Ninety-nine divorces out of every hundred, it is safe to say, result from errors of thinking and living—errors directly traceable to shortcomings in early training. Selfishness and lack of control—these, I insist, are the usual elements out of which divorces grow. And what are these but bad habits, for which good habits might have been substituted had proper precautions been taken by the parents in the plastic, formative period of youth? Even in respect to the sexual phase of marriage—that phase in which so many marriages come to grief—the trouble, when trouble occurs, may, in most cases, be wholly attributed to parental thoughtlessness or ignorance. On the sexual side, as on all sides of married life, the great need is for education for marriage.
It is not my intention here to go into details. It must suffice to say that investigation has shown that the sexual impulse begins to manifest itself in sundry ways far earlier than most parents appreciate, and that unless care is taken to observe and offset eccentricities of behaviour possibly containing a sexual element, permanent harm may result.
For example, there often is a sexual element in the cruelty with which not a few children treat play-fellows or household pets. The exaggerated affection little boys sometimes display for their mothers, and little girls for their fathers, is to-day likewise regarded by many medical psychologists as a sexual signal calling for educational measures to insure a more even distribution of affection for both parents. These same psychologists insist that at the first obvious signs of interest in sexual matters—as when the child begins to ask questions about his origin—he should be given frank, if tactful, elementary instruction in the facts of sex. Recall the quotation previously made from Havelock Ellis in this connection. Evasive or untruthful answers will not do. They only fix the attention more strongly on the subject, and from this fixing of the attention a dangerously morbid interest in things sexual may develop.
Clearly, parents who would do their full duty by their children have no easy task before them. Yet everything combines to show that unless they make a business of parenthood—and, in especial, unless, by direct instruction and the force of good example, they develop in their children the virtues of self-control and self-forgetfulness—the after lives of those children, when themselves married, will be anything but happy, and may, in addition, be lives marred by some form of serious nervous or mental disturbance.