to our child, like arithmetic, for instance. This has been our great mistake. And we shall see our folly more clearly, if for a little time we focus our attention on the child, and stop our rather useless discussions.
Now it is part of the popular belief about the sexual impulse that it is absent in childhood, and first appears in the period of life known as puberty. This is a serious error and one that has brought many evil consequences, not the least of which has been our failure to understand the nature of the child. We are now reaping our mistakes and finding out that the exact opposite of this is the truth. The remarkable work of Freud, that has opened up a whole new field of inquiry, has shown us that the sexual instinct is never absent in the normal child. “In reality,” he states, “the new-born infant brings sexuality with it into the world, sexual sensations accompany it through the days of lactation and childhood, and very few children can fail to experience sexual activities and feelings before the period of puberty.”[102]
Possibly there is some little exaggeration in this view, for the basis of our knowledge is still very narrow; but it seems certain we must accept Freud’s view as in the main right, as, indeed, any one of us who has had any experience of children may prove for ourselves by our own observation. Have you ever considered the games of your young children—the way in which they imitate father and mother, play the game of the family, and delight in being the parents of their dolls? Your child is being taught by Nature, and the first appearance of sex in its heart occurs as simply as the fall of the dew upon the flowers. It is we, their elders, who in our blundering too often break in and sully this beautiful unfolding. Sex is not something to be escaped from. This never can be done. We have, even if against our will, to accept its presence.