Developing the Sexual Child

Abstract

During the interwar years, the issue of the sexual child moved from the domain of the experts into the sitting rooms of ordinary parents via child-rearing texts. As the quote from Renz and Renz illustrates, “sexual interest and experiences” of the child are recast in a positive light.^l This conceptualization of the sexual child reflects a distinctive cultural shift in attitudes amongst child-rearing experts, namely that sexual subjectivity is normal and, especially, healthy. Such a shift appears taken for granted, for there is no sense that this statement should cause any disquiet among the readership. Despite the contingent idea of “control” there is an effort to downgrade the “specialness” of the child’s sexuality. Most strikingly, the two components of sexual subjectivity—childish imagination and activity—are represented as no more worthy of anxiety than any other aspect of the child’s growth and development.

The idea that a child should not have sexual interests and experiences is fast being supplanted by the knowledge that he does have them; that they are an expression of perfectly normal, healthy energies, and that while it is necessary to gain control over them, they should not be forcibly suppressed.

Carl Renz and Mildred Renz (1935)