Sex Instruction in the Home : Part 1

The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book: Twelve Steps to a Happy Marriage
by Various

(Page 10 of 16)

Frances Bruce Strain

A young woman who has won a place for herself as an artist tells the story of her first nude drawing. She was of scarcely more than kindergarten age when, one day before supper, her fancy produced a sketch of her ten-year-old brother in nature's own attire. Pleased with the result, she took it to the supper table and gave it to him - "A picture I made of you."

Brother looked, glanced swiftly at Mother, and started to pocket the sketch. Mother said, mother-fashion, "Let me see it," and then, after seeing, also started to slip the picture out of sight. Father held out his hand. "Let's have a look." Around the table the drawing passed from hand to hand. No one praised, no one spoke, no one smiled. When one of the younger children started to say something, he was abruptly told to eat his supper. Heavy hung the weight of unexplained guilt over the five-year-old artist. After the meal her mother took her quietly aside and said, "When you draw a picture of a boy, you don't have to draw everything!"

"It was years," the artist confessed, "before I could draw, comfortably, a male nude."

Many of the young men and women among our readers, who are concerned with love and marriage, have undoubtedly become aware of inner handicaps of their own - handicaps of thought and feeling which they recognize as their heritage from a generation of other-mindedness in regard to matters of sex. There were silences that caused wonderings, punishments that were not understood, prohibitions which built up timidities, over a long zigzag trail of unrest and fear through childhood up to maturity.

We hear young people say because of their own experience, "I'll see to it that my children don't go through what I went through." And they do see to it. Mothers of school-age children, of kindergarten and nursery-age children, mothers of babies, even mothers in their first pregnancies, come with their questions in order that they may start right.

At what age do you begin explaining life to children?

How much do you tell?

How much do you explain their own growing-up changes?

How do you keep them from talking to others?

Does telling lead to trying out things with each other?

My little girl doesn't ask questions - how make her healthily curious?

My little boy has a bad habit - how deal with it?

These are representative questions, and they strike deep into the heart of education as we see it today, for sex education is no longer merely a matter of biological instruction. Knowledge of human reproduction is an essential in every instance, of course. It is the basic science back of the whole sexual life. But just as the physical aspects of marriage are for men and women today subordinate to the psychic and intellectual aspects, so in a sex-education program, especially one in the home, biological information is far from being the element of greatest importance. More significant is the guidance and nurture of the emotional life of your children - their emotional natures as a whole, and especially those aspects of their emotional natures which have their roots in the sexual impulse. Frustrations of childhood, failures, hurts, jealousies, misinterpretations of childish love affairs, play episodes for which society has such swift punishment, clandestine sex knowledge - these are the experiences which leave their blight on the later love responses. Life as a whole with its conventions and social codes does not present an open highway to the goal of sexual maturity. But forward-looking parents can, by granting knowledge, understanding, and a sympathetic interpretation of the various phenomena of the sexual life, prevent many of the hazards of the past and provide a better assurance of happiness for their children.

Because the biological aspects of sex teaching are concrete, something one can lay hold of in a tangible way, we shall consider them first.

There is no set age to begin sex education. There is no set place to stop. There is a time to begin, and that time is indicated by any expressed interest on the part of your young son or daughter - a question, a comment, an observation, a wish. The time to stop is when his interest stops. Don't run on ahead of him. Usually interest is stimulated by some incident in the neighborhood or at school - a tank of young guppies, a nest of baby mice in someone's cellar, a new baby home from the hospital, a word in the newspaper. With many very young children, concern about their own origin seems to arise spontaneously. "Where did I come from, Mother?" It is a natural question, yet it has a certain mystical quality, coming as it does from within and reaching back into the unknown.

The greatest number of questions arise between the ages of four and six. After school entrance, questions recede gradually until by the ninth, tenth, or eleventh year children have reached what is called the questionless age. This is not an indifferent age - quite the opposite - but spontaneous questions are less frequent. Possibly they are crowded out by other interests, possibly bits of desultory information satisfy for the moment; and there is always the gradual adoption of reticence which takes place as children grow older.

At adolescence there is a keen revival of interest but more resistance to open family discussion than in the pre-adolescent age. Maturing children are touchy, sensitive, self-conscious, modest, seclusive. They run to cover at too intimate a topic, especially in the hands of adults who are inclined to strike a wrong note; to be preachy and teachy and inquisitive and, in terms of the young adolescents themselves, "too darn sexy!"

Garden City Publishing Co. reprint edition, 1949, by special arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Copyright, 1938, by PRENTICE-HALL, INC.