THE MOTHER AND THE CHILD
“The child at its mother’s knee is not too young to hear from her lips the sacred facts concerning his own origin; in a few years, indeed, he will be too old, for he will have learnt those facts from a worse source, perhaps in the gutter; and instead of being beautiful to him, as they might and could be, they will be merely dirty.”—Havelock Ellis.
The quotation I have placed before these three chapters on Sexual Education, which form the fifth and final section of my book, is taken from the play, The Awakening of Spring, by Frank Wedekind; he calls it a tragedy of childhood, and dedicates the work to parents and to teachers. The play deals with a group of school children, just entering the age of puberty, and consists mainly of their conversations one with another. These imaginative young souls speculate about the mysteries of birth and sex in a manner that is typical of all children, not mentally inert. Herein rests the great value of the work: we come to realise the terrible darkness surrounding the sexual life of the great majority of boys and girls, with the resulting tragedies that may, and often do, destroy health and even life. Unable to explain the forces germinating in their nature, these children are hindered and crushed by the sham decencies and complacent morality that greet their blind gropings. Never was a more powerful indictment made against the sham of our educational system as a preparation for life.
The manner in which, up to the present time, we have[306] ignored the need of the young for enlightenment and guidance in questions of such elemental importance to health and well-being is at once remarkable and difficult to understand. Under the influence of the idea of the sinfulness and radically evil nature of the sexual life, we have stood helpless, as if we were faced with a mysterious and malignant power; we have left the development even of our own children to the blind hazard of chance. Those among us who were wiser were not heeded. Celebrated pedagogues of a hundred years ago, such as Rousseau, Salzmann, Jean Paul and others, expressed themselves strongly in favour of the early sexual enlightenment of youth, and gave many valuable suggestions as to the methods of such teaching. Their wise recommendations remained for the most part without practical results. Only in recent years, in connection with the question of the protection of motherhood and the campaign against prostitution, has interest in the matter been reawakened. A heightened sense of responsibility has been quickened amongst us. An increased knowledge, gained by the patient work of investigation of the sexual impulse, is proving the immense importance of its right direction in the individual life. This would seem to be forcing us to act.
To-day it is conceded, even by many who are conservative in their attitude to sex, that the old plan of silence and leaving this matter to chance, has been a fatal mistake: we are coming to understand that every child has a sacred claim to wise training in sex knowledge.
There can be no doubt of our past guilt. The proof rests in unnumbered and needless disasters in the lives of almost all of us—sufferings unendurable and maiming; hurts to our deepest selves, that we have come to understand[307] only when our thoughts have been liberated by knowledge.
From our fear of sex, we have become the victims of sex.
What can save us? It is women—the mothers who hold the future in their keeping. The answer rests with them. Liberation from the manifold problems of our disordered sexual life depends largely on a right transmission of knowledge to our children, so that they without harm may become wise. Such teaching must be given first by the mother. In this way only, through a trained and wiser motherhood, making possible the unhampered unfoldment of the children of the future, can humanity come into its heritage.
This is my firm conviction, my profound belief. And for this reason, in my book on Motherhood, I have placed the question of sexual education last, because I hold it to be the most important of all—the foundation necessary before other changes or reforms can be of any avail.
There is much that gives me hope. This question of the sexual education of her children has begun to stir in the conscious thought of countless mothers. The days of folded hands are happily over. Mothers of all classes desire knowledge for their children because they want to save them from suffering and from falling into the mistakes that they, through want of knowing, have themselves made.[100]
While, however, mothers, as well as the great mass of educationalists and reformers, recognise more and more the need for this knowledge for all children, they are yet uncertain as to how and when sex teaching should be[308] given.[101] There is too much hesitating so that often cowardice prevents any action being taken. And the question, “What shall we teach our children and at what age ought we first to speak?” is one to which few have as yet found a certain answer.
The truth is, the vast majority of mothers and teachers are themselves amazingly and perilously ignorant on the whole subject of sex. The ban of silence has worked untold evil in our thoughts, and what makes the difficulty even worse is that we are so very much afraid of sex it is impossible for us to learn. Hence we go about seeking mysteries and hunting lies, and completely lose sight of what should be as clear as daylight—the need of the little child.
The twin curses of our civilisation that fetter the spirit, prudery and prurience, acting together, have drawn sex into the darkest, unwholesomest corners of our minds, so that few of us mention the subject even to our own children without a feeling of shame. So pitifully afraid are we of the facts of life that we invent fables and lie to them as to how they were born.
Parents shirk and evade the natural inquiries of their children; very often no kind of answer is given to their young searchings for the truth. In other cases foolish fictions that outrage even a child’s intelligence are repeated, and falsehood piled upon falsehood. For it is one condition of a lie that it can never stand alone; and when a mother has lied to her child once, she is compelled to weave a network of falsehood to sustain her first false statement.[309] She must go on from one foolish evasion to worse untruths to keep up appearances. Every story which, like that of the stork or the gooseberry bush, rests upon a lie, is an outrage to the child. And the mother’s authority stands upon a veritable quicksand, for the day will come when the child will not believe her. A careless word may be spoken by a servant, a companion, or some other, and, if the mother has not saved herself in time, she will be discovered by her child as a liar. The whole structure of her pretence and shameful evasions will totter and fall to ruin. And with it must go her power to influence her child. Barriers of doubts and silence are raised which, as time goes on, more and more will separate the child from the parent. And such barriers once set up can hardly ever be broken through. An embarrassing sense of shame, rising like a poisonous gas between mother and child, will work death to any confidence. How many mothers have been forced in bitterness to cry, “I lied to my child. I concealed the truth year after year. Now my child turns from me, and no longer has faith in me or in my words.”
And this failure of duty on the part of the mother works unknown harm to the child. That is the essential point. Do our children remain in ignorance of the facts of sex which we, in our fear, fail to teach them? No, they do not. Girls and boys in tens of thousands take the course of action threatened by the child Wendla—they go and learn from others what their mothers have refused to tell them. Few children fail to discover, either through their own intelligence or by some information they gain at school or from servants, some kind of sexual information. Thus too often they glean their first knowledge of sex from the vulgar, ignorant lips of the prurient.
[310]
I marvel at the blindness of parents, who seem unable to approach this question with even common understanding. Nine children out of ten gain information upon the relations of the sexes in the worst possible way. Fortunate is the child who escapes the contamination of ignorant indecency.
It should be remembered that in children the activity of the intelligence begins to work at an early age. Curiosity is very prominent: all children want “to find out.” And their activity will certainly tend 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 wish to know where babies come from. The degree of curiosity differs, of course, in different children; I do not think it is absent from any normal child. If they do not question their elders, they certainly will talk with one another. And the shy child, or the child who is kept from other companions, is not saved from these curiosities: I am inclined to think that the interest is strengthened and made more dangerous by repression.
Many foolish stories are told by mothers, in their blindness and lack of faith, to put off the child’s natural desire to learn its origin. There is a curious illusion that children accept these fables, and really believe that the baby is found in the garden under the gooseberry tree, or brought by the stork, or by the doctor in his bag. But the child’s perception is more acute than is believed, and very rarely is any one deceived. And the mother forgets that by puzzling the child’s mind with these foolish stories she defeats very surely the object for which they are invented. The greater the mystery about sex matters the[311] more will childish curiosity be aroused. We cannot escape from this. The child thinks much less of what it knows and is sure of than of what it does not know, but wants to find out.
And the same objection, of stimulating instead of quieting curiosity, applies to the plan adopted by many parents of telling the child when it asks these questions that it is too young to understand and must wait until it is older. This postponement is better than inventing foolish fables and telling lies, but I am sure it is unwise. The mother thinks the child is satisfied and forgets. Very rarely is this the case; the child puzzles alone, its curiosity only quickened by the hurt that has been given to its sensitive young intelligence. A wide experience has taught me that the only children who do not talk or think much about the origin of babies are the children who know how babies are born.
The silly stories told by parents are supplemented by equally absurd and often seriously injurious conversations with other children. Many servants of both sexes are addicted to idle and irreverent, even if not vicious, talk upon this subject, and by this means the views of many children, and even their whole future outlook, upon sex are distorted and besmirched. This is particularly the case with boys, where any intimacy with servants is much more dangerous than a similar intimacy in the case of girls.
I must follow this question a little, though it leads me aside from the main subject of this chapter. Young boys at school and elsewhere are in constant danger. It is rarely that girls are placed in a position of intimacy with an adult male, except their father or their brothers. The very reverse is the case with boys: they are tended, and[312] when young are washed and bathed, by women servants, their clothes are looked after by women, in sickness they are nursed by women, and in innumerable cases they are brought into much more intimate relations with women than girls are ever brought into with men.
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[313] 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[314] 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[315] 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.
Freud—and his opinion may not be put aside—holds that in all young children there is present a sexual life more[316] or less subconscious, which may be exaggerated and even perverted by any carelessness, neglect, or repression. It is believed that certain manifestations of infantile activity, notably the excretory functions and feeding, as also the common habit of thumb-sucking and biting of the nails, are closely connected with the sexual impulse.
In normal children the sexuality of this infantile period, which lasts until the third or fourth year, then passes into more or less complete oblivion. There follows a happy play period during which sex is latent, and this ............