SEX EDUCATION
fro the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,--With reference to your correspondence on sex education 1 enclose a quotation from Alfred Adler's recent book, What Life Should Mean to You. As the considered opinion of an eaperienced psychologist it is especially valuable :
" I should never encourage parents to explain the physical relations of sex too early in life or to explain more than their children wish to learn. You can understand that the way in which a child looks on the problems of marriage. is of the greatest importance. If he is taught in a mistaken way, he can see them as a danger and as something altogether beyond him. In my own experience children who were introduced to the facts of adult relations in early life, at four, five or six years of age, and children who had precocious experiences, are always more scared of love in later life. . . . If a child is more grown-up when he has his first explanations and experiences, ho is not nearly so frightened.. . . The key to helpfulness is never to lie to a child, never to evade his questions, to explain only as much as he wishes to learn and only as much as we are sure he can understand. Officiousness and intrusive information can cause great harm. . . . If there is trust between himself and his parents he can suffer no injury. He will always ask what he needs to know. There is a common superstition that children can ho misled by the explanations of their comrades. I have never seen a child otherwise healthy, who suffered harm in this way. . . . I must confess too that I have often found children more delicate and tactful in those affairs than their elders."
Norton, Berkhamoted, Herts.
Previous page
