The average child of five or six who has not been openly...

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 der standing the sexual structure and function, true communication cannot take place. The child senses that the parent has strong attitudes about sex. But he does not know what it is that the parent feels strongly about or why he feels that way.
One might ask, if a parent feels unable to give correct information, are there types of misinformation that are less damaging to the child than others?! I submit that there are. Innocuous misinformation given rationally is apt to have less negative effect on the child than if the parent handles the situation by going "into a rage."

I was over at a friend's house and she and I were examining the contents of her dad's dresser drawer. I remember her pulling out condoms, however, we thought they were balloons.
We took them outside and proceeded to blow them up. Her mother came home and went into a rage.
She told us they were naughty and that we should never play with such things again. As we were really scared, we told her that some kids had given them to us.

Out of curiosity, we looked in all the drawers at my house. Again, eventually finding our so-called balloons in my dad's drawer.
This time we were caught filling them up with water. My mother simply explained that as I had some special possessions that I didn't want people to touch, so did everyone else and that this was one of my dad's. When asked what it was used for, we were told that it was used by dads in their work.

Generally speaking the schools have been no better than the parents when it comes to sex education. Ambiguity, misinformation, mislabeling and excessive idealism often characterize sex instruction in the schools as well as at home.
For example, a school principle told me that his school felt that it was being very progressive and was doing the right thing when they told children that every child born is the result of an act of love on the part of the parents.
In this case, some progressive parents called in as consultants on the school's sex education curriculum objected to such instruction, pointing out that such instruction was too idealistic. Not every child is the fruition of an act of love. In this case, the parents wanted the school to tell the truth!