BABY AND CHILDHOOD SEXUALITY
To many people in our culture any concept of childhood sexuality seems totally unwholesome and many find it impossible to think of children as sexual beings at all. This is because most people think of sexuality as being inextricably linked to genitality. This is not true of adult sexuality and is even less so when it comes to children.
Babies and children are sexual creatures and it is only in a sex-repressed culture such as ours that credence would be given to any alternative suggestion. In the vast majority of cultures in the world children witness adult sexuality as part of their everyday life experience. Things are different here where children are required to be ‘innocent’ and are seen as empty slates on which anything can be written, so that they are in need of protection. Of course children do need protecting, but to protect them against sex — one of our basic appetites and means of
expression — is strange, to say the least.
If it could be proved that, by allowing children to gain a knowledge of sexuality naturally as they grow up, we would be harming or damaging them in any way, we would of course, be against it — but there is no such proof. On the contrary, work done by Margaret Mead and others suggests that in societies in which children are not repressed sexually, as happens in the West, the children show no preoccupation with sex and grow up far better balanced sexually than ours do. In such cultures, perversions and deviations are rare and the sexes get on well together as adults.
The problems when discussing baby and childhood sexuality come about because for
adults — as we have said – sexuality is often wrongly equated with genitality. There is evidence that the two are not so closely linked in babies and young children, who get just as much enjoyable and intense physical pleasure from other pursuits and experiences, as we adults do from intercourse and other genital behaviour.
At the risk of putting readers off it is probably useful to consider what Freud said about sexuality at this stage, if only because his theories have not been greatly improved on in nearly a century. Freud suggested that a child goes through several well-defined stages of sexual or, more correctly, psychosexual development from the cradle to sexual maturity in the teens. The first stage is the oral one in which most pleasure is centred around the baby’s mouth; the second is the anal one in which pleasure mostly comes from excreting (urinating and opening the bowels); the third stage is the phallic one during which the child discovers his penis or her clitoris as the best source of pleasure; the fourth is a period of latency during which psychosexual development more or less marks time; and lastly, with puberty, the child becomes genital and obtains the majority of his or her sexual and sensual pleasures from genital sensations.
Most children progress from one stage to the next at a fairly predictable pace but can, because of problems in upbringing, stop at a particular stage; go awry, or go back a stage or two after having successfully negotiated one stage. It is clearly seen in clinical practice that adults can move around the scale from a major preoccupation with the adult (genital) stage. At any one stage in a person’s life one of these phases is dominant in his or her sexuality but regression is possible to any of the previous stages. We shall look at all of these stages in more detail as the chapter progresses.
These stages in psychosexual development are under the control of the genetic ‘blueprint’ as are intellectual, physical, emotional and personality development. But genes are not the whole story because external circumstances affect the outcome too. The physical ‘blueprint’, for example, may specify a 6 foot individual but poor nutrition or a bad emotional environment may hamper this so that only 5 feet 8 inches is finally achieved. Similarly, the responses from parents and others to each stage of psychosexual development influence whether the stage progresses ‘normally’, becomes fixed or even makes the child regress to an earlier stage. The pattern of the blueprint is basically the same in both sexes but there is a considerable difference in the way our culture treats the emergent sex drive of girls compared with that of boys.
Although Freud was by no means the first person to discuss infant sexuality he was blamed for opening up the subject by people who preferred to talk of the innocence of childhood. Such people believe in the sinfulness of adults, that sex is sin, and therefore that children should be protected from it.
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