Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective - Ipce

According to the middle class standard, the infant is expected to
sleep alone, preferably in his own room. Housing the infant away from
the mother started in American hospitals only about sixty or seventy
years ago. Many hospitals still practice separation of infant and
mother at birth, except for brief feeding encounters. When infant and
mother return home, the “ideal” pattern has been for the infant to
spend much of his time alone in his room.
It is reasonable to assume that there is in the United States a
preoccupation with words and the articulated part of the culture rather
than with touch. There is an attitude of prudery and anxiety about
physical contact and erotic matters. With this assumption in mind, Clay
(1968) observed the behavior of 45 children and their mothers at three
public beaches patronized by persons of different social classes. One
of the patterns he observed was the lack of contact between infant and
mother on the beach. The majority of encounters between infant and
mother were of two kinds: first, taking care of the infants, and, second,
controlling their behavior. Far less frequent were intimate contacts
expressing love and attachment. Parents reward “desexualized”
motor performance that keeps the infant away from the mother. This generally
applied, though girl children received more physical touches
than did boys, and they were in physical contact with their mothers
longer than were the boys. For mothers of young children, having a good
time at the beach did not appear to include mothers enjoying their offspring
in a direct, personal, affective, tactile, sensual encounter.
The upper- and working-class mothers were more inclined to comfort
their children with tactile contacts, while middle-class mothers offered
distractions, mostly food. Middle-class mothers seemed more interested
in meeting friends at the beach than in relating to their
children. Small children are expected to play alone away from the parents.
These observations and conclusions must be regarded as suggestive
rather than definitive, however.
Another area of infant-adult encounter that has great potential for
educating the child in sexual matters is toilet training. There are important
adult values, attitudes and behavior patterns which the infant
learns in connection with toilet training. In the United States, one of
these is the value placed on cleanliness. The infant is expected to
keep himself and his clothes from being soiled when he urinates or defecates.
His waste matter must go into the proper container and he must
“wipe” himself so that no spots or odors cling to him. The mother may
instruct him to wash his hands after urinating or defecating to get rid
of the “germs.” Children’s attitudes of disgust toward the texture,
color, and odor of feces develop only after socialization by a mother
who expresses such attitudes. (Sears, et al, 1957, p. 106-107).
Looking for relationships between toilet-training patterns and the
mother’s sexual anxiety or strictness of attitude toward control of
sexual behavior, Sears (Sears, et al, 1957, p. 111) found that toilet
training and control of sexual behavior were frequently linked by the
mothers. If eliminating had sexual implications for mothers, one can
hypothesize that her degree of sexual anxiety might influence her toilet
training patterns. The assumption is all the more reasonable since
high sexual anxiety has been found to be associated with the decision
not to suckle. If the mother had sexual anxiety over toilet training,
she might consciously or unconsciously try to get it over with as early
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