Troubling theories about childhood innocence
Troubling, indeed, to think that three and four-year-olds calling “kissing crocs” one boy and one girl is “a problem.” I don’t call that a problem; I call it normal! Let them be normal. If that’s the way they’re thinking naturally, than it’s natural. Why try to mess with them?
by Carolyn Moynihan
Sexuality engineers may be coming to a childcare centre near you.
Let’s get one thing straight: are we against the sexualization of children or are we not? If we — adult, mainstream society — are against it, we had better start explaining to ourselves why there are people employed in public institutions who say openly that they do not believe in the sexual innocence of children and want to expose it as a myth.
So here we have a really absurd situation. On the one hand, clerics and others being jailed for treating children as sexual agents and destroying their innocence. On the other, academics training childcare teachers to believe that childhood innocence is a myth and that they must actively shape the sexual awareness of their little charges.
If we are not against it, we had better start asking why, exactly, we are outraged at clerics, teachers and boy scout leaders who sexually interfere with children. Is it simply that they went too far along a legitimate path — the path of awakening children to sexuality from their earliest years and teaching them ways to express it?
That early intervention in the sexual lives of children is not merely legitimate but the right and proper thing to do is the idea behind a bunch of articles in the latest issue of the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood Education.
These articles, written by people who are forming early childhood teachers, are dedicated to the proposition that children younger than five already know about sex and are sexual “agents”. They say that tiny tots are actively “constructing” gender identities, but that their knowledge and gender options are limited by an exclusively heterosexual environment. To come straight to the point: little children are learning only to be heterosexual, not homosexual, and this is unjust.
A daycare centre experiment
In a paper on this theme, “Kiss and tell: Gendered narratives and childhood sexuality”, Mindy Blaise, a senior lecturer in the faculty of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, describes how she tested this theory on some three- and four-year-old children in an Australian childcare centre.
It is worth looking at this is some detail to understand her method.
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Well, it might make you all feel better to know that I too find this troubling and wrong. Kids should just be kids. Yes, sometimes there is a need to discuss adult subjects with them. But that should always be done in an age-appropriate manner. Trust me, although the researchers are right that heterosexuality is the dominant narrative (of course it is, considering that it is the dominant sexual orientation!), the kids who are gay or lesbian will eventually figure it out. They don’t need assistance from adults on that end. And the way that the world is changing, it won’t be long before same-sex relationship narratives become a larger part of the culture. It’s already happening. So, I personally do not find it necessary to “educate” children about their own sexuality. They will get to that point soon enough on their own. We don’t need to rush it.
First off, let me say that despite the varied examples in their lives, my kids are clearly cisgendered and looking likely to be heterosexual. They are displaying clear gender stereotypes without any outside indoctrination. I’m fine with this- cisgendered and heterosexual is the default for good reason and I’m glad my kids won’t have to spend their lives swimming upstream against the flow of societal expectation in that regard at least. I’m also glad that they’re turning out this way because that’s they way THEY are, not what I want them to be.
I see this issue from both perspectives. Kids should be allowed to develop the way they find natural within themselves with gentle encouragement from parents- even if the majority OR minority doesn’t like it. While sexual orientation generally doesn’t become apparent until shortly before or early on in puberty, gender identity dissonance often appears at 3 years of age or younger. Society commonly tries to “mold” children, especially anatomical boys, who manifest features counter to what is expected. While active efforts to “mold” sexual orientation of young children such as the above study should not be encouraged by the minority, neither should efforts to “mold” sexual orientation or gender identity at the same age by the majority.
An incident on the radio in Sacramento last year really emphasized how general society can express abusive derision of children with gender uncertainty, expressions meant to beat them into submission to societal expectations rather than what they truly feel. Submission that all too often results in misery and even suicide later in childhood. I know of a very young child who tried to take a knife to “his” penis when the pain “he” was subjected to was distilled by adults simply that, “you have a penis, you’re a boy”.
“God forbid if my son put on a pair of high heels, I would probably hit him with one of my shoes,” States said at the time.
“A boy that wears a dress is a freak,” Williams added. “He’s a nut.”
These DJs later apologized, but only after they lost nearly all of their sponsorship.
I could speak just as frighteningly of “reparative therapy”. which has been undertaken on kids as young as in the initially-mentioned study to dissauade them from “perverse” directions.
We need to stop trying to actively manufacture kids that WE want, and rather let them become the kids they are to become. We as parents can teach, we can be examples, we can choose the examples our kids are exposed to, but when they become something innate to themselves, we need to support them in that journey. They’ll know the way regardless of what we do…or they’ll die trying.
The last three paragraphs should not be italicized. I wish there was a way to edit.