SEX QUESTIONS CHILDREN ASK OF PARENTS
If the home atmosphere is sexually repressive, the children do not ask many questions. Conn reports that twenty-nine percent of 128 boys and thirty percent of 72 girls in one of his studies had inquired about sexual topics. As a group, the more intelligent children offered more questions. But even in superior groups (I.Q. 111-140) the average number of sex inquiries did not rise above two questions for each child. The children (four to six years of age) used such information as they had received at home, and combining this information with their limited experiences, were able to produce naive explanations of, for example, where babies come from. The child of this age thinks of “being born” in such terms as: “the baby is little,” “they grow out of the ground,” “they grow and then they buy them,” “the baby comes from the hospital,” “God put ‘em in. God makes ‘em”. Of twenty-five children of preschool age (four to six years of age), God was frequently referred to as the source of babies. Children also spoke of babies as being bought from stores. In about one-third of the cases they mentioned the hospital as a place from which babies are obtained. The idea of the doctor as the person who brings the baby to the mother was introduced by only two children. There was no reference to the mother’s role in the coming of the baby, and the concept of the birth process was foreign to these children. Many children twenty years later were not giving better answers than were the children in 1948.
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