Children’s sexuality up to three years: what influences its development?

Newborns. Merging with mother

The emotional life of a child begins from the moment he is born. In order to be convinced of this, it is enough to observe breastfeeding, in which, as the English doctor and psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott noted, not so much food intake is important as communication.¹.

When the child was still in the mother’s womb, they were an amazing dyad: two organisms with a common physiology and common mental manifestations. All the emotions that the mother experienced were also experienced by the baby in her stomach, since they had a common blood circulation and biologically active substances produced during certain emotions got to him. In addition, he felt how the mother’s heart rate, breathing, blood pressure changed …

Stanislav Grof, a specialist in transpersonal psychology and holotropic breathing, called the prenatal state a “paradise matrix”, which a child leaves with horror at birth and which he unconsciously strives to enter for the rest of his life.².

All this information is directly related to sexuality. “In the unconscious of a person, for the rest of his life, there remains the desire to restore the primary state, the best of all, namely, intrauterine existence”³. Partial restoration of the invisible connection between mother and child, which helps to reduce his fear of the unknown outside world, is achieved, according to Donald Winnicott, thanks to the care that the mother surrounds the baby (including breastfeeding).

A newborn and infant, when satiated, does not stop sucking the mother’s breast, «plays» with her, and also feels the need to suck on the nipple or her own finger.

Later, when the mother-child dyad disintegrates, the child will look for someone with whom he could merge, having crossed the bodily boundaries. “The only real opportunity for the restoration of primary pleasure is given in sexual contact,” Otto Rank explained, “that is, in a partial and purely bodily return to the womb.”

What happens in infancy

In both male and female infants, the genital area can be extremely sensitive. Parents need to take this into account when caring for a child and be more careful.

Sometimes a mother, observing her son’s bodily reactions, may mistakenly think that her son wants to write. However, due to the peculiarities of male physiology during erection, urination is very difficult, and more often it is simply impossible.

Girls very early may experience a variety of sensations in the genital area and look for their repetition, which may be reflected in their behavior or special body movements. Doctors do not always correctly qualify the symptoms, often explaining what is happening by the fact that the child is «tormented by gases.»

In this case, the mother is advised to follow a diet, the girl is prescribed to give dill water, massage the tummy, or even use a gas tube. The last remedy only contributes to the consolidation and frequency of phenomena that disturb parents.

What are they related to? The fact is that childbirth is a hormonal storm. A large amount of both male and female sex hormones enters the blood of a woman. The high content of male sex hormones in the blood of girls received from the mother most often causes such bodily manifestations. The hormonal background stabilizes quickly enough, everything passes by itself.

Incorrect actions of adults (search for what «interferes» with the girl, an atmosphere of anxiety) can contribute to the consolidation of children’s sexual manifestations. Due to the high content of female sex hormones in the blood of girls, some of them may experience spotting — they also quickly disappear without any treatment.

Below is fine, but above…

An increased amount of maternal female hormones in the blood of both boys and girls leads to swelling of small (pea-sized) mammary glands. In girls, this phenomenon is usually perceived by parents adequately, it does not cause unrest. Parents of boys are often worried about this.

One day, very anxious parents came to see me and brought their little son. They expressed suspicion that he was a hermaphrodite. This is a serious, fortunately very rare disease in which a person has both male and female genital organs at the same time. I already began to think about which of the experienced colleagues I could turn to with a request to consult such a patient, but after carefully examining the child, I discovered that the boy had completely correctly formed male genital organs.

To my question about the reasons for doubting the normal development of his son, the father sadly replied: “From below, everything is fine with him, but from above — his chest is growing!” Now most parents are aware of such a phenomenon as breast engorgement in newborns, which does not require any special measures. Unfortunately, even now we have to face the fact that for some reason they begin to massage the chest, apply various compresses, rub ointments … At the same time, there is a risk of infection, mastitis.

Weaning — separation from mother

Mom and a small child represent a dyad, characterized by the blurring of the physical and mental boundaries of these two people. This is reflected in the fact that the mother, absorbed in caring for the baby, often uses the pronoun “we” (“we want to eat”, “we pooped …”). Often, at the same time, a woman begins to pay less attention to her husband, which leads to a deterioration in marital relations, the appearance of jealousy of the father for the child.

Breastfeeding in most cases lasts approximately 1–1,5 years. Breast milk is perfectly absorbed by the baby’s body and is extremely beneficial in all respects. However, too long (more than 1,5–2 years) breastfeeding prevents the processes of separation of the child from the mother, the formation of his personality. Often, breastfeeding is needed not so much for the child as for the mother, who does not want him to grow up, become independent of her. Sometimes breastfeeding is an unconscious way for a woman to minimize intimate relationships with her husband.

For the normal development of a child, harmonious marital relations of his parents, timely (about three years) termination of dyadic relations, recognition by parents of the child’s right to independence, respect for his physical (bodily) and mental (mental) boundaries are necessary.

New sensations

After the cessation of breastfeeding, the main sexual sensations shift from the oral region to the anal region. After a year, the child turns from a defenseless, incapable of independent life, a being dependent on the mother into a person striving for autonomy. He can already move independently, explore the world around him, begins to master speech. He has developed motor skills, he is well coordinated. One of the last important achievements of this period was the ability to control not only the arms and legs, but also the internal organs.

During this period, parents actively begin to teach the child to use the potty, which, in fact, is the first requirement for the child’s behavior to comply with the social norm. At the same time, the model of parent-child relations is built either according to the type of confrontation, or according to the type of cooperation and mutual understanding.

It is curious that parents who have achieved unquestioning obedience from a child are often later dissatisfied with the fact that he always turns out to be led, does not show initiative, and is deprived of leadership qualities and ambitions. Pride in the ability to control one’s body and joy in mastering the skill of neatness are reinforced by pleasurable sensations that provide sensory pleasure to the child.

An important role is also played by the approval of such correct behavior by the mother and other relatives. True, sometimes the reactions of adults are incomprehensible to the baby. Accustomed to the fact that parents encourage him for the ability to «tolerate», use the potty and stay clean, the child is perplexed, and sometimes even protests, if he is punished for everyday «accidents» that adults did not pay much attention to before. While the child is learning to cope with his emotions, he can be capricious, stubborn, even behave aggressively, he may sometimes have an unstable mood, but over time this passes.

In adults, the anal region is also an important erogenous zone. Freud even described the «anal character», which is characterized by «the constant presence of three components: accuracy, economy and perseverance»⁴. It is curious that it is parents with such characterological features who, as a rule, are very concerned about the problem of potty training a child. They begin to instill neatness skills very early. More often than not, this backfires.

In children whose parents do not have such character traits, the development of neatness skills occurs quickly and almost imperceptibly. By the age of three, the existence of the mother-child dyad ends. An important sign of this milestone is the child’s transition from naming himself in the third person to the first. Previously, he said: “Peter will go …”, “Peter wants …”, now he began to use the pronoun “I”: “I want!”, “Give me!” The famous “I myself!” is increasingly appearing in speech.

From that time on, he begins not only to repeat the words “boy” and “girl”, “man” and “girl” after adults, but to understand that all of humanity is divided into two groups according to gender, that mother belongs to the female half, and dad to the male, that he himself is also a bearer of a certain gender. The next stage of psychosexual development is phallic.

¹ D. Woods Winnicott «Little Children and Their Mothers» (Klass, 1998).

² S. Grof «Beyond the Brain» (Transpersonal Institute Publishing House, 1993).

³ O. Rank «Birth Trauma» (Agraf, 2004).

⁴ A. Freud, Z. Freud «Children’s sexuality and psychoanalysis of childhood neuroses» (V.-E. Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1997).