Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective - Ipce

cide that the child is “not old enough to know about such things yet”
(postponed response). Even in regard to animal sexual behavior “that
day never did come.”
When I helped my father in the barn, I often saw
the afterbirth from the cows in the gutter when
we were cleaning the barn. I quite naturally was
curious as to what the afterbirth was and asked
dad what it was. He told me that I was not old
enough to know about such things yet, but that
he would tell me when I was older. However, that
day never did come.
Not one parent in the Sears (Sears, et al, 1957) study was found to
be completely free and open in the discussion of sex with young children.
One reason why parents are not open in sex discussion is the fear
that any attention called to the subject may awaken the child to erotic
activity--“he’s one of those guys who would go out and try it.” (Sears,
Maccoby, and Levin, 1957, p. 192).
The average child of five or six who has not been openly and positively
socialized about sexual matters and who has had an opportunity
to observe genital differences can say that “girls have shorter ones
and boys have longer ones” or that “a boy’s sticks out and a girl’s
doesn’t.” But he is very reluctant to divulge the name or label by
which he knows the organ. The name he knows for the organ may be as innocuous
as the term “dewdrop,” “teddy bear,” “dicky bird,” “train,” or
“pieces of string.” Nevertheless, the child becomes restless, bites his
lip, or hangs his head and refuses to speak when he is requested to utter
the word which refers to that part of the body. Conn and Kanner
(1947) reported no less than sixty-one different names for the sex organs
in the vocabularies of two hundred children. But they were most
reluctant to use them. Many had two or three terms for the sex organs
which they could use interchangeably. Most of these terms served both
for the male and the female genitals. The great majority of children
had something to say about how bad, naughty, “not nice” it was to talk
about genitality, genitals, to see others undressed, and to be seen in
the nude. Sex talk was generally regarded as a great offense. This attitude
was especially strong when it came to naming the genitals. A
girl six years old said, “that’s a bad word.” When she was asked why,
she said “because it’s really bad.” A five year old boy said “a girl
has a different thing. I don’t want to say it because it might be a bad
word.”
This phenomenon of non-labeling or mislabeling the sex organs and
their functions, encouraged by many parents, leaves the child without a
vocabulary with which to think properly or to describe human physical
attributes and his own physical or psychic experiences. Because he
lacks a definitive sexual vocabulary, it is possible that fantasy will
overrun his sex life. The mysterious penis that supposedly exists behind
the female pubic hair, the feeling that females have been castrated,
and other childhood fantasies are possible because there is no
system of naming of parts and functions which guides the child’s nascent
interest in his own or other’s bodies. (Gagnon, 1965).
When child and parent do not share an adequate vocabulary for un-
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