EARLY SEX KNOWLEDGE: PARENTAL CONTRIBUTION TO KNOWLEDGE OF SEX
It has often been maintained that one of the parents’ obligations is the imparting of sex information to their children. This is an obligation that most parents would prefer to avoid, but no one is available to whom to transfer the task. Through timidity, a feeling of incompetence, and exaggerated response to small but vocal minority groups, the schools have thus far failed to give adequate sex information. On the other hand one must admit that any school that attempts to provide anything approximating adequate sexual information is soon under considerable pressure to desist. Many individuals who help exert such pressure are the victims of two delusions: (1) that knowledge of sexual matters will engender sexual behavior, and (2) that children are completely innocent about sexual matters. It is impossible for the preschool child and, in our present situation, not very feasible for older children, to pick up their knowledge from books. By the time a person can profit from reading the available literature, which is frequently contradictory anyway, he has already formed many of his basic concepts regarding sex and has accumulated the usual fund of misinformation and emotional bias.
Each interviewee was questioned about the amount of sexual information given him by his father and mother. The number who reported receiving any sex information from their fathers is a sad commentary on leaving sex education to the average parent. The percentages range from 27 per cent to about 13 per cent, and in only six groups did as many as one fifth say they had received any sexual information from their fathers. Within the range there seemed to be no particular trends.
An examination of the mother’s contribution reveals that for most groups the percentage who received any sexual information from their mothers is fairly close to the percentage who received any from their fathers. For example, among the control group 21 per cent derived some information from their fathers and 21 per cent some from their mothers; for the prison group the figures are 26 vs. 20; and for the offenders vs. adults 27 vs. 17. If one assumes that near equivalence is the norm, one should then look for groups that deviate markedly from the norm. While the percentage of men who received any sexual information from their mothers varies from 0 to 33 per cent, there are only five deviant groups. Three of these, the homosexual offenders vs. adults, the aggressors vs. minors, and the peepers, contained considerably more men who obtained information from their mothers than men who obtained information from their fathers. In contrast to these, there were two groups for whom the father was by far the more important source of data, these being the incest offenders vs. adults and the offenders vs. adults. But it is evident that the whole matter is, in this study, of minor importance in differentiating the various groups under consideration.
There does not seem to be an invariable relationship between getting along well with a parent and obtaining sexual data from that parent. We see, for instance, that the offenders vs. adults, who got along very well with their mothers, had more of their members obtaining sexual information from their fathers than from their mothers. Even more striking are the incest offenders vs. adults, who got along best of all groups with their mothers; not one of these males obtained any sexual information from his mother. Yet a negative correlation does not exist either; groups with poor maternal adjustments sometimes were especially likely to have received sexual information from their mothers—e.g., the homosexual offenders vs. adults.
On the basis of these scanty data and taking into account the findings about parent-child relationships, one is tempted to suggest that a good relationship with both parents and some sex education from both parents reduces the possibility of a subsequent sex-offense conviction. One should not yield to this temptation to speculate, however, for the term “sex information” as used above does not take into account quality or quantity. For example, a statement such as, “You can get a terrible disease from girls,” is considered as sex information although from some points of view it is scarcely conducive to a good heterosexual adjustment.
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