Learning About Sex

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 820, 15 April 1955, Page 4

Learning About Sex

tion, prepared by an Auckland panel, have been published by the Department of Health. They are being distributed mainly through parent-teacher associations, and it may be assumed that if they are well received they will pamphlets on sex instrucbe made more widely available. As introductions to the subject, they have been planned and written with great care. They are brief and clear, are admirably balanced, and in the right hands should be most valuable. But whose are the right hands? The question is an awkward one which must have been much in the minds of panel members. It can be answered provisionally by saying that intelligent parents who have already established’ a relaxed and_ sensible relationship with their children will find the- pamphlets useful supports in their more intimate discussions. The uncertain or embarrassed parent may want to use some of the pamphlets as substitutes for personal action. Children will take no harm from them, and may receive much good. But the pamphlets are intended for guidance, and the principal task should still be left to parents. We cannot help wondering if the project has been taken far enough. Should there not also be a series of pamphlets for adults? Admittedly, some of these pamphlets are addressed to mothers and fathers; but the assumption behind them is that parents will be approaching the subject from a full and satisfactory experience. "The person with a healthy mind," says one of the pamphlets, "thinks of sex as a perfectly natural, normal and desirable part of life. ... He knows that in marriage sex should be mutually desired and desirable, and that where it is not,

marriage is failing to give the happiness it should." There are many marriages, not necessarily unsuccessful in public estimation, in which sex remains imperfectly understood, or weakened by physical and psychological difficulties. The "person with a healthy mind" is not, unfortunately, as common as he should be: if he were, there would be much less work for doctors and hospitals. "Sex is not the most important thing in life," says the same pamphlet, "but it affects the happiness of many people." It is not necessary to be a Freudian, or an academic psychologist of any sort, to suspect that this is an understatement. Sex exists at the very centre of life, and its influence touches every phase of behaviour. Marriage difficulties cannot always be traced to sexual maladjustment, but very often they could be avoided if husbands and wives had more knowledge and understanding of the relationship between sex and love. And this affects the problem of instruction. Near the end of the pamphlet, Sex and the Parent, is a wise statement: "Attitudes to sex and to other important things are often ‘caught’ from the parents rather than consciously taught by them." In the right atmosphere of home, where sex is shared by husband and wife as the culmination of an intimacy which far transcends physical pleasure, there can be few problems of instruction. But in other homes the atmosphere is different; and too often it is different through false attitudes to sex. The education of the young is a necessary task, and in these pamphlets a first and useful step has been taken. But many parents grew up when the subject was concealed or repressed. And they, too, are in need of guidance.