Parents who probably never learned about “that stuff” until considerably later might be taken aback, but sexual awareness is no longer a sign of the end of childhood. Long before kids reach puberty, they know a lot more about sex than children did 25 years ago. How could they avoid it? They watch sex slaves interviewed on “Geraldo,” sing along to “Me So Horny” on the radio and go in droves to see movies like “Pretty Woman,” last year’s blockbuster about sex for sale. “Our preadolescent’s level of sexual sophistication is high because of the world kids are living in and the tremendous access they have to that world,” says Debra Haffner, executive director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States. “In the ’50s, Donna Reed didn’t sleep in the same bed with her husband. A recent ‘Cosby’ show was about menopause; it ended with the parents making love.”
One reason children know more about sex these days is that we want them to. Today’s parents believe that innocence can be dangerous. The idea of childhood as a sheltered time, free from adult anxieties, is becoming a nostalgic luxury in a world where young people die of AIDS and TV newscasts are filled with stories of child-pornography rings, kidnappings and the sorrowful faces of abused children. Parents feel the need to arm their kids with more information. As writer Marie Winn points out in her book “Children Without Childhood,” “The Age of Protection has ended. An Age of Preparation has set in.”
Many parents now see protection as an impossible goal. As a result of profound societal changes over the past 25 years, parents are simply not as available as they used to be. Most mothers aren’t home when their children return from school and can’t exert day-to-day control over their children’s friends and activities. Single parents, lonely and under stress, often use their children as confidants, making children partners in their own upbringing.
Psychologists say that the result is the breakdown of authority and a loss of faith among children in the wisdom of the adult world. Neil Postman, professor of communications at New York University, believes that many children are robbed of their childhood by being exposed too early to the “secrets” of adulthood - death, illness, violence, sexuality. In the past, he says, children learned these concepts in stages so they could assimilate them. “Now, because of the nature of the electronic media, children have full access to the venality, incompetence, errors and corruption of adults,” Postman says. It might be more from necessity than from choice, but modern parents are changing their concept of childhood - and the children are bearing the burden.
Experts say that kids are about two to three years ahead of their counterparts a quarter of a century ago. According to child psychologist David Elkind, recent studies show that 50 percent of 15-year-old girls have had sexual intercourse, as compared with 10 percent in the 1960s. Another study reported that, by the time they were 13, 20 percent of boys had touched a girl’s breasts. Dating, which used to begin with adolescence, now often starts a couple of years earlier. Jeffrey, a 13-year-old eighth grader from Long Island, said that of his group of five friends, two are already sleeping with their girlfriends. They are not behaving promiscuously, he states, since these are “long term” relationships–each having lasted for “at least one month.”
The sexual acceleration starts early and holds throughout adolescence. A 3-year-old who no longer holds her mother’s hand becomes a 6-year-old more interested in MTV than in Bambi and a 9-year-old who can discuss homosexuality, AIDS and transsexual surgery. Many of these children seem to miss out on their childhood altogether. Kim, a teenager from Phoenix, says her father left her mother for another woman when Kim was 8. “My mother came to me crying and told me everything,” Kim says. “It kind of made me uncomfortable and sometimes I kind of felt responsible for her problems too.” Kim says she views her mother as her friend. But it’s an unequal friendship - a distorted image of the mother-daughter relationship of times past. “I can’t tell her lots of stuff because she’s too naive,” Kim says.
Some observers argue that kids are more sexually advanced for physiological reasons. The average age of menarche (a girl’s first period) has gradually lowered from about 14 a century ago to 12.5, and earlier puberty naturally arouses earlier curiosity and sexual exploration. But, as psychologist Elkind points out, the physical acceleration - mostly attributed to better nutrition - was recorded more than a decade ago and hasn’t changed since. Today’s behavior, he believes, has sociological roots. The children are reflecting a general change in adult values, including a wider acceptance of casual sex, that is reinforced by movies and television. “The teenage vamps on the soaps, the sexually active teenagers in ‘Married With Children,’ these are a far cry from the Brady Bunch,” says Elkind. Many psychologists point out that not all the changes are negative - denial of sexuality is also unhealthy - but that we seem to have swung to the opposite extreme.
American children receive mixed messages about sex. In spite of a more relaxed sexual morality in society, Americans are generally still embarrassed to discuss sex with their children. Traditionally, Americans have left sex education to the family, which often meant that kids learned about sex from each other long before either parent sat down for that birds-and-bees conversation.
Frightened by the prospect of AIDS, parents and educators pressed the schools for help. They were partly successful. In 1980 only three states and the District of Columbia required sex education in public schools. Today 21 states mandate sex education, and 33 states require AIDS education. A 1988 Planned Parenthood poll found that 85 percent of American parents favor some form of sexual education between kindergarten and 12th grade. “To live in the 1990 is to live in a world that is filled with sexual information,” says Cathleen Rea, a clinical child psychologist in Newport News, Va. The choice is ours whether we attempt to help children vet what they hear or whether we let their innate and very strong sexual impulses make sense of it for themselves.
But children don’t need to learn everything all at once. In their zeal to prepare their children, some parents are telling them more than they can assimilate. Anne Bernstein, author of “The Flight of the Stork: What Children Really Want to Know About Sex and How to Tell Them,” tells a joke to illustrate the point. A young boy asks: “Mom, where did Billy next door come from?” The mother launches into a tortuous tale of human sexual response and reproduction. “Oh,” replies the puzzled child. “I heard he was from Detroit.”
Bernstein suggests that a child can understand only as much about sex as he or she is developmentally capable of grasping at a certain age - no matter how much information is doled out. “Different information will be taken in at different times and have different meanings at different times,” says Bernstein, a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, Calif. Most parents know this intuitively - all they have to do is watch an 8-year-old during the kissing scenes in a movie. “Ugh” is the usual response. By 12, however, children are more able to deal with the different aspects and repercussions of sex, Bernstein says.
Maybe parents worry too much about preparing their children for danger and not enough about their responsibility for protecting them. Elkind believes it is important to teach young children basic facts about their bodies, but parents shouldn’t pass on their own anxieties about sexual dangers by telling their children too much too early. Preparing kids, Elkind says, should not be an attempt to shift responsibility for their well-being from the parents to the children. “Some programs that prepare children to deal with child abuse might give the implicit message that it’s the children’s job to protect themselves,” he says. “Children then feel guilty if something happens. It’s the parents who need to be more vigilant.”
Being vigilant is more than protecting a child from sexual abuse. It means monitoring TV as much as possible and trying to preserve for young children a few precious years of innocence. Psychologists say that the period from 9 to 12 is very important for developing same-sex friendships that prepare children for later heterosexual relationships. A strong sense of privacy emerges in the preteen years, and children begin sharing confidences with friends with whom they feel comfortable. It’s easier to do that with people who are more like them and less mysterious than members of the opposite sex. By sharing intimacies with “chums,” children prepare themselves for later intimacy with the opposite sex. When children start dating at 10, they skip the “chum-ship” stage - a gap that research shows doesn’t bode well for later relationships.
Still, children remain more innocent than they appear. “It is vital to remember,” Elkind says, that “children’s language ability far outstrips their cognitive ability.” A recent incident illustrates his point. An 8-year-old told his mother that he had attended an AIDS program at school. She asked him what he learned and he replied authoritatively: “Oh, that’s easy. Don’t have intersections and buy condominiums.”
