The sex education that a child obtains is much more farreaching than we, his parents, ordinarily recognize. It includes not only what we have told him about the "facts of life." It includes many of the things he himself has experienced.
Adult sex, as we know, has to do with body feelings and also with love--with the spirit--with what goes on in a person's mind and emotions. Both body feelings and the mind's workings reach back to a human being's earliest days.
In the very beginning, the baby's body was all-important, as we've heard. He reacted then to the world and to the people around him in terms of his bodily needs and desires. He reacted primarily in terms of what made his little body comfortable or uncomfortable. Through his body he got first impressions about himself. These were already a part of his sex education.
The way a baby's mother touches him when he is newly born, this is part of his sex education. If she is tender and caressing, he begins his days with a sense that he is worth being loved. If she cuddles him with leisurely indulgence, taking pleasure in his pleasure, it lets him feel that enjoyment is a relaxed, happy thing.
On the other hand, if she carries on with diligent dispatch (as she has so often been told to do) with the focus on routines rather than on baby, she gives him quite a different feeling.
If a mother happens to be harassed (as many mothers have been in the stress and storm of a pressure-filled world) she can readily carry worries from other areas of life into life-withbaby, just as a father can carry worries from business into lifeat-home. Then a child feels the intimacy of his first body closeness not as secure as it might be. He feels it fraught with tension rather than with the full acceptance he craves.
"But what can I do now?" moans Bob's mother. "Now that Bob's in his teens? I see the mistakes I made. I didn't even want him. His father had just been called into the service and I resented getting pregnant right then. I wasn't ready to have him and my resentment carried over after he was born. I know I didn't give him the acceptance or the cuddling he needed. And then, too, he hardly saw his father at all. I haven't wanted to say it or see it. What's the use now?"
However, the more clearly she saw it, the more fully could she cope with it. Denying it had kept her from seeing some of the things she could do belatedly to make up to Bob for what he had missed. Gradually she learned that the granting of closeness through understanding acceptance of feelings in adolescence can help make up for earlier lacks.
She set up periods for acceptant contact. "A couple of times a week, at least, I see that he has a chance to talk with me alone. Not with all the rest of the family around. When I took account of the time I spent with him before, I was appalled. Actually I had given him no real time! Sure, I said offhand hello's and how-are-you's. I asked questions about school and suggested a clean shirt or a hair comb. And I prided myself on the way we all carried on conversations together during dinner. But that was family time, not Bob's time. He was actually having none of the he-me-alone contacts which I'm sure now he had always missed. The sort of 'time alone' of one child and one parent that I read about somewhere. After all, you can't feel close or give out confidences with the other children te-heeing over the most sensitive bits.
"So now I say to them, 'Scoot! This is Bob's time, if he wants it.' His father does the same. Sometimes Bob turns us down. Sometimes he takes us up. Enough anyway, I guess, to make up for some of those earlier times he missed.
"As a result, he seems to be building self-confidence by leaps and bounds. And curiously he seems easier now, too, with his dates."
As for actual cuddling experiences to be had belatedly? Sometimes a dog or a kitten to cuddle will help bring the longwanted sense of physical closeness. "That is," says Warren with nineteen-year-old dignity, "if you're still too young to cuddle a girl."
In any event, it's never too late to realize that early body experiences and contacts have had a part to play in the person's attitudes toward himself and toward sex.
But sex education is not a matter of body or body feelings alone. It is much broader. It involves relationships of person to person. Of liking, not liking, of loving, of hating. Of enjoyment in what one has of love fully given. Of missing what one has not. All the child's attachments as he grows. And the attachments to each other of the persons close to him. All of these have a role to play in what he feels and thinks and believes about sex.
The small child, for instance, senses not only the way his mother feels toward him but the way his father feels, too. Glad of having a family, or worn down with the burden.
He feels also the way his mother and father feel toward each other: This is the way a man and a woman are with each other --loving and warm, able to fight and to make up eagerly. Or superficially pleasant with the anger cold underneath.
He senses what goes on, whether they hide it or not.
Take Bernice, as example. When she was little, she felt her father's and mother's constant conflict, her father's evasion of responsibility, his attempts to escape elsewhere for solace of love without burdens. Although her mother never let Bernice see her crying, Bernice sensed the tears. Her mind picked up the actual facts and then went further. Her imagination elaborated on them and extended them to include the entire male
sex . . . "All men are beasts." . . . "All men want to hurt women." These assumptions grew in her head, distorted from what was true about one man to untruths when applied to all men.
At nineteen Bernice bounded from one engagement to the next. Six times in the past year and a half she believed she had found her man.
"But always something gets in the way," Bernice told the psychologist. "I have misgivings. I pick out little flaws that are really unimportant. I exaggerate them dreadfully. I see this very clearly and yet I can't stop."
Finally, however, when Bernice understood that she had imagined falsely that all men were like her father, she began to see her men friends more realistically. She could separate fact and fiction in her mind and settle down to a comfortable marriage.
Bernice's story illustrates an important and neglected aspect of sex education which parents have known far too little about.
A child not only takes what he feels with his body and about his body as he grows; he not only takes what he feels about the relationships of person to person in his intimate world; but, in addition, he imbues these with his imaginings. Fact and fiction merge until, without knowing it, he is pushed by fiction as much as by fact.
Remember--
Even more important than what has actually happened to him is what he has made of it in his own mind.
A small child takes even little things which, to the adult, logical way of thinking are silly, improbable or impossible. He transforms or expands these beyond all reason. He twines them about with wishes and threats that make him both ashamed and afraid. Many of the guilts and fears and failures of the adolescent are then due to holdovers from the childish thoughts and feelings he had in his earlier days.
One great weakness in providing adequate sex education for the teen-ager stems from our ignorance of the barriers that lie in his own mind.
If we are to do a good job
with our teen-ager's sex education
we need to
UNDERSTAND MORE ABOUT THE FANTASIES
he has had in the past.
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