Postponing Adolescence

Today's children are reaching sexual maturity earlier than previous generations. Many parents are responding by condoning early dating, and some are even encouraging use of the Pill by girls barely into their teens. That kind of permissiveness can have unhappy consequences, according to Manhattan Psychoanalyst Peter Bios. In the current issue of Daedalus, he insists that youthful behavior need not follow biology, and that "a prolongation rather than an abbreviation of childhood" is imperative.

To Bios, the young adolescent is still a child psychologically, "regardless of the status of his primary and secondary sex characteristics." There is no way to hurry his emotional maturation; encouraged to grow up too fast, he may never really grow up at all. Premature sexual behavior can be especially damaging. The boy who shows a precocious preference for girls is often the one "whose maleness proves in later years shakily established," while the boy who prefers the company of boys during his early adolescence "tends to settle, later on, more firmly and lastingly in his masculine identity."

Bios even favors separation of the sexes in school for a while after puberty and disagrees with arguments that thwarting a youngster's new-found sexual drive will be harmful. By the time a child is sexually mature, Bios says, his personality is strong enough to tolerate and even profit from delay, repression and sublimation.

In general, Bios believes parents should set limits, affirm their personal values, deny the "clamor for grown-up status," and refuse to be intimidated by charges of authoritarianism. That is bound to cause family tensions, he says, but antagonism between parent and adolescent is normal and even necessary. Without conflict, Bios believes, there is no growth.

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