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Why children need affection
Showing children you love each other

Nearly everyone seems to recognize that from their early days small babies require a great deal of patting, fondling, touching, and caressing. A baby inspires tenderness and affection from parents and many others. And he or she get it. Touching the skin sets in motion an electrical transmission system between skin and brain, and children brain development depends a lot on this kind of stimulation.

Breast feeding is good for both mother and child because of the touching involved, it is an important part of early loving. The mother feels the child and the child feels her. Once a medical student was asked to enumerate the advantages of breast feeding and he answered, “Well, the temperature of the fluid is right, its consistency is right, it is a more sanitary kind of feeding — and it comes in such cute containers.” Ability to understand and accept their child as a sexual being adds deep feelings to a mother, as she is sexually stimulated by breast feeding her infant, and even comes to the point of orgasm and multiorgasmic experience.

There is no better form of communication among family members than touching, and the slow integration of family life is at least partly due to the strange inclination of so many parents and children to hug and kiss each other. This show of affection may have taken on a sexual meaning too, subconscious or otherwise, for large segments of the population, and so it is accepted, as so much else that is sexual is welcomed or discovered up.

Is there anything sexual in these exchanges between parents and children? Of course there is, no matter how vehemently it may be denied. Sexually mature adults understand that parents and children have erotic feelings about each other, expressed innocently in open exchanges of affection, and that this physical closeness is a sign of psychic closeness as well. It is the outward and visible expression of the love the family members have for each other. One authority, Helen Colton, writing about this “skin hunger,” as she calls it, says, “I have a feeling that if children had this sensory experience of being touched all of their lives, they might have less need to turn to drugs to provide the missing sensory experience.” That may well be true.

Seeing babies in their innocent nude state, many parents don’t find it difficult to realize that they are already sexual beings on a purely sensory level, and that they are already being influenced in their sexual development by a number of forces. They know now that sexual reactions and attitudes are not instinctive, but the result of absorbed experiences. Children accumulate information and attitudes through far more channels than the spoken word, and they learn of the ways of the world — certainly of their world — from myriad sources.

Some parents may overestimate the sexual curiosity of their children. Sometimes adults may think that once children discover sex, they will want to go on immediately to adult experiences. That attitude is just a projection of how some parents would feel, as adults, if they were in such a situation. In fact, children want nothing more than fondling, closeness, and the feeling of being “special.”

The naturally close relationship of mother and child should extend to the father. It is just as important for father to cuddle, hold, and rock the baby. If the baby is bottle-fed, the father will be doing his son or daughter a psychosexual favor by holding the container. The sharing of care for an infant or young child is not only desirable in terms of equality between the parents, but as an affectional display, for it can be helpful to the emotional growth of the child.

Unless they are well integrated into the family in sexual as well as in other respects, young children under two years, I think, should not be so close to their parents that they are permitted to be in the bedroom while husband and wife are having intercourse. No one can really be certain at what age a child perceives aggression as something fearful and threatening, and this is how he is most likely to interpret his father’s sexual behavior toward the mother.

As the child grows up, he or she continues to need a considerable amount of loving, both from people of the same sex and from those of the opposite sex. Since not so much of this is as likely to come from outside sources as the baby desires, the child’s reliance on family affection becomes greater. If he or she is deprived of it, or doesn’t get enough, it may make it difficult for him or her to give affection later on.

The most common expression of affection is kissing on the lips, and it is here that one encounters the first major variation in family behavior. Loving, outgoing families are great lip kissers. Kissing is simply a spontaneous burst of affection, a warm, tender exchange of mutual love. A man whose idea of a husbandly kiss is a peck on the wife’s cheek is not likely to pick up his child and give him a resounding kiss. Yet he may wonder why his child never feels close to him.

If parents make an effort to improve their sex lives by casting off their inhibitions, they will not only make themselves happier but they will be more relaxed and open with their children. Just as inhibition, prudery, and all that goes with them have been passed down from generation to generation, so their opposite can be transmitted by the example of happily mated parents. Showing affection before children is an important part of sex education, but obviously parents cannot do it if they don’t feel affectionate toward each other.

The key to satisfactory relationships between people, I have long been convinced, is communication. To me it is the prime element in the construction of a successful marriage and the creation of a healthy family life. I believe there is no more important element in a successful family relationship, which includes not only the mother and father but the children as well. People must be able to talk to each other about their feelings and arrive at some common ground if these goals are ever to be achieved. Once communication is firmly established and becomes easy and natural, everything else is possible. Then a parental couple can turn its attention to the nature of their relationship with the children.

In its sexual aspects, a major question is how sexualized the behavior of the parents should be when the children are present. Certainly, the more spontaneous sex feelings can be shown. Kissing, for example, can be more than perfunctory. A man comes home and finds his wife in the kitchen getting dinner, with their child sitting on the stool watching her. He puts his arms around his wife and gives her a sexual tongue kiss, perhaps touches her breasts or gives her an affectionate pat on the rump. In a happy, well-adjusted home, this will not disturb the child in the least. The child may want to join, innocently, in the loving, which can lead to more demonstrations of affection including the child, and a warm, harmonious atmosphere is created. The acts of affection between parents are easily a part of the family group, in which the child shares, either by happily watching the love between parents or directly by getting his share of kisses, hugs, and touching.

Any kind of behavior could be confusing to a child if he has never seen it before in the family circle. If it has been standard practice since he was old enough to be aware of it, he accepts it happily, but if it is introduced suddenly, he will be taken aback and not comprehend what is going on. Parents who are trying to learn to be demonstrative with each other in front of the children when they have not been before should change their behavior gradually (probably they will want to do that in any case) so the child has an opportunity to absorb what is happening. I earnestly advise anyone who is changing his views to change his behavior slowly, and give his children a chance to absorb it gradually. And I repeat, even in minor departures from the norm, such as affectionate kissing between parents who have always been perfunctory before, a child needs time to adjust to the new situation. But the result will be rewarding.

If the child is not excluded from other sexualized behavior, he may feel good about his father’s obvious happiness with his mother, and if he loves the mother, it also makes him feel good to see her the recipient of his father’s love. This kind of identification with parents in such circumstances can only be a healthy thing.

Closeness is not just a word; it is a state of being. If a child and his/her parent hug and kiss each other spontaneously, they are close not only in a physical sense but in other ways too. The undemonstrative parent cannot hope, in most instances, to have that kind of closeness with his/her children. The mother who says, “I don’t love you any more,” must not understand what she is doing to a child, or she would not say it. The sudden withdrawal of affection, and the equally arbitrary reoffering of it, make a child distrust the sincerity of all affection and lead to a great deal of emotional insecurity, then and later.

Some parents worry that the danger arises when the affectionate and demonstrative parent permits his/her overt expression to become sexualized, whether he/she realizes it or not. In fact, his/her behavior may be on such an unconscious level that only an outsider can wonder what is happening. For example, kissing that would be only a quick mark of affection in most circumstances may be supposed to become something else when it is a little too long and too frequent.

Bathing is another occasion for some sexualization. There are parents who derive a sensuous pleasure from their small children’s bodies, especially those of the opposite sex. Drying the genitalia with a towel easily produces sexual pleasure in children, giving boys an erect penis and making girls respond with pleasure. Children themselves often discover masturbation while bathing, and that is as good a way as any. But when the sexual excitement is produced by a parent with a towel, it becomes a matter where an adult is involved. At a certain age the child knows enough to conceal his pleasure as much as he/she can, but younger ones associate these pleasant, sexual feelings with what the beloved parent is doing to them.

There is a sensible middle ground between the half-ashamed, quick, almost perfunctory bathing of children by the sexually inhibited and the sensuous toweling (in some cases, the unobtrusive fondling of genitals) indulged in by overaffectionate parents. Many parents follow this middle way with spontaneous variances in either direction and think nothing of it.

Very common young children are sleeping with parents, or jumping into bed with them at various times. The kind of difficulty I have in mind is the dilemma of a young divorcee who has come to me about her seven-year-old boy. She has only recently divorced her husband, and while they have both been conscientious about getting their son over this emotional hurdle, he misses his father, especially at night, which was when he usually spent some time with him. Lately, says the mother, he has come into her bedroom after he was supposed to be asleep, complaining that he couldn’t rest and pleading to come into bed with her for a while.

Aware of his need for emotional security, she permitted him to do it, even though she was uneasy about the idea. The first time it happened, he simply went to sleep in a little while, cuddled up against her, and did not protest when she lifted him up, half asleep, and deposited him in his own bed. But at the third repetition of this scene, she felt his penis harden against her thigh as she lay on her back with an arm around him. Aghast and not knowing what to do, she pretended to be asleep as he rubbed against her side and masturbated. Not the least part of her anxiety and confusion was the fact that, against her will, she felt herself becoming sexually aroused.

Now this mother has come to me, distraught, not knowing how to handle the situation. She is afraid to forbid her son from coming into her bed because she thinks he will feel further deprived of parental love. On the other hand, she is frightened by the sexuality he has displayed toward her, and by her own unwilling response.

Several solutions are possible, but I suggest one of the simplest. When the boy asks to come into her bed, she is to say, “Come on, I’ll come to bed with you." But when he jumps into bed, she lies down outside the covers beside him, then talks to him, sings to him, or relates whatever else comes into her head in the way of stories, until he falls asleep. He is not refused — he has the security of her presence — but he is not permitted to use her as the object of his awakened sexuality.

Of course, there are many situations in which no such overt sexuality occurs. In some families, children enjoy sleeping on occasion with one or the other of the parents, and there is no apparent difficulty in that act itself. But the balance of tensions in the family can be disturbed when one parent or the other, or both, shows a preference for the company of a given child. This not only divides the family, setting up jealousies and rivalries, but it may lead to the kind of problem I have just discussed.

People are afraid of incest to be happened. Incest is the oldest and the strongest of all the taboos, going back to earliest times, and all religions absolutely forbid incest. Incest means having sexual intercourse with a blood relative of the opposite sex. It could be mother, father, brother, sister, grandparent, or grandchild. In a broader sense, this list include uncles, aunts, and first cousins, stepparents, stepchildren, stepbrothers, stepsisters, even though they’re not blood relatives, and adopted children as well. In even more broader sense, incest doesn’t necessarily mean sexual intercourse, but includes any kind of sexual relations, affections, feelings, homosexual included, between relatives. People are afraid so much of incest just as it inevitably produces babies who inherit the outstanding bad characteristics of both parents, the bad traits and defects overcome the good ones, and in result successive generations are “breed out”. The fear of incest inhibits expression of warm and affectional feelings in a family, inhibits mutual touching, fondness, closeness, and intimacy. In real life, sexual games, kissing and fondling among relatives are not rare, they don’t produce guild, harm, defective children but may successfully strengthen, purify, and improve family communication, affection, and bonds. Sex play with sisters, brothers, and cousins of both sexes is especially common in preadolescence. Sexual relations among relatives may be mutually normal, natural, and healthy, but they may also be horrible and destructive for children and adults when cause serious psychological damage to a child, with profound long-range consequences.

More common, I suppose, is when three-year-old Susie or seven-year-old Jimmy is frightened by a thunderstorm and comes running into his/her parents’ bedroom, seeking sanctuary in their bed. At such times the parents need to give the child the security he/she asks for, but when there is no storm, or any other need for the parental presence, parents gently keep the child out of their bedroom. It is their bedroom, much as the child’s bedroom is his/her, and the child learns that concept of privacy is to be respected on both sides.

Sunday morning is still another time when young children often come running in to jump into bed with their parents, who may be sleeping late that day. This can be the occasion for a happy family gathering and a general feeling of affectionate closeness, and it usually is. But bed is a private place, and it is quite possible for things to get out of hand. None of the family may be wearing much, if any, night clothing, and if nudity is not so much accepted, sexual feelings may arise. When there is a lot of body contact in romping about the bed, it is not hard for such play to become sexualized in different ways, and the line between affection and sexuality is crossed again.

Strangely, the exact opposite situation can occur. I recall an adult male patient of mine who was having extreme difficulty in showing affection toward his wife. Until he was fifteen years old, he had slept with his affectionless father. He described how he would lie in bed night after night, his body rigid with repression, fearful of making any move that might be interpreted as affectionate by his father. He had a great deal of unlearning to do before he could let himself become abandoned with his wife.

Parents can be seductive in ways that may ultimately be an issue for their children. One does not have to be a believer in Freudian theory to see that if a father, for example, showers affection on his daughter, to which she responds, and leads her to believe that he prefers her to his wife (as indeed he might), the result can possibly be serious trouble, not simply for the marriage, but for the daughter, who may spend a good part of her later life trying to find a substitute for her father.

The following case in point perhaps is an extreme one, but sometimes the extremes illuminate the desirability of the middle ground. I am thinking of a patient who gave his wife the obvious love and affection his daughter craved during her psychosexual development. Instead of showing his affection for both, this husband in his daughter’s presence made his deep sexual feeling for his wife very obvious, leaving the daughter feeling shut out and deprived of his love.

It would have been so easy to manage things better. He could have shown his daughter normal love and affection, the emotions he felt for her within the family circle, and she would have passed safely through the period when the father was the center of her life. But without being aware of what he was doing, he continued to embrace and kiss his wife passionately in his daughter’s presence, while giving his child only perfunctory attention and at times almost ignoring her, leaving her longing for her father’s love and hating her rival, her mother.

In this particular case — and I must emphasize again that what I am citing is an extreme result — the girl cracked under the continued internal pressure when she was in her late teens. One night when her father was sitting at home reading while his wife was attending a meeting, he heard a noise on the stairs behind him, and turned to see his daughter, completely nude, making her way toward him. “Come on, Daddy,” she said, “come upstairs with me, and try me. I’m better than Mother, I promise I am. Please come and sleep with me.”

Perhaps in a clinical sense it was psychotic behavior, but the degree of difference between “sane” and “insane” is not so great when we think of the number of girls who may never be pushed to that extreme, but still grow up hating the mother-rival, and hating the father too because he deprived her of his love.

Parents should be careful of excluding their children in this way. Further, mothers should not make invidious comparisons between a son and his father, just as the father should refrain from doing the same between daughter and wife.

The one other major occurrence in the first five years is the time, about four or five, when children begin to turn their sexuality in other directions, innocently rehearsing what is going to happen to them as adults. “I’m going to marry you,” a little girl tells her father confidently, while the little boy shows the same regard for his mother and may be jealous of his father, as the girl is of the mother. As they practice, unconsciously, at being the mothers and fathers they will become, they may imitate the parent of their own sex.

It is not hard to answer statements like “I’m going to marry you.” The trick is to stay, casually, on the same level as the child, using the child’s logic. “Well, that would be nice,” the parent can answer, “but I’m already married to Mother. We can keep right on being best friends, though.” And add, perhaps, “Some day you’ll meet somebody you may want to marry as much as you do me.”

It is important for parents to handle this phase of development with care, because it is now that future attitudes toward sex relationships are being strongly determined. Some parents use these early attachments as weapons against each other: “She loves me, she doesn’t love you,” the hostile father says, or vice versa with the mother and son. Others may respond excessively to these early romances. We have all seen the mother who idolizes her little son and lives only for him (apparently a more common situation than the father-daughter relationship). The potential damage here is too obvious to require any more emphasis.

Children soon give up their rivalry with the parent of the other sex if they are left alone to do it, and the period of imitation sets in. The most important role both parents can play in this initial romantic situation is to be a warm, loving human being toward their small lovers. Both boys and girls are much more likely to be capable of establishing loving relationships as adults if they have had the benefit of a wise and understanding rehearsal of their future roles before they are six.

Some of the confusion can be seen in the pre-teen boy’s relationship with his mother. A mother who sees her sweet, lovable, dependent child of five or six become sulky, argumentative, and sometimes downright hostile by the time he is nine or ten may begin asking herself the old parental question, “Where did I go wrong?” Probably she has not “gone wrong” at all. Her son’s attitude is simply the result of his changing sexuality and continuing growth as an individual. The earlier romance with his mother has ended. She has been replaced, possibly, by the little girl at school or next door. At home he is likely to be less outgoing in demonstrating his affection. There is some restraint about it now, less willingness to kiss and hug spontaneously, yet he needs love as much as he ever did. Often he will be interested in what part the father plays in reproduction, and his sex questions will turn more in that direction. Since, at the same time, he is also interested in films, books, and other information media, which tell him about space travel, electronics, animals, and phenomena of the natural world, it is not hard to find materials that will tell him about sex as well, particularly books and pamphlets; video cassettes are going to be a powerful teaching force here before long.

In saying these things, I realize that many readers will think it is nonsense to be constantly assessing their actions within the family circle, but I can only assure them that their lives and those of their children will be happier if they do so. So much of this behavior is unconscious that it is only when parents begin to understand what they are doing to their children that they can learn to take more seriously the underlying sexual tensions in family relationships. Equipped with such understanding, they may not be so ready to recoil with horror at the mere suggestion that these tensions exist.

Again, I want to emphasize that when sexual problems emerge in a family, they usually do so in disguised form. A father, for example, discovers that his daughter is having intercourse with one or more of her boy friends. His outrage may be in direct proportion to his own unconscious feelings of possessiveness and sublimated sexuality toward his daughter. Many researchers who have studied family sexuality have noted these unconscious sexual feelings between family members who would certainly answer with a shocked denial if they were accused of it.

A classic case history tells of the widowed father left with an early teen-age daughter. He complains at night of muscular pains and cramps in his legs. They can be assuaged only if his daughter, summoned by his pitiful calls for help, massages his limbs until the symptoms go away. She begins with the calves of his legs, but then the cramps appear in his thigh muscles, and she must stroke and massage them too. In this particular case, the sexual contact (and that, in reality, is what it is) goes no further, but, as the doctors who report the case point out, no one knows how many other cases there are in which overt sexual behavior follows in similar situations.

Fathers and mothers are aware of the sexuality mixed in with their natural feelings of love and tenderness toward the young, warm body of their little son or daughter. Children are often unconscious seducers. The small child who rides-a-cock-horse-to-Banbury-Cross on a parent’s thigh, or on that of an affectionate uncle, aunt, or grandparent, often experiences sexual sensations and behaves in a sensuous way, to which adults may respond, unconsciously or not. The juveniles involved have encouraged sexual behavior of adults, or even provoked it. Sometimes, too, it is the adults who are completely innocent in situations where children, stirred to provocative behavior by sexual fantasies, accuse older people of making advances when in fact they have rejected the overt actions of the children.

I do not mean to imply that there is a sexual element in every demonstration of affection between parent and child. I am saying only that there are far more sexual contacts between adults and children than most people realize. Knowing that an element of sexuality so often exists in such relations, whether it is recognized or not, makes it easier for an adult to separate affection from behavior that may be confusing to a child and may complicate his/her attitudes toward sex. Such knowledge certainly doesn’t preclude the spontaneous, joyous demonstration of affection between parents and children that is so much a part of healthy family relationships.

Once this is understood, some common phenomena that many parents observe are easier to accept in a matter-of-fact way without feelings of guilt, or even horror. I am thinking of fathers rough-housing with small sons as a defense against sexuality because they have sexual feelings or thoughts about them. I am thinking of the mother who is frightened when she nurses her first baby and discovers, on occasion, that the experience produces strong sexual responses, sometimes even to the point of orgasm. Fathers and mothers who have the knowledge to understand what they’re doing are not going to be disturbed by these commonplace happenings, and will simply accept them as another aspect of human relationships.

In the context of family love and affection, it is important to understand why some children are seductive. It is a seductiveness that grows out of feelings of insecurity, of low self-worth. Its aim is to draw the parents’ attention by doing something to make them seem worthwhile. They reach out in the same way to grandparents, uncles, aunts, even strangers.

Not many children express these feelings in an obvious, overt way. Some are very clever about it, pressing their genitalia against the adult’s body in so subtle a manner that he may not even be aware of it, or, if he is, automatically responds as subtly as the seducer. The seduction can be physical or non-physical. That is, an endearing child who knows he is endearing can use his charm in a calculated way to reinforce his need for security and his feelings of self-worth.

Sometimes it is hard for a parent to draw the line. For instance, a man’s small daughter climbs into his lap before she goes to bed and asks to be read to, or told a story. Nothing could be more natural and normal, or more representative of affectionate family behavior. But what are we going to say about the same girl who continues this nightly ritual, with her father’s doting cooperation, into her early teen-age years, and arrives every night in his lap, in skimpy night clothes, cuddling and pressing against him her nearly adult body? As for the daughter, she could not be giving a clearer indication that there is something wrong with her family relationship, and indeed with her whole psychosexual adjustment to the world. The parent is sowing the seeds of confusion in child’s mind. When the daughter grows up, she may well respond to her father with open contempt for him, leaving him deeply hurt by and uncomprehending what was wrong.

With so much sexuality, overt and hidden, in the seductive-child situation, we might well ask when we should be concerned about a child’s sexual relationships with adults. First, of course, when force has been used, whether inside or outside the family. When force is not used in sexual relations between a child and an adult, the child may not only consent to the act but sometimes may even be the initiator. And some therapists argue that much behavior between children and adults is not wrong so long as it does not become exclusively sexualized.

Similarly, if a woman is stimulated sexually by her breast-feeding child, sometimes to the point of orgasm, some therapists would say there is nothing wrong with this, even if it does go beyond the year or so in which the child is normally breast-fed.

Psychological upsets, then, are caused when behavior verges toward extremes. Too much closeness between parents and children can be as bad as the failure of parents to show love and affection. I hope no one will accuse me of being too pessimistic when I add that even in seemingly healthy, satisfactory relationships — which includes most of them — irrational fears of doing wrong often appear, and these, too, may handicap parents in their relationships with children. Only informed adults who are able to recognize these feelings as irrational are in a position to prevent them from interfering with what would otherwise be a stable family situation.

All this will not be difficult if parents, from the beginning, “feel right” about their children. Those who are suspicious of their children’s sexual behavior, who are always prying and inquiring, not letting them have any privacy, restraining them from expressions of sexuality, inevitably find that these attitudes, whether they understand it or not, interfere with the vital relationships they need to establish with the children at about age five.

That is why I have emphasized over and over that parents need to understand the development of their children from infancy, and particularly their sexual development in the context of the whole. If they understand the curiosity, sexual and otherwise; if they understand the necessity to explore, and its harmlessness where sexual matters are concerned; if they understand that the child’s perennial questioning, including his sexual questions, requires answers; if they understand that all of these things are aspects of the whole developing child ? then they will feel comfortable about their growing children. And, feeling comfortable, they will be able to guide and help them to the best of their ability in this most critical period.

The good relationship between parents and children is a satisfying thing to see. Here, for instance, is a seven-year-old girl, loved wholly and without complications by father and mother. Either father or daughter feels free to reach out toward the other, touch or kiss with warmth and spontaneity. She sits on his lap, and he listens to her, attends to her, tries to understand her. Any sense of rivalry between mother and daughter is absent; they have their own special and different relationship.

Both parents respect her growing womanhood as she gets older. One father I know in such a happy relationship touched his daughter deeply — she recalled it with pride and affection years later — when he presented her with a lovely bouquet of flowers when she menstruated for the first time. It was his recognition that she had become a woman — a salute to the little girl he had cherished who was now entering a different phase of her life. My patient’s girl had been prepared for the experience long in advance, and her father’s gift confirmed his continuing love for her.

This is genuine togetherness, to use that now old-fashioned word in its best sense, meaning a healthy, giving, warm family relationship. The social prophets who say that this kind of family is dying, if not dead, do not comprehend the strength of the bonds that tie human beings together. Family life is changing, indeed, under the impact of the technological society, but the human relationships involved in it remain fundamentally the same, as they have throughout history.

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