With more money and connections than ever before, they command a variety of erotic experiences. Paychecks are invested in Club Mediterranee rather than house payments. Evenings are spent dining by candlelight, and going to concerts and plays. Stealthily, concepts such as stability, security, and responsibility enter. Painstakingly, youth begins to retrace the parents' footsteps. After several years, the metamorphosis is complete, and the young couple looks and acts startlingly like their parents. Filet mignon by candlelight becomes meat loaf at six p.m. so that the children can finish their homework. Leftover sexual sophistication scarcely intrudes upon the air of tired harassment. This marriage is primarily useful-it provides an acceptable neighborhood and the most advantageous social contacts. (Cuber, 1974) The children are raised properly, attend the best schools, and take piano lessons.
Socrates reportedly described a similar pattern more than
two thousand years ago. The process begins around the time
when the child first enters school. He develops a conscience
and learns to live by the rules of his parents. Responsibility,
punctuality, and production are clearly underwritten as
essential. Eroticism and sexual experience are curiously
omitted from the list of desirable values. He notes that sex is
an uncomfortable or worrisome area for his parents. At best,
they seem lukewarm or ambivalent. Yet this is the format
which inevitably must become his own, and he has little
choice about the matter.
These same values persist beneath
the turmoil of adolescence and the relative sexual freedom of
young adulthood. With very few exceptions, these principles
resurface after marriage or a firm commitment. Priority is
given to production and punctuality while sex interests lag.
This again becomes the erotically impoverished portrait presented
to the next generation. Thus the inhibited child grows
through a period of sexual freedom which he then must
renounce in order to become an inhibited adult who will rear
an inhibited child. That this is indeed the case is shown by a
study by Wake in which thirty percent of mothers acknowledged
that they themselves had had premarital sex. Yet only
three percent approved of this behavior for their daughters,
and only nine percent for their sons.
There is no question that these upright, moral, industrious
parents constitute the backbone of society. They're concerned
with the child's emotional well-being and success in
life. They support civic projects, higher education, and Little
League. They read Spock and attend church. Although they
may not laugh at a shady joke in front of the children, they
certainly don't blackball sex by threat or punishment. If anything,
these parents are too good.
Parents can preserve the child's healthy erotic response
without making radical changes in their own behavior. A certain
awareness, flexibility, a sense of humor, and the application
of accepted principles gleaned from the study of adult
sexuality are all that is necessary. The techniques used to
expand and elaborate the adult sexual response are every bit
as useful for the child, providing the appropriate adjustments
for developmental level are made. As parents begin
actively to further the child's healthy erotic development,
sexual values ascend on the list of priorities.
Sex becomes not
only acceptable but important, assuming its rightful position
as one of a number of essential concerns. There is one danger:
Eroticism can be absorbed into the work ethic so that sex
becomes an achievement rather than a pleasure to be
enjoyed. This can be avoided through provision of time, freedom
from distraction, and a balanced emphasis on both
active and passive pleasuring.
The psychiatrist in private practice serves primarily the
striving, anxious middle class. There is no dearth of case
material to illustrate how responsible, hardworking families
unintentionally impair the child's erotic response.