WHAT SHOULD CHILDREN TELL PARENTS?
So many children have come to me and said, “What shall I tell my
parents about sex?” My answer is always the same: “Tell them the
truth. If the subject is approached in a tactful way, it should be no
more embarrassing to teach a parent about sex than to teach him about
personal pronouns. And it should be less discouraging.”
In discussing sex enlightenment for parents, first of all, definitions
are needed. What do we mean by “parents”? Do we mean all adults who
have had children? Do we mean adults who have had children, they knew
not why? Or do we mean married people who have given birth to one or
more offspring but have never gone into the matter very thoroughly? For
the purposes of this article, it will be assumed that by “parents” we
mean all adult persons permeated with a strong sense of indecency.
I have talked with hundreds of children about the problem of educating
their parents along sex lines. So many of them have told me that
they honestly tried to give their elders the benefit of their rich
experience in life, but that the parents usually grew flushed and red
and would reply, “Nice people don’t talk about such things.” It is true
that a great gap exists between generations. The fact that children
are embarrassed to have their parents along when they are attending
certain movies or plays is indicative of how hard it is to overcome
the old fear of allowing one’s elders to learn anything. A child never
knows at what point in a play his uninformed old father will start to
giggle. It is hard for children to break through and really come in
touch with their elders. “Nice people don’t talk about such things!”
is the defense which old people put up against life itself, when they
feel it crowding in all around their heads. Parents hesitate to discuss
things calmly and intelligently with their children for two reasons:
first, they have a kind of dread of learning something they don’t want
to know; and second, they feel that if they must learn anything at all
they would like to be spared the humiliation of learning it from their
offspring. Actually, middle age (and even senescence) is marked by a
great curiosity about life. There is a feeling that life is slipping
away quickly, and that it would be terrible to have the end come before
everything in life has been revealed. The beauty of life, always
apparent, implies a mystery which is disturbing right up to the bitter
end. The spectacle of old men wistfully attending sex lectures (as they
frequently do) suggests that the strong suspicion exists in them that
somewhere they will hear the magic word by which human affairs will
become clarified, somewhere they will glimpse the ultimate ecstasy.
Children who allow their fathers and mothers, to whom they owe their
very existence, to go on wondering about sex, are derelicts to duty.
[Illustration: “_One’s father and mother are never too old to be told
facts._”]
If young folks lack the tact or intelligence requisite to enlightening
their parents, the task should be intrusted to some one else. Yet it
is hard to say to whom. A child should think twice before sending his
father around to public school to secure sex information from his
teacher. Women teachers, to borrow a phrase, are apt to be “emotionally
illiterate.” Many teachers have had no sex life and are just waiting
for somebody like your father to show up.
One’s father and mother are never too old to be told facts. Indeed, it
is most unkind to keep them in ignorance and allow them to nourish the
doubts and horrors of their imagination. The majority of parents pick
up their knowledge of the facts of life from smoking-car conversations,
bridge-club teas, and after-dinner speakers. They receive it from their
vicious adult companions who are only slightly less ignorant than they
are and who give them a hopelessly garbled version. They pick it up,
too, from the gutter.
[Illustration: _Fig. 7. It is customary to illustrate sexology chapters
with a cross section of the human body. The authors have chosen to
substitute in its place a chart of the North Atlantic, showing airplane
routes. The authors realize that this will be of no help to the sex
novice, but neither is a cross section of the human body._]
This matter of picking up information from the gutter is an interesting
topic in itself. Quite the most remarkable case history that has come
to my notice is that of François Delamater, a parent thirty years of
age, who went deliberately to the gutter for his sex education. He
had heard, as all people do hear some time or other, that sex can be
learned from the gutter, so he set out to make a comprehensive survey
of the gutters of eighteen large American cities. For a long time he
found out nothing, although he was a very curious man. By a peculiar
piece of fortune, however, he happened to be walking in Cincinnati
one day and met a man who was leading a tame stork. The man was in
the gutter. The stork carried in its bill a live baby, in swaddling
clothes. Smelling a rat, Mr. Delamater stopped the man and inquired
where the baby came from. The man replied that he didn’t know.
“For that matter,” continued Mr. Delamater, “where does _any_ baby come
from?”
The man shook his head. Then he relented and told Mr. Delamater that he
had merely been hired to lead the stork around the streets to advertise
a moving picture called “Her Husband’s First-born.” The whole incident
so confused the mind of the thirty-year-old parent that he eventually
evolved the strange theory that babies are born within the father, an
erroneous notion that dwarfed his emotions and modified his character.
It is of the utmost importance, in imparting sex knowledge to one’s
parents that it be done in such a way as not to engender fear or
anxiety. The phraseology should be chosen carefully, and efforts
should be made to explain everything clearly but without the use of
words which have a tendency to make old people nervous. The word
“erotic” is such a word. When it is necessary to speak of Man’s erotic
tendencies, it is best to substitute another word. In the first place,
an overwhelming majority of parents do not know the exact meaning of
the word “erotic,” and to know an _in_exact meaning is worse than
nothing. Many are apt to confuse it vaguely with “exotic.” I have known
parents to go through whole books by authors like Havelock Ellis or
Mary Ware Dennett without understanding a single paragraph, because
they thought Man’s “eroticism” referred to his desire to be in some
foreign place like Spain. Those parents that actually do detect the
difference between the sound of the two words will immediately become
nervous, inattentive, and dispirited. They will make some excuse to
leave the room, and will wander out, probably to the ice-box to get
themselves a cold snack, which they will eat while in a sulky frame
of mind. Later they will look up the word in the dictionary, but will
forget it by the time they hear it again in conversation or read it in
print. Furthermore, all their taste for sex will be gone.
Just what to tell parents is, of course, a vital question, not to be
answered dogmatically. Before a child can conscientiously approach such
subjects as pedestalism, the recessive knee, begonia-ism, frigidity in
men, birth control, sublimation, and the swastika fixation, he must
clear the boards. The simple phases of sex should be imparted in a
direct manner: it is best to explain things in a matter-of-fact way,
rather than resort to such cloudy analogies as birds and flowers.
Strange to say, the habits of birds and flowers have done as little
to clarify the human scene as almost any other two manifestations
in nature. Further, there is always the danger, in setting up plant
or animal life as an example, that one’s parents will place a
literal interpretation on things. I am thinking particularly of the
case—which all sociological students know about—of Nina Sembrich, the
fifteen-year-old high-school girl who attempted to impart knowledge
to her father by telling him about bees. (Nina’s mother was dead, or
she would have told her too.) She traced, in rather minute detail,
the renascence of earth in spring, the blossoming of the trees, the
activity of the bees and their function in distributing the pollen, the
fertilization of the seed and its growth during the warm languorous
summer days, finally the fruition and harvest.
[Illustration: “_Strange to say, the habits of birds and flowers have
done as little to clarify the human scene as almost any other two
manifestations in nature._”]
It was a beautiful story, redolent of orchards and sunny hillsides,
instinct with life—a story that had a soporific effect on Mr. Sembrich,
lulling him as the buzz of a bee lulls one in hot daisy fields. The
upshot of it was that he gathered a rather strange impression from
the narrative and somehow got the idea that to have babies you had
to keep bees. He bought several hives, installing them in the little
sitting-room on the second floor, where Mrs. Sembrich had kept her
sewing-machine when she was alive. The acquisition of the apiary
further complicated matters for Mr. Sembrich by reason of the fact that
bees themselves enjoy a rather extraordinary sexual scheme—theirs is
a complex society, infinitely more diverting and harder to understand
than our own. Observed by a slightly nervous person who is trying to
profit by a simple analogy—as Mr. Sembrich was—bees are capable of
causing the utmost confusion.
If you will recall what you know about bees, you will readily
understand what I mean. In a colony of bees, certain individuals have
no sex whatsoever; these are the “workers.” The male bees are “drones.”
The queen (or “mother”) bee develops her sexual character only after
being arbitrarily chosen for the purpose, walled up, and fattened on
special food. Mr. Sembrich marveled at these things.
Basing his hopes entirely on what he had seen, he made his first overt
act, which was to give up his business (he was a merchant tailor) on
the assumption that to be endowed with masculine characteristics one
had to be a drone. In this, of course, he was justified to some degree;
for it is quite true that very busy men rarely are fully equipped for
a complete or happy sex life. Business men commonly find a vicarious
gratification for their erotic nature in card index systems. Often,
their satiable appetite for life is dissipated in the process of
dictating a single sales letter. Only men who devote virtually their
entire attention to love ever glimpse its full glory or experience its
bewildering intensity. (And _they_ make so little money they might just
as well not.)
Mr. Sembrich, therefore, was not without justification in becoming a
drone, since life was what he wanted to find out about. But it was when
he undertook to fatten up a lady of his acquaintance into a “mother”
that he ran into difficulties. He locked her in the kitchen and plied
her with rich desserts. He even urged honey on her—a rather literal
expedient even for a man in his mental condition. The lady not only
failed to become a mother, but she took sick and died, surrounded by
a group of Mr. Sembrich’s “workers,” whom he had hired to help feed
her. With a dead woman in the kitchen and a lot of bees upstairs in the
sitting-room, the household became unbearable as a place to live and
bring up his daughter Nina, so Mr. Sembrich fled, still ignorant of the
essential knowledge of life.[17]
[17] Sexually speaking.
Another case, not exactly paralleling the Sembrich affair, is the case
of two parents who failed to learn something to their advantage because
they happened to be at dinner. It happened this way. Charles Updegraff
had sent his son, Junior, to spend the summer at a boys’ camp. There,
in addition to learning how to swim, paddle, and make fires, Junior
learned about sex, so that he returned home fine and brown and a credit
to the Updegraffs. (The Updegraffs had swum, paddled, made fires, and
so on, for generations.) Now, at Camp Whortleberry (that was the name
of the camp) the authorities had adopted what is known as the “pet
method” for imparting sex knowledge to the boys. Each boy was given
charge of a pet of some kind, and the pets were given _carte blanche_.
Junior Updegraff drew a pair of sunfish. To augment the actual pet
study, the boys were also given lectures by the camp director, who knew
in a general way what he was talking about. Thus, when the summer was
over the boys’ minds were full of a strange assortment of facts and
oddments, some of them rather amusing. Young Junior had hardly been
home an hour when he thought he would do his old man a good turn by
telling him what he knew about sunfish. The Updegraffs were at table.
[Illustration: _Sun fish (Mola-Mola)_]
“Pop,” he said, “do you want the low down on a sunfish?”
Mrs. Updegraff hastily interrupted. “Better wait till after dinner,
son,” she said.
[Illustration: “_Young Junior had hardly been home an hour when he
thought he would do his old man a good turn by telling him what he knew
about sunfish._”]
(Note: parents have always been held back by the superstitious idea
that it is wrong to learn anything while eating.)
“What’s the matter with right now?” asked Junior. “I was just going to
tell Pop about our pet study course. I know a lot of things.”
“Wait till we’re through eating,” said Mrs. Updegraff.
“Why should I? A mouse is an embryo twenty days, a lop-sided apple is
that way because it’s been fertilized only on one side, male animals
grow bright colored in the mating season, and so it goes. Sunfish....”
[Illustration: _Sea Rover_]
“Junior!” said Mrs. Updegraff, sharply. “Not till after dinner. Sunfish
can wait!”
“No they can’t!” cried Junior, warming up to his subject. “The father
sunfish makes the nest, then....”
“We don’t want to hear about it,” snapped Junior’s mother. “Tell us
about your canoe trips.”
“I never went on no canoe trips.”
“Why not?”
“Always was watching the sunfish.”
The matter was dropped and the meal continued in silence. After dinner
Mr. Updegraff, secretly very much interested, hung around in the hope
that his son would again open up the subject of sunfish. The boy never
did. He was only a child and children are easily discouraged.
I suspect that the church is responsible, in large measure, for the
ideas of life now held by adults. Sex is still sin to the evangelical
clergy. A kiss is thinkable only when sanctified by the church. A child
who permits his parents to continue in the belief that the elevation of
the soul depends on the renunciation of the flesh, is hardly doing his
duty by them. Sometimes it may be advisable to quote to your parents
from standard works on the subject of sex. Great care must be taken,
though, to avoid abruptness, as far as possible. Thus there is some
doubt in my mind whether a child ought to approach its mother on a
hot afternoon when she is tired and bedraggled, and say to her: “Ma,
under favorable conditions a husband and wife should remain sexually
attractive to each other during the whole period of their sexual
potency.”
That’s no way for a child to talk.
Some children have told me that instead of quoting from books they have
tried leaving the books lying around, opened at pertinent pages. Even
this failed to work in most cases. The mothers usually just picked up
the book, dusted it, closed it, and fitted it neatly in some nearby
shelf. They thought it was dusty.
[Illustration: _Sea rover_]