SHOULD CHILDREN BE TOLD?

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 November 1931, Page 7

SHOULD CHILDREN BE TOLD?

HEALTH WEEK IN SYDNEY. SYDNEY, October 22. The discussion, for and against, of birth control, inspired by Archbishop Kelly’s attack on it: the question of health certificates as a compulsory part of marriage; the question also of sterilisation .and the problems generally of the reproductive functions of man, as one of the higher animals, have been piquant features of Sydney’s Health Week, or Health Fortnight, to be strictly correct. For iho:e sections of the Sydney press, which serve up lavishly to the public, these aspects of life’s problems it has been a royal time. They would probably like to see 52 Health Weeks in the year. Dr Harvey Sutton —now better known as Professor Harvey • Sutton, since he has left the Education Department for his higher field of activities at the University—again raised the plea that children should be told the truth about sex matters, not in a blunt way, but as a beautiful story of the phenomena of life. Professor Sutton’s attitude has always been that, contrary to the practice of the present and past generations the impressionable period of the child is par excellence the time for a j simple, clear explanation of the origin I of life, in truthful statements of phenomena which may have aroused a

child's attention and curiosity. His argument is that specious lies and evadings often practised by parents are merely heaping up difficulties for a child’s later adolescent stage, when any approach by the parent may arouse, not confidence, but suspicion, emotional exaggeration, and unfavourable reactions. Professor Sutton has always maintained, as one of ISydncy’s most outspoken platform speakers, that almost no fact with regard to the animal kingdom. its sex life, and reproductive activities, need be withheld from the child, so loug as it is related in the proper way.

INDECENT ASPECT. “Most healthy normal adolescents,” says Professor Sutton, “find qut for themselves the explanation of the main phenomena of life, but the sources they seek are usually illinformed. misinformed, or even openly mischievous. Hence, for many, the whole reproductive function is given a filthy, indecent aspect; and is treated as a subject for obscenity, and perhaps the most ■wonderful aspect of existence—tho perpetuation of the species by the creation of a new being —is dragged through the mire.” j In this view, many of Sydney’s other! leading medical men concur. They' hold very strongly that it is better to' teach youngsters, along the right' Hues, the things that they ought to’

know, for their own protection, than to allow them to find out through other harmful sources. The girl rapidly metamorphoses into the woman; the boy, into the young man. They quickly come to regard themselves as women and men of the world, but with their eyes blinded to vital facts s : mply because custom has tabooed the discussion of them in their earlier years.

Health Week and the wide range of subjects which it has evoked remind one of the interesting theory advanced by Professor Sutton some time ago, that the dice in life’s early battle are loaded against the male, since ! n young babies, and tor many years after, four boys die to every three girls. A possible explanation, in his view, is that the male may present a greater variety than 'he female, and a greater extent of deviation from the normal, bringing c-ut more defective as well as supei -normal occurrences in the male. Thus eliminuZon of the unfit hits the mule group heavier-. He says the experience of children’s hospitals is that the male baby, both in its infancy . and as a child, tends to be more restless and more difficult to treat, and control than the average girl baby. This innate restlessness, according to the professor, shows itself quite definitely in the occut rcnco of two and a-half times as many deaths from accident in boys than in girls, from the age of five to fifteen. Speech defects, for example, he says, especially stammering and stuttering, are three times more frequent in boys than in girls. His remarks about a greater deviation from the normal in the male group are well exemplified he argues, by an investigation of feeble-mindedness in schools. But, as he observes, if boys preponderate among defectives the consolation may be that, similarly, more boys than girls would be found in the super-normal or genius class.

Another of Professor Siitlon’s intel csting conclusions is that, it) the race to maturity, the gif! is outpacing the boy. She is, he says, prepared for reproductive existence years before the male. His contention is that the girl of 14 probably equals the boy ol 16; the girl of 15, the boy of 18; the woman of 18, the man of 21, and the woman of 21 the man of 25. Another of his deductions—a fairly obvious one to parents—is that the rapid growth in the male in about his fifteenth year is reflected in his schoolboy-appetite. A boy of about 15, according to Professor Sutton, eats more than at any other time iu his existence.