Anne C. Bernstein
Perspectives
Press
Indianapolis, Indiana
Copyright © 1994 by Anne C. Bernstein
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Revised Edition, First printing September, 1994
ISBN
#0-944934-09-9
Ebook ISBN #0-944934-41-2
Library of
Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Bernstein, Anne C, 1944-
Flight of the stork : what children think (and when) about sex and family building / Anne C. Bernstein. — Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-944934-09-9 (pbk.) : $14.00
1. Sex instruction for children. 2. Children's questions and answers. I. Title.
HQ57.B49 1994
612.6'07—dc20
94-21672
CIP
When psychologist Anne C. Bernstein's original version of The Flight of the Stork came out in 1978 it was well received as something innovative and helpful for those struggling to provide effective sex education for their children far beyond the stork and cabbage patch tories common to years ago. Reviewers of the original wrote...
“This is a well-conceived and well-written book, and, beyond this, an aesthetic experience. It leaves stimulating ideas hatching all over the place... To read this book is to embark on a pleasurable, enriching experience... It will be titillating if you have children of your own who are asking, and answering, and asking again the perennial question.”
Carlos Sluzki, MD, UCSF Dept. of Psychiatry in Family Process
“... some of the children's inventive ideas introduce an amusing note (but) the book is one of serious research that should prove a helpful guide to parents in gauging how much sex information their children should be given and when they should have it.”
ALA Booklist, April 1, 1978
“(Flight of the Stork) is richly paced with probing interviews of children, conducted in the style of Piaget.”
Howard Gardner, author of Frames of Mind in “Getting Acquainted with Jean Piaget” New York Times, January 3, 1979
This 1994 edition brings into the 21st century the issue of what children understand about where babies come from. Today, babies come to their families through sexual intercourse, through adoption, through assisted reproductive technology, through donor insemination and surrogates, through blending of families of origin. And because of this complexity, parents need even more help. Anne C. Bernstein offers that concretely and supportively. Advance comments on the new version include...
“Anne Bernstein has done a wonderful job of helping adults understand how children organize and internalize information provided to them by adults. The material can be used in a variety of ways by adults who are willing to be adaptable at all-i.e. How do we interpret what children have to say? More importantly how can we encourage them to say more, so that we can understand what they think?... (The book) should be required reading for every person who works directly with children: social workers, teachers, therapists, etc., to help them understand how children learn and understand life events.”
Vera Fahlberg, MD Children's Therapist Author, A Child's Journey through Placement
“From time to time I have been excited by a book which fills a void and expands my horizons. With Flight of the Stork, Anne Bernstein has done both. It is at once entertaining and informative; carefully conceived and artfully presented. I recommend it without reservation to those who are interested in helping future generations grow up with healthy attitudes about reproduction and themselves.”
William R. Keye, Jr, MD, Chief Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and In-Vitro Fertilization Program, William Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak, MI
When it was first published, Anne Bernstein's Flight of the Stork (helped) parents understand how children come to make sense of sex and reproduction (and) served as a window to the mystery and wonderment of sexuality and the process of creation from the perspective of the developing child... Bernstein's revised book is a valuable addition to the literature on family life. Her new chapters on adoption and reproductive technology provide wonderful insights into how children think about these topics. She continues to show an extraordinary ability to translate basic research findings into interesting, relevant, and practical information... This book is must reading not only for parents, but for family counselors, mental health clinicians, educators, and all other individuals whose professional responsibilities involve working with children around family life issues.
David Brodzinsky, PhD, Author, Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self and The Psychology of Adoption
Dedication
For my mother and father
Clara Handelman Bernstein and Alfred Jacob Bernstein
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the people who helped make this book possible.
I am grateful to the many readers—parents and teachers—who had continued to use The Flight of the Stork during the years it was out of print, encouraging me to revise and expand the original work and pursue publishing a new edition.
My son, David, and stepsons, Brian, Antonio, and Sean, gave me the opportunity to follow my own advice. Their lively curiosity and ingenious turns of mind gave me a deeper appreciation of the tasks that confront all parents. I am grateful to them for teaching me how conversations about sex and birth and forming families happen in everyday life.
Most particularly, I am indebted to Pat Johnston, noted infertility and adoption educator, and the editor and publisher of this volume. Her guidance was essential in developing the new materials, expanding the scope of the book from children's concepts of human reproduction to a broader understanding of how people form families. Most of the new material in this book addresses how children can better understand their origins when they have joined their families through adoption or have been born through assisted reproductive technologies—in vitro fertilization, donor insemination, ovum transfer, and surrogacy. I couldn't have done this work without Pat Johnston's inspiration and guidance.
I am also indebted to a number of other professionals, educators and advocates in the field of third party reproduction for putting me in touch with people to interview and sharing their own expertise. Fay Johnson and Shirley Zager of the Organization of Parents Through Surrogacy, Carol Frost Vercollone of RESOLVE, Inc. and Carole LieberWilkins of RESOLVE of Los Angeles County, Hillary Hanafin of the Center for Surrogate Parenting, Christie Montgomery of Surrogate Parenting Services, and Tim Fisher of the Gay and Lesbian Parents Coalition International (Washington, D.C.) all gave generously of their time and knowledge of the field. Chicago therapist Judith Calica and pediatrician and therapist Vera Fahlberg provided critiques of the new material.
Flight of the Stork found its way to Perspectives Press thanks to talented colleagues in developmental psychology. Judith Newman, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, invited me to be on a panel for a Jean Piaget Society meeting. There I met David Brodzinsky, whose research on children's understanding of adoption created the basis for Chapter 9. Without the extensive work of Brodzinsky and his colleagues, Anne Braff Brodzinsky, Marshall Schechter and Leslie Singer, I could not have addressed these issues in such depth. I am grateful to him, too, for creating the link to Pat Johnston and Perspectives Press. Johnston credits reproductive endocrinologist William R. Keye, Jr. for introducing her to the first edition when both were working as RESOLVE volunteers in Indiana in 1980.
Those who contributed to the original work must also be thanked anew. Philip A. Cowan first pointed out the need for a study of children's thinking about the origin of babies. His guidance throughout the original research was invaluable. Margaret T. Singer, Kenneth Craik, and Joseph Kuypers provided many helpful suggestions, and Sonne Lemke's work on children's identity concepts added an important dimension to the research. I am grateful, too, to Elliot Turiel for directing me toward resources to update my understanding of Piagetian theory.
The children I spoke with, and their parents, who consented to their children's being interviewed, were, of course, indispensable. The children, with their ingenuous and imaginative views and their eagerness to serve as consultants, made the work a pleasure. The Children's Community Center and the Berkwood-Hedge School in Berkeley, California, the Early Childhood Education Department of Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, and Maria Pinedo of San Francisco all helped me make connections with children and families.
Lonnie Barbach, Ernest Callenbach, Daniel Goldstine, Katherine Larger, and David Swanger provided encouragement and assistance in the critical juncuture between completed thesis and first publication.
Donald Rothman read the manuscript as I wrote it, keeping me attentive to questions of style and clarity. An innovative teacher of writing, he more than anyone else provided both support and criticism as the first edition was in progress. Betty Cohen, Martin Gold, Alan Graubard, and Diana Rothman made many excellent suggestions for revising the first edition. Loni Hart, Nancy Feinstein, Wendy Roberts, and Vicki Strang were valuable consultants. Rhoda Weyr, my agent for the first edition, and Betty Kelly, my editor at Delacorte were vital sources of both personal and technical support. Jim Shortridge and Shelley Ross, of the SIECUS library, provided invaluable assistance in bringing my recommended resources up to date. Pat Johnston, Diane Ehrensaft, and Conn Hallinan read drafts of the new material; their editorial acumen has made for a stronger book.
I would like to single out my husband, Conn Hallinan, for special appreciation, because I especially appreciate him. A talented, creative teacher of journalism, he has become my editor of first resort, taking time from his own considerable workload to read my work “hot off the printer.” His loving constancy has made all the difference.
Notes for the Second Edition
Many things have changed since 1978, when The Flight of the Stork was first published. The birth rate has revived after a prolonged dip that led school districts to sell off empty buildings they would later find they needed. The need for sex education, both at home and at school, was amplified by the destructive consequences of not educating young people about sex. The rate of teenage pregnancy has continued to increase, and sexually transmitted diseases have become epidemic. In 1978, AIDS was unheard of, and the notion that sex could be lethal would have been dismissed as reactionary backlash to the sexual revolution. Only a few researchers were starting to open the closet door on child sexual abuse.
The need to talk with children about sex and reproduction is greater than ever. They need to know about sex to keep their curiousity alive, encouraging the lively pursuit of the answers to these and other questions. They need to know about sex to protect their health and safety. And they need to know about sex to develop satisfying, mutually respectful relationships throughout their adolescent and adult lives.
Because times have changed, some of the specific ideas children hold may change with the information they are exposed to in their family lives and in the media, but how they approach problem-solving and what they are likely to distort will follow predictable patterns. Because Flight of the Stork is about how children's thinking develops, the principles on which it is based continue to inform parents about what their children are likely to understand, and misunderstand, about the origin of babies.
This is a book about the origin of families, as well as the origin of babies. In thinking about how people get babies, children ponder how they happened to have the family fate has dealt them. In the original study, I asked children how do mommies get to be mommies, how daddies get to be daddies, and how do they happen to have their own particular parents. Their answers let me know that this was a question to which they had already devoted time and attention.
In the years since first publication, families have become more diverse. There are more single parent families, more families formed through adoption, more stepfamilies, and more families headed by same-sex couples. The ways all families reproduce has become more varied, thanks to innovations in medical technology that permit the creation of babies without sex. For children in families that diverge from the Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best version of American “nuclear” family life, and for their classmates, the question “where do I come from?” cannot be answered by simply disclosing “the facts of life.”
To address these concerns, I have substantially expanded The Flight of the Stork to address how children think about step-family formation, adoption and assisted reproductive technology and to help parents think through how to discuss these topics with their children. The new material is half again as long as the revised original work. In Chapter 9, I address the challenge presented to children by the still more complex concepts of in vitro fertilization, donor insemination, ovum transfer, and surrogracy, making suggestions to parents about how and when to discuss these topics with their children. In Chapter 10, I examine the development of children's thinking about adoption: what it means to be adopted, how they understand the motives of adoptive parents and birthparents in making an adoption plan, and their evolving understanding of the permanence of the family formed by adoption. In Chapter 11, I explore how children understand the tangle of relationships created by remarriage, when they may have a mother and a stepmother; a father and a stepfather; full, half-, and stepsiblings; and grandparents galore.
When I wrote the first edition, I had studied children's concepts of how people get babies, but I had never been called upon to put into practice the advice I had given others. In the years since, I have become a stepmother and a mother, and I have had to practice what I'd been preaching. I found that the principles on which this book is based have worked for me and my family. In thinking about how what I would say would be received by our boys at different ages, I was rewarded by having the kinds of conversations I had imagined to be possible. I hope this book gives my readers the understanding, the tools, and the confidence to do the same.
Preface
Storks fly through the air dangling babies from diaper slings. Cabbage patches are filled with infants hidden among the leaves. Doctors pull forth babies from black bags. The traditional child-tailored myths of creation are on the way out. Happily, few children are now being told these age-old parental lies, and fewer still believe them.
As part of my research at the University of California, Berkeley, I decided to find out what children understand of the explanations and gossip that form their early sex education. So I asked children their own perennial question: How do people get babies? And they told me.
It might seem as if the answer to that question will depend on what a child has been told, but that's not the case. Children continue to amaze the adults who have conscientiously imparted the “facts of life” with their own fantasized versions of these “facts.” Even when adults give children straight facts, the story of human reproduction often gets twisted into a remarkable version of creation.
Jane, age four, told me, “To get a baby to grow in your tummy, you just make it first. You put some eyes on it. Put the head on, and hair, some hair, all curls. You make it with head stuff you find in the store that makes it for you. Well, the mommy and daddy make the baby and then they put it in the tummy and then it goes quickly out.”
Jane had never been told that babies were manufactured, using parts purchased from the store. She put together the answer out of information pieced together by a thread of child logic that reflected her understanding of the physical world.
How did I happen to be talking to Jane about how people get babies? My interest in sex education began some years back.
In 1948, I was four years old and my mother was pregnant. My parents “prepared” me for Andrew's birth by reading to me Marie Hall Ets's book, The Story of a Baby. It soon became my favorite. I loved the story of the egg “smaller than a seed of hay that flies like dust in the wind” growing in its “house without windows or doors.” I was fascinated by the pictures of the wrinkled, tightly curled embryos that changed from a curious squiggle on the page to something that looked just like a baby.
In those days, I could not yet read, but I could remember. I delighted in amazing adults by reciting word for word the books I had heard most often, turning the pages at the appropriate time. For the “baby book,” though, I wanted an audience of children, since I was eager to share this wonderful story with my friends. I made the rounds of the neighborhood, “reading” the book to all the kids. Years later I learned that my educational campaign had caused a flood of phone calls from the other mothers to mine: “Do you know what your daughter is doing?!”
A few years after Andrew was born, I started lobbying (in vain) for a sister. My mother seemed reluctant to come right out and say that two children would do quite nicely thank you. Instead, she rested her case on a statement of fact: There was no baby growing inside her now. “Well,” I argued, “just tell Daddy to plant the seed.” My brother, playing nearby with a pail and shovel, came into the conversation, waving his shovel: “Me help Daddy plant the seed.” I knew that was silly. Although how the seed was planted was still a mystery to me, I knew that it didn't take a shovel and was nothing a three-year-old could do.
As a child, I wanted to learn about what adults thought about having babies and what their sexual experiences were. Later, as an adult, I turned to the study of children's ideas of how people get babies. Early in my graduate studies I took a class with Philip A. Cowan. I remember his saying that there had been much speculation about how children think about how people get babies, most of it based on adult memories or projections about childhood. While some studies collected anecdotes from children, none had systematically asked the children themselves. Years later, when I was ready to begin my own research, I decided to devote myself to this inquiry.
I talked with over a hundred children from three to twelve years old. I asked them how people get babies, how mommies get to be mommies, and how daddies get to be daddies. I asked them when mothers and fathers start to be mothers and fathers, and called upon each child to explain how his mother and father got to be his mother and father. I asked what the word “born” means and what had happened at the child's birth. All of the children interviewed had at least one younger brother or sister, and 1 asked each child why his younger sibling had come to live at his house as part of his family.
I asked the younger children: What if some people who lived in a cave in the desert, where there weren't any other people, wanted to have a baby. Because they had never known any other people, they didn't know how people get babies. What if they asked you for help? If they asked you what they should do if they wanted a baby, what would you tell them?
And to the older children, my question was: What did you think about how people get babies before you understood it as well as you do now? What did you think when you were little?
I approached each child as a consultant, asking his or her help in my work, which I explained was learning how kids think about some things. I emphasized that it was their way of thinking, not the Tightness or wrongness of their answers, that interested me. I did not provide the children with any information, nor did I introduce terms or concepts not mentioned by the children themselves. In speaking with over one hundred children, never did one turn the tables on me to ask me information about reproduction.
I use the ages of children in my examples only to help identify the children speaking. These ages are not intended as norms, or indications of how a child “should” think about reproduction at age four, seven, or eleven. The sequence of the levels which I will discuss should be the same for all children, but the ages at which they are reached may differ considerably. The children I talked with are not representative of the entire population. Most, but not all, are white and middle-class. They live in a fairly sophisticated region of the country (the San Francisco Bay Area), and they have received more direct teaching on this subject than most children have. While education does not completely determine the level of explanation children give to the question “How do people get babies?” repeated experience with ideas does have an influence. As a result, we can expect that the children described in this book are probably a little younger than most of the children whose thinking about the origin of babies theirs most resembles.
Parents should not become discouraged about their children's rate of development or attempt to push them to race up the “ladder” of developmental levels. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget calls this desire to speed up the natural rhythms of children's learning “the American disease”—racing to the end instead of enjoying the journey.
The world has become so complex that many of us find ourselves awed by the responsibility of raising children when we cannot anticipate how accelerating change will transform the conditions they will live with as adults. Our grandparents did not question that they knew what they needed to be good parents. If they had any questions, they were confident that their own parents could provide the answers. Many of the adults I know best feel that our parents did not, and could not, prepare us for the world we now live in. We are unsure about how to equip our own children to live with change and to take control over change in order that they and the world may survive.
Such uncertainty about parenting has led to an unprecedented search for experts to tell us how: how to love, how to fight, how to like ourselves, and especially, because it is part of the way we ourselves can change the world, how to raise our children. There is nothing so revealing about the true dimensions of an expert than the discovery that others look to you for advice about how to live and trust important aspects of their children's future to your counsel. In writing a book that goes beyond describing children's thinking, to suggest how to talk with them, I have been humbled by the responsibility.
And so a word about “experts” and how to use the advice they have to offer. As you cut the suit to fit your body and not your body to fit the suit, so take expert advice only when it fits. If what I suggest goes against your grain, trust yourself. You'll be a better parent for it.
1
Children Think Differently from Adults
Alan: If Daddy put his egg in you, then
(AGE 3) I must be a chicken.
Susan: To get a baby, go to the store and buy
(AGE 3) a duck.
Every day, thousands of parents sit down to tell their children about the birds and the bees. And the cows. And the chickens. And the ducks. Parental descriptions of sex and birth often sound like morning roll call on Noah's ark. When it comes to people, however, the roll call becomes a lecture, taking on the precision of an advanced anatomy course, as the anxious parent rushes through enough detail to confuse a medical student.
Children take this information, process it through mental jungle gyms, and create their own versions of who comes from where, and how. The children seem content with their answers, and parents, having provided the answers, are not about to start following up with more questions. Chances are, therefore, that misunderstanding will persist.
The most effective way to tell children about sex is to provide information matched to their level of mental development. But because children aren't asked what they really believe, as opposed to what they were told, we don't understand how their ability to analyze and assimilate information changes year by year.
Do you remember what you thought as a child about how people get babies? Take a few minutes to recollect what you believed when you were four years old. Then close your eyes and come up the years to age eight. How had your understanding changed? By the time you were twelve, what did you think?
In talking with groups of parents and psychology students, I asked them to think themselves back to childhood and share their beliefs about procreation. Many find this a difficult thing to do. They find they cannot remember what their child selves believed about sex and birth. Others remember only what they were told by their parents.
One man of about thirty recalled his father explaining how you know the baby is coming long before it actually arrives. He said getting a baby was very much like going to a bakery: You go to the hospital and get a number; when your number is called, you return to collect your baby.
A woman remembered believing that to get a baby you put in a purchase order at the hospital. She had figured this out for herself and believed it until she was eleven. To put this story together, she drew on her own experience. Her father had shown her the hospital where she and her brothers and sisters were born, pointing it out to her as “the place we got all you kids.” Throughout her childhood she had seen him handle countless purchase orders, since he ran his business from their home, so it was only logical that he had sent out a purchase order for them.
A woman remembered believing that a string goes from the father to the mother during lovemaking, and it is this string that impregnates her.
A man recalled his boyhood belief that intercourse was like urination and took place standing up.
A woman remembered thinking that birth occurred when the baby turned the knob of a little door in the sleeping mother's back and walked out.
An older European woman told of her fright when, having missed a period as a teenager, she was convinced that a man had impregnated her while gallantly kissing her hand.
Perhaps your memories, like these people's, are very different from your current beliefs. Perhaps you cannot remember thinking any other way than you do now. It is hard to remember that you used to reason completely differently from the way you do now. The difficulty of translating thoughts from child logic to adult logic may block the road to memory.
This book is about some of the ways that children think differently from adults. In reading these pages, adults can learn to translate some of what they know into child logic so that they may communicate better with their children. By talking with children about how people get babies, I have gathered a collection of amusing stories which beautifully illustrate the way children think. The “out of the mouths of babes” quality of many of them is touching, and the adult who listens carefully has a lot to learn.
Many parents still find it difficult to talk about reproduction with their children. Their own emotional discomfort in talking about sex is one stumbling block, and their lack of information about what the child is really asking and is likely to understand is another. I will try to present a systematic description and explanation of the ways in which children are likely to embellish fact with fable at different ages. Knowing the direction in which your children's thinking is developing can help you present information in the way they can most readily absorb. I have divided children's explanations of the origins of babies into their six levels of problem-solving ability. In Chapters 3 through 8, I will present each level: the children's ideas about how people get babies, how their theories of reproduction tie in with their ideas about other of life's puzzles, and how parents can use this insight into children's thinking to communicate more effectively with their children.
The idea that children's thinking develops through a series of levels is based on the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget regards each child as a philosopher who works at making the universe intelligible. Children ask themselves and others: What makes it night? What is a dream? How do people get babies? In growing up, children attempt to piece together answers to these and other questions, to explain to themselves the whats and hows and whys of the events that surround and involve them. They use all the resources at their disposal: what they themselves perceive with their senses, the information given them by others, and their own style of putting the puzzle together. As children develop, they shape the world in terms of their own level of understanding and then restructure their understanding when they take in information that doesn't fit into their old view of the universe. It is this structuring, restructuring, and eventual understanding that we are going to be talking about.
Piaget believed that the maturation of the nervous system and the muscular system plays a role in development, but it does not steal the show. He believed that the effect of the environment is important, but the child does not sit back passively and wait to be shaped by the outside world. Instead, Piaget emphasized, from infancy onward the child actively seeks contact with the environment, looking for new levels of stimulation. When an event occurs, it is not merely registered as a “copy” of reality, but is interpreted and assigned meaning by the child. A blanket is not a blanket is not a blanket. To one child a blanket is something to suck, to another something to hide under while playing peek-a-boo, to a third it provides warmth during sleep, and to yet another it is a source of security and good feeling to cling to when alone.
How then does the child actively move from one stage of thinking to another? As we have already noted, maturation is necessary for development, but it is not enough. The child's intellect must also interact with the world around her. Only when the external world clashes with concepts already established in her mind is the child forced to modify these concepts and develop intellectually. Piaget described this movement from stage to stage as resulting from the interaction of three different processes: assimilation (taking in), accommodation (putting out), and equilibration (balancing).
Each stage or level represents a general approach to understanding experience. Basic to Piaget's way of thinking about children's developing knowledge is that they cannot skip or leap over steps; each way of solving problems builds on the previous way. Cultural and individual differences may speed up, slow down, or even stop development, so that all children of the same age are not at the same level, but the order of the levels each child must move through stays the same.
The invariance of this sequence of stages, even the very existence of stages in children's thinking, has become quite controversial in the years since Piaget stopped writing. Instead of seeing cognitive stages as basic, general, deep-seated and all pervasive, some developmental psychologists doubt that post-infancy styles of solving problems, or making sense of the world, are radically different at different ages. Part of the problem is the difficulty in accurately assessing whether qualitative shifts in solving one set of problems is truly coordinated with similar ways of thinking about very different subjects. Another is that the evidence points to slower and more gradual transitions in cognitive development rather than the abrupt step-like shifts suggested by the idea of stages.
What sense does it then make to talk about stages? In looking at children's developing cognition, it is improbable that what we are looking at is simply the uncoordinated acquisition-of-expertise in a multitude of intellectual tasks. Despite agreement that Piaget's formal model is not wholly adequate to describe the changes in children's thinking, experts in developmental psychology have judged that “some of his more informal generalizations... seem very insightful and likely to prove at least roughly correct.” (Flavell, 1977, p.93) Elliot Turiel suggests that the concept of stages is still a useful one, with the proviso that transitions between them be seen as gradual rather than abrupt. In this view, development entails qualitative changes within each subject area. Transitions include a gradual process of becoming disenchanted with old ideas and then accepting new ones. For example, a child will first reject new information that does not fit with her old way of viewing the world, then begin to criticize her existing ways of thinking, and later go on to construct and maintain a more advanced set of ideas. (Turiel, 1986).
In the descriptions that follow of children's thinking about how people get babies, the sequence of stages was originally thought of in Piagetian terms, although there was always an appreciation of uneven development across tasks and long periods of transition. I would also like to remind the reader that the ages given for each level are not standards of “normality.” Nor are they measures of general intellectual development. They serve only to describe the children I talked with whose thinking is described by that level. To compare your children to those quoted here in order to see how they “measure up” is to do them a disservice.
Because children are not miniature adults, they will not think like adults until they are themselves grown up. No matter how carefully a parent explains things, a child will misunderstand some part of the explanation, sometimes at the time, sometimes later. So, you might ask, why put the extra effort into answering questions with the child's thinking in mind? Why correct confusion that growing up will straighten out anyhow?
Perhaps the most important reason is that children ask their parents sincere questions and want and deserve truthful answers. Not the whole truth all at once, but as much of the truth as they request. It is not necessary to reel off explanations with all the details of a physiology text. It is important to find out what the child wants to know, and to do your best to satisfy his or her curiosity. Children know when their parents are being evasive, and they begin to wonder: Am I asking something I shouldn't? Is this something bad to think about? and Is there something wrong with me for asking? They then quickly learn that if they really want to find out about something, they must go somewhere else for the answers. But children also can sense when their parents are responsive, aware of their needs, and want to inform them. They learn that they can find out what they want to know at home and can rely on their parents as trustworthy sources of knowledge. When they feel assured that the channels of communication are open, they can pace their questions to their need to know, asking one question now and waiting to mull over new ideas before coming back to ask for more.
Another reason to encourage children's natural curiosity about birth is that this curiosity is the starting point for their interest in other questions of origin, the first step toward thinking about cause and effect. Both Freud and Piaget agree that children's inquiries into the origins of babies make up an important step in their intellectual development. Freud calls it “the first of the great problems of life.” Piaget says, “It is true that there will be children who ask questions about origins before they ask them about birth but even here the question arises whether it is not an interest in birth which, thwarted and projected, is not at the root of these questions about origin.” He goes on to say that “children's ideas on the birth of babies follow the same laws as their ideas in general.” We will explore those ideas throughout this book. For now, it is important to note that children's questions about procreation are an early foray in their search for knowledge. Encouraging the child's unguarded questions and answering responsively also encourages the child as an active, inquisitive explorer of the world.
Contrary to the old saw, what you don't know can hurt you. Like the little boy who said, “If Daddy put his egg in you then I must be a chicken,” children who cannot distinguish between ova, the human eggs that grow babies, and the eggs we eat for breakfast have occasion for worry. What if instead of being born they had been eaten? Imagining people as cannibals of their unborn young is disturbing. The child may refuse to eat eggs, or may eat them obediently and then feel queasy.
A six-and-a-half-year-old girl told her mother, “When I grow up, I'm not getting a daddy. And if I get a baby, I'm not going to let it out.” Her belief that a baby could grow inside her body without her doing anything to set that process in motion leads to other upsetting thoughts. The idea of a baby inside who will never see the light of day, the feelings of this reluctant mother turned jailer who must keep the baby locked within her body, must no doubt cause her a great deal of worry and unhappiness. How relieved she would be to understand that if she didn't “get a daddy” no baby would begin to grow.
Among older children, vagueness and confusion about the mechanics of reproduction can lead to worry about pregnancy. Perhaps the child believes a kiss can impregnate. Or, uncertain about how the sperm gets to the egg, the child may become uncomfortable simply standing close to someone of the other sex. Adult women told me of their childhood fears that toilet seats and school benches, crowded buses and subways, might expose them to the risk of unwanted pregnancy.
Misconceptions about how people get babies can lead to conception in adolescence. Margaret Mead (who did not become pregnant until she was nearly forty) remembers her girlhood beliefs in Blackberry Winter, “The father's role in conception was essentially a feeding role, for many acts of intercourse were believed to be necessary to build up the baby, which was compounded of father's semen and mother's blood.”
Misunderstanding can cause worry and psychological upset. Mary Jane Sherfey, in her book The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality, remembers a troubled ritual of her early adolescence. When she was twelve years old, her second-best girlfriend (whose uncle was a doctor and should know) told her that menstrual flow was really the remains of a dead baby. If you had sex, her girlfriend continued, the baby was fertilized and you got pregnant. If not, the baby died, and the menses were all that was left. She did not doubt this explanation, and it worried her:
“Most questions were ultimately answered simply, ‘God made us that way.’ Sad. All those dead babies! It seemed so cruel and even more so that I had to catch the few remains of my own dead baby month after month on an absorbent napkin and flush him down the toilet. I also decided that there was something wrong about God's attitude toward women. After all, He created the baby in me in the first place, and He must realize that I was forbidden to have sex and fertilize the baby until I was married (or much older). So He made the baby and then murdered it—all inside me!”
On one occasion, she ritualized her grief and feelings of loss. Carefully, she wrapped her used sanitary napkins in Christmas wrapping paper, collected them in a painted shoebox, and buried them in her back yard. Solemnly she recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over the tiny grave, saying “Good-bye, little baby.”
Many misunderstandings are harmless and easily outgrown. Others become lingering concerns. Recalled by an adult who has made the transition to untroubled maturity, they make a good story. But the child who is experiencing the worry of misconstrued realities would prefer relief now to entertaining tales later.
Sympathetic, understanding adults can help reduce the child's confusion. When children learn that their parents are open and informative about answering their questions and discussing their concerns, they have available a trusted resource to turn to in times of confusion or worry. Parents' comfort and responsiveness in talking about sex and reproduction are important prerequisites to minimizing misunderstanding. Attitude provides the ground on which effective communication can be built. Knowing how children think at different developmental stages, what concepts are likely to be difficult for them and how, helps parents to build their educational efforts on a solid foundation.
Few of the parents of the children I questioned about reproduction could predict the extent of their children's sexual knowledge. Parents of children at the lowest and highest levels of understanding predicted their offspring's answers with some accuracy. Most others assumed that their children knew a great deal more than they actually did. Many parents whose children produced fantastic versions of creation assumed that their children knew “the truth,” and none anticipated the distortions that turned up.
As I talked to children of various ages, it became apparent that our present efforts at sex education often confuse children. A four-year-old boy, trying to explain how people get babies, told me, “First they were little, a duck, then they grow older into a baby.” His solution seemed peculiar, but his source became clear when a four-year-old girl elaborated on a similar explanation. This little girl was explicit:
Me: How would a lady get a baby to grow in her tummy?
Susan: Get a duck. ‘Cause one day I saw a book about them, and they just get a duck or a goose and they get a little more growned and then they turn into a baby.
Me: A duck will turn into a baby?
Susan: They give them some food, people food, and they grow like a baby. To get a baby, go to a store and buy a duck.
Me: How did you find that out?
Susan: I just saw, find out from this book.
Notice how literally Susan takes the idea popularized in folk wisdom: You are what you eat. A more important source of her confusion lies in the way many writers prepare books about sex and birth for children. One widely distributed book, which is recommended for children as young as three, starts with a pencil dot (to repre sent an ovum), then proceeds through the sex life of flowers, bees, rabbits, giraffes, chickens, and dogs before it reaches the human level. The evolutionary approach also reveals the hidden bias that sex is really an animal activity which can best be understood by watching animals. If we, like Pythagoras, were explaining the transmigration of the soul, then all the animals might make sense. As it is, few young children can encounter this kind of explanation without confusion.
Another writer, Selma Fraiberg, discovered a four-year-old boy who knew a sex education book by heart, but insisted that some of the woman's eggs never become babies because the daddy eats them up. “It says so in my book,” he claimed, and indeed it did—in a discussion of reproduction in fish.
Both of these examples show that confusion is likely to occur when several species are included in the same introductory book. When unable to figure out a certain aspect of human reproduction, the child extrapolates details from other sections of the book. These details seem no more fantastic to him in their transposed contexts than they were as originally stated. If there was a duck on page 4 and no human baby appeared until page 10, the child searching for an explanation of how that baby comes to be might mistake the layout sequence of the book for a causal sequence in the development of the baby. Before there was a baby, there was a duck!
Other studies suggest a way out of confusion. The experience of researchers into how children think about other concepts has shown that children can expand their understanding to include ways of reasoning one level more complex than their own. Using this idea as a guide, we can reduce sex misunderstanding to a minimum.
This book presents six stages in the development of children's thinking about how people get babies. Knowing the direction in which your children's thinking is developing can help you to present information in a way that they can most readily absorb.
2
Talking with Your Child about Sex and Birth and Forming Families
Although children's thinking and intellectual interest in the origin of babies will be our focus, I want to avoid the all-too-common educational practice of separating sex from reproduction, emotion from physiology, personal relationship from mechanics. Too frequently, sex education is limited to diagrams and procedures, a problem in human engineering amenable to technical solutions.
But learning and knowing cannot be isolated from feeling. How I feel about myself, how I feel about my teacher, and how I feel about what I am learning all affect whether that learning will be difficult or effortless, compartmentalized or usable in other contexts.
Many educators now recognize that their classrooms are filled with feeling children, not just problem-solvers or fact memorizers. If reading, writing, and rithmetic skills bloom or wither depending on the emotional climate, how much more must the impact of sex education be influenced by its roots in feeling?
Only death seems to provoke the same level of discomfort most of us feel in talking about sex. Even those of us who feel some ease in talking with other adults about sex suddenly get cold feet when it's time to talk with children. Perhaps our awareness of the negative messages about sex we ourselves received as children reminds us that we need to be careful not to pass on our conflicts. Lacking real-life models for how to talk more openly with children, it is not easy to put our good intentions into action.
Whatever our feelings about sex are, we cannot avoid communicating them to our children. In addition to the verbal messages we are aware of sending, there are layers of simultaneously broadcast signals that qualify what we are trying to say. Tone of voice, inflection, facial expression, and gesture all communicate how we feel about what we are saying. Parents who tell their child that it is all right for her to masturbate, their voices flat and controlled, are giving her a double message. Their words say one thing, but the way they say it lets her know that on a deeper level they believe just the opposite. She cannot help but feel that she is doing something wrong, but because they do not acknowledge the nonverbal message, she is left confused about why she feels as she does.
Parents who evade issues, changing the subject when a question is asked or distracting the child when his behavior becomes overtly sexual, are also communicating their feelings to the child. No answer is also an answer. The message is clear if not explicit: This is something we don't talk about in this house; You are asking me improper questions I don't want to hear. The child learns that there is something wrong with him, feels embarrassed, and remains ignorant or seeks answers from friends who may know less but don't make him feel ashamed.
In Between Marriage and Divorce, Susan Braudy gives an example of how powerful nonverbal messages can be, leading to firmly held, but erroneous, convictions. Growing up, she never discussed either sex or religion with her mother. Instead, “my mother handed me a series of illustrated booklets about sex, when I was twelve. She had her ‘I'm uneasy so don't ask’ look on her face. When I was eight and asked her if she believed in God, she got that strained look on her face and told me that it was her private business. Once I found a Tampax and asked her what it was. She got the same look on her face and said nothing. So that's why I knew Tampax had something to do with religion.”
While reading a book cannot provide an instant solution, the more aware we can become about our sexual values and feelings, the more informed we are on the issues, the better able we will be to teach our children about sex in an open, loving, and supportive way.
Any exchange between two people makes a statement about their relationship. A child who asks “How do you go about having a baby?” or “Does it hurt when the sperm hits the egg? “tells you that you are someone he trusts to give him reliable information without making him feel bad for wanting to know. Direct, honest responses to children's sexual curiosity give them both needed information and validation that they are good people, whose explorations of life, pleasure, and love are a valuable part of their development.
There is no way for parents to totally control the sex education of their children. I doubt whether it was ever possible, but in today's “global village” of rapid communications media, no child exposed to the light of day can be insulated from messages about sex. Not being able to control the whole show should not, however, discourage parents from assuming leading roles in the drama. Amid the clamor of competing claims to children's attention on sexual matters, there need to be reliable and loving people on whom they can depend through their years of growth. No matter what others say, they need to know what their parents think and feel about the things they are learning and feeling. Parents who establish themselves early in their children's lives as open and comfortable in dealing with sexuality will find that when their children have questions or worries to be cleared up, they will turn to their parents.
Teaching about sexuality begins at birth. The touching and handling and caressing loving parents provide in the course of infant care is essential to the newborn's survival and development. Gentle, loving touch teaches infants to relate warmly to others, while touch deprivation leads to emotional and physical problems. Studies of infants in orphanages who were fed and kept clean but deprived of adequate cuddling show how important the stimulation of skin contact can be. The institutionalized children became depressed, and their developing speech, motor coordination, and relations with others were retarded or arrested. Colds and common childhood diseases were fatal in a surprising number of cases. (Gadpaille.)
This early stimulation between parent and child, so essential for the infant's survival and growth and so different from the genital eroticism of mature adults, is nonetheless sexual. Sensual pleasure, the exchange of affection, physical closeness leading to emotional intimacy, all are there. Through early experiences of skin touching skin, infants learn whether the life of the body and physical contact with others yields pleasure or discomfort, reassurance or rejection.
Children first experience love, both giving and receiving, with their parents. So by loving children you are providing sex education, too. Children value themselves when they feel valued by the people they most love, the people on whom they know their survival rests: their parents. From their parents, children learn either “I am a lovable person whom others will care for” or “I am unlovable and must protect myself from caring too much for anyone.”
The young child values his waste products as part of his body. If he is made to feel that his bowel movement or urine is bad, he may internalize these attitudes, and start to feel that he himself is bad. Similarly, children who discover that the genitals that give them pleasure cause disgust in their parents will often feel that their genitals are bad, their feelings are wrong, and they are unworthy as people. (Fraiberg.)
Long before children enter school, their gender identity and feelings about sexuality have been shaped by early experiences with family members. Feeling good about one's sexual identity is an important part of self-esteem. To like the fact of one's own sex, one must feel good about one's genitals. It is hard for a child to feel good about himself if his parents would have preferred him to have been put together differently.
In learning about sex differences, children learn both facts and values. Listening to the answers to their questions about genital differences, they pick up attitudes as well as information. Once they can move around well enough to observe others' bodies, have a social setting such as a nursery-school bathroom that permits repeated opportunities for looking, and have the mental ability to make comparisons, children will explore this intriguing discovery.
Until they see evidence to the contrary, both sexes assume that everybody is “just like me.” Seeing the body of a naked child of the other sex will stimulate questions about why there's a difference. Boys may ask, “Where's her penis?” or “Why doesn't she have one, too?” or “What happened to it?” From girls, the questions may be “What is that?” or “Why does he have that?” or “What happened to mine?” Warren Gadpaille, who argues that the theory of “penis envy has been grossly misused as a basis for a thoroughly mistaken and derogatory theory of female inferiority,” points out that these questions are most frequently asked “with strong curiosity but with little or no anxiety.”
Unless complicated by negative attitudes toward the little girl's sexuality, penis envy is frequent but harmless. “Every parent has observed,” writes Gadpaille, “and certainly every child ‘knows,’ that having something is preferable to not having it... On this basis alone, penis envy is both understandable and transient.” Teaching more about other sex differences is often useful when children first begin to ask questions about genitals. The development of breasts or facial hair, changes in the size of genitals with maturation, and the presence of the female's internal organs round out the picture so that each sex is defined by what it has rather than by what it lacks. It is difficult for the girl, as well as the boy, to ask questions about something they cannot see. But both need to understand that they are specially designed, “on purpose,” to be different so that they can make babies together when they are grown up.
One part of teaching is labeling. Middle-class Americans have tended to teach their children that a boy has a penis and a girl has a vagina. While clearly preferable to referring to genitals with a nonspecific “down there,” the word vagina is usually used inaccurately to refer to the female external genitals, the vulva. Until recently, the clitoris was entirely ignored by parents teaching body parts to children, leaving their daughters to discover for themselves this unlabeled part that exists only to provide pleasure.
There is no way to satisfactorily teach female anatomy if a direct equivalence must be made to the male. Alix Shulman attempts to redress past grievances by introducing new terms and concepts to the dialogue between parent and child:
Boy: What's the difference between boys and girls?
Mother: Mainly their sex organs. A boy has a penis and a girl has a clitoris.
Boy: What's a clitoris?
Mother: It's a tiny sensitive organ on a girl's body about where a penis is on a boy's body. It feels good to touch, like your penis...
Boy: What's it for?
Mother: For making love, for pleasure. When people love each other, one of the ways they show it is by caressing one another's bodies, including their sex organs.
Boy: How do girls pee?
Mother: There's an opening below the clitoris for peeing. A man uses his penis for peeing, for making love, and for starting babies. Women have three separate places for these (and so on....)
There is a great deal to applaud in this approach: using the child's curiosity as a guide in providing information; giving simple, direct answers that make the lesson a dialogue instead of a lecture; recognizing the importance of teaching boys as well as girls about female anatomy; and including talk about pleasure and lovemaking in discussing sex with children. But her comparisons are not wholly accurate. Women do not have two separate places for lovemaking and starting babies. Women and men make love with their whole bodies. While the clitoris is uniquely designed for pleasure, women's sexual preferences, as well as their patterns of genital nerve endings, do vary. We should not banish the vagina from the arena of love and pleasure to make up for the prior exclusion of the clitoris.