SEXUALITY IN INFANCY: 0-3 YEARS

March 2009
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Rather than passing through a set series of sexual stages determined by physical growth, children develop at different rates in a wide variety of directions depending upon how they are raised. In some communities they may go through the classic series of stages in attitude toward the opposite sex, preschool friendships, elementary school dislikes, followed by junior high school awakening and high school attraction and involvement. In other communities, perhaps only a few miles away, the series of stages may be quite different. Broderick found communities in the United States in which there were well established romances going on in kindergarten class and a great deal of giggling and gossiping over couples. Among these five year olds, who-is-going-to-marry-whom was a common subject of conversation. By eight and nine years of age, children played kissing games at their parties. By ages ten and eleven nearly half had begun to date and most had a series of crushes on adults and other children. Ninety percent of the fifth grade boys in one community were involved in what Broderick referred to as “special” relationships with girlfriends (Broderick).

Anthropologists have complained for years that both the hormone and the psychoanalytic theories failed to account for the sexual activities of young children in certain primitive societies. United States data have shown that romantic interest in the opposite sex begins in infancy or early childhood, depending on the degree of permissiveness and stimulation in the social environment. This is not to deny the marked impact of puberty upon sexual attitudes and experiences.

Psychoanalytic theory of sexual development has had more emphasis in the human sexuality literature than it deserves, particularly the literature on infant and child sexuality. This is so, first because psychoanalytic theory, though rich in insights, has not produced many empirically verifiable hypotheses. Second, psychoanalytic theory has drawn what empirical support it does have largely from observations of small samples of clinical populations rather than from broad representative samples of children and adults and particularly disturbed adults. Children and adults who have been brought to a therapist or clinic because of some behavior problem have provided the major source of samples in the past. Psychoanalytic theory, though inadequately tested, has been utilized as a source and justification for after-the-fact casual explanations of various manifestations of sexual behavior.

Psychoanalytic theorists must continue to derive and test hypotheses using psychoanalytic concepts. To complement this, other behavioral scientists with other theoretical and conceptual orientations, should test social theories of sexual development using large (rather than small) and representative (rather than clinical) populations.

The human infant, here defined as being between the ages from birth up to but not including three years of age, is a creature of potential. The development of that potential, whether related to mental, physical, or sexual-erotic aspects of growth, occurs at a very rapid rate during the first two years of life. Actually the sensing mechanism is at work much earlier than that, by about the eighth week of gestation. Until recently the human fetus in situ was not accessible for study. It was thought that quickening (when the fetus begins moving limbs and trunk) did not take place until the sixteenth to twentieth week of gestation. Fetal movement is necessary to the development of bones and joints, but the fetus apparently also moves to make itself comfortable in the uterus. The fetus is responsive to pressure and touch, for instance, tickling the scalp and stroking the palm to elicit reactions (Langworthy). It is possible that the fetus is also experienced in sucking before birth. It is not uncommon to detect the fetus sucking thumbs, fingers, or toes. We can conclude that at least habituation and perhaps even some sensate learning can take place during the gestation period.

That sensate learning is possible before or outside of the achievement of self-awareness also is at least tangentially supported in studies of infant “socialization” among other mammals. Harlow’s report on affectional patterns of rhesus monkeys deprived of interaction with a mother figure is an example. These monkeys were deprived of the learning opportunity provided in normal dependency-affectional and sexual behavior patterns as monkeys grow older.

The human infant, a pliable but non-ambulatory bundle of soft and spongy boney tissue with a resultant uncanny ability to achieve unusual postures both prenatally and postnatally, can interact with people only as they come to him or her. At a rapid rate, however, the infant develops the capacity to locomote, thereby facilitating the development of the ability to initiate encounters with others. The newborn’s whole body of impulse and potential can be viewed as an undifferentiated potential for physical, emotional, and social experience. Sexual-erotic development, like all development, takes place at different rates and in different ways in different individuals; development in the affectional-sexual-erotic area is not separable from development in other areas. As an infant develops, every aspect of his or her life experience is capable of affecting every other part. This is markedly evident in the case of the infant whose motor development has progressed to the stage at which it no longer must await but can actively seek encounters with others, whether they be running to hug daddy hello or opening his or her arms as an indication of the desire to be held.

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