The Free Child - AS Neill - THE SELF REGULATED CHILD

No one has ever seen a healthy child. Every child living has been moulded by parents, teachers, society. When my daughter Zoë was two, Picture Post published an article about her with photographs, saying that, in their opinion, she, of all the children of Britain, had the best chance of being free. It was not quite true, for she lived and lives in a school among many children who were not selfregulated; they had been more or less conditioned, and since moulding must lead to fear and hate, Zoë found herself in contact with some children who were antilife. She had no fear of animals; she loved a farmyard, but one day I stopped my car at a farm and said: "Come on, let's see the moo cows." She suddenly looked afraid and said:
"No, no, moo cows eat you." A child of seven who had not been brought up with self-regulation had told her so. True the fear lasted only for a week or two, and a subsequent tale of tigers being in the bushes had also a short life of influence.
When I told this story to a friend, a Freudian teacher, he said that I had got the whole thing wrong. It was necessary for a child to be brought into contact with reality as soon as possible. "But;" I said, "what is reality anyway? If she were in a Gestapo concentration camp that would be reality, but would it be good for her development?" The idea of the reality principle can be dangerous, for spanking mothers, brutal fathers, caning teachers can all plead that they are realities in a child's life.
I never heard the term self-regulation until my friend Wilhelm Reich used it, and if he did not invent it, he, more than any other man, has understood and used the method. Homer Lane had spoken of selfdetermination and others had described selfgovernment; these were not the same as self-regulation, for they referred more to children governing themselves communally than to selfdetermination of the individual baby.

There are so few self - regulated babies in the world that any attempt to describe them must be tentative and conjectural. The observed results so far suggest the beginnings of a new civilisation, more profound than any new society that is promised by any kind of political party.
self-regulation implies a belief in human nature, a belief that there is not, and never was, original sin. This belief is not new; many have held it and tried to practise it, in, for example, the kind of education called Naturalism and associated with the name of Rousseau, but it was applied only to the child's psyche, not to his soul and body together. self-regulation means the right of a baby to live freely without outside authority in things psychic and somatic. It means that the baby feeds when it is hungry, that it becomes clean in habits only when it wants to, that it is never stormed at nor spanked, that it shall always be loved and protected. It all sounds easy and natural and fine, yet it is astounding how many young parents, keen on the idea, manage to misunderstand it. Tommy, aged four, bangs the notes of a neighbour's piano with a wooden mallet, while his fond parents look on with a triumphant smile which means: "Isn't self-regulation wonderful ?" Another pair think that they ought never to put their baby of eighteen months to bed, because that would be interfering with nature; no, baby must be allowed to stay up when he is tired out, and then mother will carry him to his cot. What actually happens is that baby gets increasingly crossly tired. He cannot say that he wants to go byebye because he cannot speak. Usually the weary and disappointed mother lifts him and carries him screaming to bed. Another young couple came to me rather apologetically and ask if it would be wrong for them to put up a fireguard in baby's nursery. All of which illustrations show that any idea, old or new, is dangerous if not combined with common sense.

Our daughter, Zoë, four and a half, plays with Ted. Ted is five and was not reared with anything approaching self-regulation. Ted has been spanked by both his parents, and as a result has much repressed hate in him. When the two play, Ted always wants to be aggressive and destructive of toys. His attitude to grownups is suspicious and hostile; he pushes me or hits me when I pass by; he is noisy in a room; saddest of all, he has little or no imagination, and therefore cannot create a game for himself. His body is rigid and his movements have no grace. By nature he is a dear, likeable child with potentialities of becoming a fine, balanced man. His antagonism to life and joy will make him grow into a neurotic person incapable of loving and giving. I know; I have seen so many with his type of origins grow up into unhappy adults.
He has never had any fun in his life and he takes literally all that is said to him. When I said to him: "Tell Neill it is lunchtime," he simply stared at me in bewilderment, but if I say the like to Zoë she will say mock seriously: "No use telling him; he won't come, he isn't hungry." I don't want to overvalue this fun question: all I claim is that the conditioned child cannot rise to a joke of any kind, probably because life is no joke to him.
Ted is, as I say, likeable, but he is so tiresome. He must always be the centre of the picture, and he pushes and groans and shouts in order to test the reaction of adults. Years ago I noted this side of the punished child . . . he tests every new adult to find out if he or she is an enemy, and when he is convinced the adult is no enemy, he becomes cheeky and overbearing.
To be objective about one's own daughter is impossible, but, since she is the nearest specimen of self-regulation, I have to try my best to describe her contrasting behaviour. She is not a perfect child: if she has not had enough sleep in a night her behaviour next morning is rather like that of Ted, but it does not last long. And one feature of Ted's behaviour is missing: she shows no destructive tendencies and no hate of man or beast.

Often her tantrums end in gay laughter. She has not the time nor the desire to plague adults in order to get a reaction from them. Her short life has made me reconsider a belief I have expressed in lectures and books for years, that no young child can love: he only wants to be loved. The amount of affection she expends on all sorts of animals geese, dogs, cats, horses is enormous. Since she began to have riding lessons she has identified herself with horses, and will spend hours prancing about the rooms as a circus horse, showing by her head and foot action how observant a young child can be. Sometimes she is a dog, and after a visit to a zoo she is a zebra or a giraffe or a deer, but never once a savage animal like a lion or tiger. When Ted and she play a horse game I see him kicking out as a wild horse: that may be his masculinity, but it is more likely to be his wrong beginnings. Zoë's passionate identification of herself with animals makes me wonder if it is her way of criticising the unselfregulated young humanity she meets every day. One thing her phantasy life has taught me, that the Freudians are all wrong when they say that a child phantasies to get away from reality. When she was two she would bring me an imaginary bag of grapes and say:
"Daddy, have a grape." I would select one and she would take it back saying: "That one isn't ripe enough." That the bag of phantasy grapes meant wishful thinking was disproved by the fact that she would play the game when a bag of real grapes or sweets stood on the table.
She gets tired of playmates very often because they have no power of imagination, of invention. This is bad for her, for her own inventive imagination makes her a leader and is apt to overemphasise the exhibitionism that every child has. One of the dangers of having a self-regulated child is that adults will show so much interest in her that she gets too much in the centre of the picture. It is likely that, in a community of self-regulated children, where all were natural and free and forthgiving, no single one would stand out and be encouraged to show off. And there would not be the jealousy that other children (and, alas, their parents sometimes) show when faced with a free child who ~notgottheirmnhibitions.

Compared with Ted she is supple and free of limb. You see her and her body is as relaxed as that of a kitten, but poor Ted lifts like a sack of potatoes; he cannot relax, his reactions are all defensive and resisting; he is antilife in every direction.
Since Freud discovered the positive sexuality of small children, not enough has been done to study its manifestations. True, books have been written about sexuality in babies, but so far as I know, no one has written a book about self-regulated children. Our daughter has shown no marked interest in her own sex or that of her parents and playmates. She has always seen us naked in bathroom and lavatory, and showed some interest two years ago in the difference between male and female anatomy. To me she has disproved the theory held by some psychologists, that there is an instinctive, unconscious, innate modesty that makes a child embarrassed on seeing adult genitals or natural functions. That theory, like the similar one that there is an innate shame about masturbation, is nonsense; all child shame about bodies and bodily acts is an acquired one from inhibited elders. Zoë has not shown any special interest in her genital parts; my wife and I have not noted any infantile masturbation.
It would be quite unscientific to conclude much from the study of one child, and one is confined to making guesses. Is infantile masturbation due to inhibitions only? If life is not allowed to go outward, to express itself in free doing and imagination, do the genitals take on an abnormal importance? Certainly they must do when parents and nurses have shown disapproval of genital touching either in shocked tones or in spanking or taking the hands away roughly, for then the forbidden fruit element comes in and its concomitant compulsion. My own view is that when a small child is free to live its life fully without punishments and teachings about disgust and taboos, he or she finds life far too full of interest to confine it to the sexual apparatus.

Reports from other parents who are using self-regulation should deny or confirm this view.
Zoë's interest in the sex of animals is keen . . . "My turkey can't hatch her chickens 'cos the father turkey did not fertilise her." About a year ago she had a fancy for telling staid women in shops that Daddy fertilised Mummy and she came out of Mummy's fanny, but so far as we know any disapproving looks or words did not affect her. It looks as if any antilife influence that a child meets does not do it much harm if it comes from outside the home, a cheering idea indeed for those parents who have to send their children to State schools where religion and taboos and moulding are imposed on the young.
The development of her natural function habits has been curious in a way. We never forced her to use her potty, did not even make out that it had any special importance. Gradually she came to use it and was soon house clean so far as her hind quarters were concerned. But, demanding and of course getting a bottle to bed with her nightly, she wet the bed, and now that she has got over the bottle phase, she often wets at night. Here again we have not the evidence to discover what is the normal time for ceasing enuresis. Luckily Zoë has no feeling of wrong about it, but she sometimes cries because she finds it uncomfortable.
I have said farther back that no child has a really free environment, and this certainly applies to any child brought up in a school. Too often she gets up after going to bed, making one excuse or another for not going to sleep, and of course getting up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning. In a school there is too much noise, too much excitement for a small child; that is why in Summerhill we segregate our under sevens in the Cottage away from the main building. So far Zoë has not wanted to go to the Cottage to live and sleep, mainly because she was told by the others that she wasn't a Cottage Kid and had no right to be there.

I have never before seen a child who had so little interest in eating. A bag of chocolates can sit on her table for days without being touched, and the most delectable dish at lunch or supper will often leave her indifferent. If she sits down to breakfast and another child shouts from outside to come and play, she always leaves her food and never comes back to eat it, but as her physique is excellent, we have nothing to worry about.
So much has been written about a child's interest in its faeces and urine that I expected to learn a lot by observing Zoë. She showed no interest at all nor any disgust; she had no desire to play with her body products, but when she was three a girl a year older, who had been "trained" to be clean, introduced her to a hole and corner excrement game with much whispering and shame and guilty giggling. It was a tiresome phase and we could not do anything about it, knowing that to interfere would be to risk inhibition and conscience. Luckily Zoë soon got tired of the other's onetrack activities, and the faeces game came to an end. It looks as if a self-regulated child is capable of overcoming the influences of conditioned children in a comparatively short time. Zöes acquired fears and repressed interests have never lasted long, but naturally no one can say what permanent harm, if any, they have done to her character. Intellectually she is very bright, but again one cannot conclude anything, for many an unself-regulated child is bright. One can only guess that a bright free child is likely to make mores of life than an unfree one. The biggest difficulty with self regulation we have found is the clothing one. Zoë would run about naked all day long if she could. Another parent of a self-regulated child reported that when the day was cold, her daughter of two automatically came into the house and asked for warm clothes.

is the clothing one. Zoë would run about naked all day free child is likely to make more of life than an unfroze one.
The biggest difficulty with self regulation we have found long if she could. Another parent of a self-regulated child
reported that when the day was cold, her daughter of two automatically came into the house and asked for warm clothes. We have not had this experience: Zoë will shiver with blue nose and cheeks and resist all efforts to get her to put on more clothes. Courageous parents might say:
"Her own organism will guide her; let her shiver; she'll be all right," but we are not courageous enough to risk pneumonia without knowing more about the incidence of disease, so we bully her into wearing what we think she ought to wear.

Her eating has not been troublesome; she chooses what she wants, and when she has a cold she eats only fruit and drinks fruit juices without any suggestion on our part.
I want to make it clear that all this description of our daughter is not meant to be the usual fond parents' rhapsody about a Wunderkind. When the Picture Post article about her appeared, parents wrote indignantly asking why a fuss should be made about this one child, saying that there were many children just as free and enterprising, etc. The subject is much wider than that; the individual child is only an indication of what the world of infancy could be . . . and will be in the future.
Scores of outsiders from all over the world have said of Zoë: "Here is something quite new, a child of grace and balance and happiness, at peace with her surroundings, not at war." It is true; she is, as near as can be in a neurotic society, the natural child who seems automatically to know the boundary between freedom and licence. And the maddening thought is that every child in the world could be the same if training were abolished and love substituted for it. Yes, yes, every mother will cry aloud that she gives her child love, even when she is spanking it, but we must discriminate between types of love. Possessive love is dangerous for it looks for a return, for gratitude, for behaviour that will make its parents proud of their child. Parental love that demands an answer is poor love, and, alas, such love is universal; when the sequel comes when the child is seventeen and hateful towards her parents, they can never accept the truth that they are reaping what they sowed. The proverbial revolt against the parents, taking place at any time between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, is surely an artificial product of parental authority and possessive love. I prophesy that self-regulated children will not go through that unpleasant phase; I cannot see why they will ever need to, for if they have no feeling of being tied and absorbed by parents when they are in the nursery, I cannot see any reason why rebellion against parents should arise later.

Even in semifree homes the equality between parents and children is often so good that the rebellious striving to get free from the parents does not arise. The saddening feature of so many young marriages is the repetition of the older generation's mistakes. Young parents who think themselves very advanced about sex or politics or philosophy or science, go on treating their babies in the same manner in which they themselves were treated. Perhaps the spankings are eliminated, and the touching of the genitals tolerated, but in all other ways the baby is conditioned and trained, "because, after all, the kid has to fit into a stern society later on," as one of Summerhill's old pupils put it, while I blushed for him. Another kind of parent is more subtle in paying lip service to child freedom while negativing it in practice the higher life type who believe in an ism of one kind or another; theosophists, psychic folks, food reformers (many of us are, but not the kind who will refuse champagne at a wedding because wine is a poison), what are called cranks in general; they are akin to Bloomsburyites; some are rationalists combining a hate of God with a hate of natural life. Speaking generally such people are not good for children, why it is difficult to say with clarity. They are usually disapprovers of sex, and although they never tell their children that, the children unconsciously acquire the parental disapproval of the earthly. Gandhi, I read, when he had a coed school went off the deep end when he learned that an adolescent boy had slept with an adolescent girl; he threatened to expel them if it happened again. What puzzles me is why the two ever thought of sleeping together in what must have been patently an antilove community
it just shows that conditioning isn't always successful.
I wish I could get down to understanding just why the higher life or higher thought parent is so dangerous. Possibly he works as the nudists do.

The nudist says in effect: "Look, sex isn't important; the genitals are no more exciting than the nose or ears." The higher life parents say in effect: "Bodies and functions belong to the lower elements of life; they are not evil of course, only relatively unimportant; take masturbation, for instance, it isn't sinful; it is just a silly thing to do, and if youth had enough interest in more important things (higher, spiritual things being meant here) sex would be put in its right place.
I can hear some harassed mother, busy with her lunch cooking while her baby is trying to put its fingers in the potato pot, I can hear her ask with irritation: "What's all this self-regulation anyway? All very well for rich women with nurses, but for the likes of me just words and confusion." Another might cry: "I'd like to but how do I start? What books can I read on the subject?"
The answer here is that there are no books, no oracles, no authorities. All we have is a minority of parents and doctors and teachers who believe in the personality and the organism we call a child, and are determined to do nothing to warp that personality and stiffen its body by wrong interference. Occasionally one sees an article of a writer s experience, but we are all nonauthoritarian seekers after the truth about humanity, and have no right to offer guidance to any young parents; all we can offer is an expression of our own faith and an account of our own observations of young children brought up in freedom. And, again, I must emphasise the danger of confusing freedom with licence. If a young mother thinks that her child of three should be allowed to paint the front door with red ink, on the ground that it is thereby expressing its innate self freely, she is incapable of grasping what self-regulation means. But, to practise!
self-regulation should begin with birth. Every baby has the birthright of feeding when it wants to feed. This is an easy way to begin if the mother has the baby at home, but so many maternity homes are so far behind the times that many a baby cannot start self-regulation for a few weeks, and then no one knows what damage has been done already.

If a maternity home takes the baby away at birth and does not allow the mother to feed it for the first twentyfour hours, who can say what permanent damage is done to that baby? In some homes a mother can discuss the situation before the child is born, and sometimes the home will agree to the mother's wishes, but usually to enter a maternity home means that one must accept the system as it is, and therefore, any mother who means to use self-regulation should beware of going into a home that does not approve of self-regulation. The moral being:
have your baby at home if you can.
Timetable feeding, so long the system of doctors and nurses, has been attacked so effectively that many old fashioned practitioners have given it up. It was obviously wrong and dangerous; if a child was crying for hunger at four o'clock, he was being subjected to a stupid, cruel antilife discipline of infinite danger to his bodily and spiritual growth. Hence baby must feed when he wants to feed, and in the beginning his wants will be frequent, for he cannot absorb large quantities at a time. The practice of giving a bottle of water at night is a bad one; the baby should be fed if hungry during the night. After two to three months the baby will regulate itself to larger quantities of food, and there will be longer interludes between each feed. At the age of about three or four months the baby will want to be fed say between ten and eleven p.m. and then in the morning between five and six, but of course there is no hard and fast rule about this. Remember that with timetable training the mother is always a few steps ahead of the baby, knowing what to do next and capable of rearing a mechanical baby that will give the minimum of trouble to adults, whereas with self-regulation every day, nay, every minute is a discovery, for then mother is always a step behind the baby and learning by observation all the time. Thus if a baby half an hour after a good feed is crying, I have no idea what the timetable merchants say about it, but I do know that the young mother will have to think it out for herself . . . is he un

comfortable? Is it wind? Does he want attention from his mother because he feels lonely? The mother should react to all or any of these reasons with her spontaneous love, not with any wretched book rule. One fundamental rule should be writ large in every nursery. . .
BABY MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO CRY ITSELF OUT.

It must be emphasised that self-regulation demands more giving out than a set system does; the parents will have to sacrifice more of their time and self interest for at least two years. One dangerous custom is to park a baby in a pram in the garden, maybe for hours at a time. No one can know what agonising feelings of fear and loneliness a baby can experience on waking up suddenly to find itself alone in a strange place. Those of us who have heard such a baby's screams have some idea of the iniquity of the stupid custom. self-regulation implies much selflessness in the parents; they must not play for the baby's love or gratitude; they must not look on baby as a show piece to perform smiles and tricks when relatives come visiting. I give this aspect prominence because I have seen young couples who thought that they were using self-regulation when they were making the baby adapt itself to their own convenience, e.g. trying to make the child have a sleeping time that will fit in with their desire to go to the cinema of an evening, or later on, giving the child soft, noiseless toys so that Daddy won't be disturbed during his after lunch forty winks. "But, hoy," cried the parent, "you can't do that to us; we have our own rights in life." I say No; not during the first two years . . . or maybe four years of a child's life. The first years must be years of the most careful watchfulness, because the whole of the surroundings are against self-regulation, and one is forced to fight for a child with a conscious intensity.
From the very beginning the recreational needs of a baby should be studied. Too many babies are shut in by the walls of a pram or a small room or a play pen; it seems reasonable to guess that the wider a baby's horizon is, the fuller will be its growth in all ways. Too many

babies are sacrificed to furniture and adult precosities in rooms, and the withering: Don't Touch That, Baby! comes into force. In a small home of moderate or poor income one cannot make an ideal environment for the crawling baby, who will shove his hands into all sorts of pots and pans and knock over breakable dishes. Here there is a real problem for the most enthusiastic self-regulation mother, and one that demands much patience and invention. If a mother must take away something from a crawling baby, or a baby at any stage, the irate howls of protest should be placated in some way, preferably by substitution of a harmless for a harmful or fragile plaything. We found with our Zoë that she would not be placated with any Ersatz object, but our environment, a school, had so many opportunities for touching thing; that our problem was much easier than that of the mother in a flat, with possibly neighbours downstairs who signal with a broom handle when baby is too enthusiastically busy. There is no reason why a baby should not be allowed to play with kitchen material when it is not in use noisy pot lids, wooden spoons he can use as drumsticks; he is likely to prefer these to the usual toys sold in toy shops, most of which have not any element of creation or even construction in them. Indeed the average toy can be a soporific, lulling baby into a dull somnolence, one similar to the dummy teat which gives a substitute pleasure for a creative joy.
All parents have a tendency to overbuy in the matter of toys; baby in the shop eagerly holds out its hands towards some gadget . . . a tractor, a giraffe that nods . . . and parents buy it on the spot; thus most nurseries are full of toys and books that the child never shows any interest in. Of all her toys the only one that Zoë retained a liking for was her Betsy Wetsy, a self wetting doll I brought her from America when she was eighteen months. The wetting arrangement did not interest her one bit, maybe for the reason that it was a puritanical fake, for the weewee hole was in the small of the back.

Only at four and a half did she say one morning: "I'm tired of Betsy Wetsy and want to give her away." One should never show a child how a toy works, indeed one should never help a child in any way until or unless he is not capable of solving a problem for himself. The self-regulated children observed so far seem content to amuse themselves for long periods with their toys and games; they do not smash them about as moulded children so often do. Reich's little son Peter was making soap bubbles and delighting in their colours, but his moulded playmate kept smashing each one. "Leave them," cried Peter passionately, "don't break them, they are so beautiful." Yes, young parents, if your baby wants to destroy you have killed something vital in him that life will find it hard to replace; you have converted his natural love of life into a hate of life. And all the Borstals and prisons and gallows and electric chairs exist because training has been making loving children antilife for generations.

Mothers too often do not play enough with their babies. They seem to think that baby in a pram with a soft Teddy Bear solves things for an hour or two. Babies want to be tickled and hugged and larked with. One should ignore those lifeshy psychologists who tell you never to have the baby in bed with you, never to tickle it, the idea being that any bodily contact might raise sexual emotions in the baby, thus giving it a fixed mother or father complex. There might be a danger but only if the parent were so neurotic as to find selfcentred pleasure for herself in so doing, but I am writing for more or less normal people, not parents who are still infants themselves.
When baby gets the length of including his or her genitals in the play scheme, the parents meet the great test in their job. It may be that when a baby's life is full, the genital toys will come later as interests; so far I have not enough evidence to know. All I know is that, late or early, genital play must be accepted as good and normal and healthy, and any attempt to suppress it will be dangerous, and I include the underhand, dishonest attempt at drawing the child's attention to something else.

A self-regulated girl was sent to a nice nursery school daily. She seemed unhappy. Her genital play she had christened "snuggling in," and when her mother asked her why she did not like school she said: "When I try to snuggle in they don't tell me not to, but they say: Look at this or Come and do this, so I can't ever snuggle in there."
This infantile masturbation (genital play is a better term) is a most complicated problem because nearly all parents were conditioned in an antisex way in their cradles, and cannot overcome a sense of shame and sin and disgust deep down in their own personalities. It is possible to have a strong intellectual opinion that genital play is good and healthy, and at the same time, by tone of voice or by look of the eyes, convey to the child that emotionally you have not accepted the child's right to its own genital satisfaction. A parent may seem to approve wholly when baby touches its genitals, but when stiff stomached Aunt Mary comes to call, the parent may have anxiety lest baby performs in front of the life disapprover. It is easy to say to such a parent: "Aunt Mary represents the antisex element in your repressed self," but saying this does not help parent or child, and we do not know enough to say definitely what is due to repression and what is not. A familiar question asked by critics of child freedom is:
"Why don't you let a small child see sexual intercourse ?" The answer, that it would give the baby a trauma, a severe nervous shock, is shown to be false among the Trobriands where, according to Malinovski, children see, not only parental sexual intercourse, but birth and death as matters of course. I do not think that seeing sexual intercourse would have any bad emotional effect on a self-regulated child. The only honest answer to the question is to say that love isn't a public matter anyway, not in our civilisation.

The parental fear that infantile genital play will lead to sexual precocity is a fairly widespread one. It is a rationalisation of course; genital play does not lead to precocity, and if it does, what about it? The best way to make
a child take an abnormal interest in sex at adolescence is to prohibit his or her genital play in the cradle.
So far I have no personal knowledge of how one self-regulated child reacts to another such in genital play. Boys who have been taught that sex is wrong generally link up genital play with sadism, and girls who have had a similar antisex training seem to accept the sadistic genital play as the norm. I can only guess, not via wishful thinking but because of the absence of aggressive hate in the self-regulated child, that genital play between two free children would be gentle and loving.

As I write I am not forgetting the many parents who have religious or other views on the sinfulness of sex. Nothing can be done about them, they cannot be converted to our views, but, on the other hand, we must fight them when they infringe on our own children's right to freedom, genital or otherwise. When they live next door and inform our child of five that he must wear pants when he plays in the garden, we must tell them forcibly what we think of their monstrous interference. We cannot fight for our children without encountering the outpost and patrols of the religious organisations which condemn children to neurotic hate of the flesh and of life. There is much confusion on this point. Recently when lecturing to teacher students, on being asked why my school did not teach religion, I gave the answer, inter alia, that all religions were antisex, and was surprised to see a number jump from their seats in violent protest against this statement. I felt that to get into an argument would be futile and would waste time that might be devoted to more important features in education, otherwise I might have asked blandly if they would give me the names of any Roman priests or Church of England Bishops or nonconformist ministers who had openly advocated sexual play for children and a sex life for adolescents. I feel now that I should have pursued the subject and tried to find out from the protesters why they held the illusion that organised religion was prosex.

The family doctor can be as dangerous a guide as the family parson. Doctors are not trained in psychology, and their opinions on child behaviour may be of no more value than those of a plumber, yet many a young mother makes her family doctor an oracle to be consulted on matters other than physical health, and when the doctor, speaking from his own complexes, tells her to spank her child for masturbation, she obeys. The selfappointed and untrained Nature Cure practitioner is another gentleman to beware of; his lurid pictures of the evils of "self abuse" in later illnesses would be objects of ribald laughter if they were not so dangerous to ignorant parents.
Yes, yes, I hear young mother say impatiently, get back to practical things. Tell me in detail what I ought to do about my baby and its sex, and not only its sex, but such things as thumb sucking, headlong, bedwetting. Tell me what I should do when baby gets into tantrums and tries to match its sense of power against mine. But how can I tell? I can only say: interfere with your baby's natural growth and certain results will appear, unpleasant results, but which ones they will be I do not know. I know that thumb sucking does not appear in a self-regulated child, at least not in any I have seen, but I do not know enough to say exactly why. I could make the guess that in timetable feeding thumb sucking might arise because nature was quicker than the clock; I could suggest that bottle feeding, by depriving the baby of the warmth and orgiastic emotion of the breast, could lead to habitual thumb sucking. Such guesses do not help; I have seen self-regulated children brought up almost all the way on the bottle, and they did not suck their thumbs. I fancy that too much' is made of the bottle feeding breast deprivation; if the baby is loved warmly, bottle feeding does not appear to make any difference. We cannot of course tell, but we can observe that bottle feeding does not automatically lead to symptoms that are negative and soul destroying. Such symptoms are more likely to arise after training in cleanliness and habit formation.

The habit formation fetish is one that ought to be fought against; there is no merit in a habit in itself, and nearly all habit formations have the aim of making the baby as little of a nuisance as possible to the parents.
I have sometimes thought that, if human excrement were as easy to touch as that of sheep or rabbits or horses, children would stand a better chance of growing up with emotional freedom. The disgust that adults have for human faeces must play a great part in forming the negative, hate forming part of the child psyche. A mother may have no feeling of disgust when washing out the nappies, but three years later may show considerable angry emotion when she has to wipe up a small pile from the carpet. No emotional anger is ever lost on a baby; it sinks in and stays and is registered in the character. Hence the young mother must be very careful in dealing with the excrement situation. The child, owing to the geography of the lower body is bound to associate sex with excrement, and parental disapproval of the latter will almost certainly associate with the child's disapproval of the former. In practice then, never attach any importance to excrement . . . unless the child is proud of its production in which case you have to show your admiration. If the child has an "accident" treat it as something normal and unemotional.

Nakedness should never be discouraged. The baby should see its parents naked from the beginning. I grant the difficulty of dealing with the child when neighbours think they are shocked; the only way out that occurs to me is to tell the child, when he is ready to understand, that some people don't like to see children naked, and in their presence clothes must be worn. So with genital play, for it may be a grim and tragic necessity to tell a child not to play with his or her genitals in public. That advice may sound cowardly and unfair to the child, but the alternative has its own particular danger too, for if the child comes up against stern disapproval expressed in hateful, shocked terms by hostile adults, more harm might be done than that done by his loved parents' reasoning.

The antilife disapproving relatives or neighbours have to be met with at one time or another, and in our own case with Zoë we have found that a rational explanation of the behaviour of outsiders is accepted. Some child taught her the word that the law will not let us print, and when we were interviewing a prospective parent, a conventional business man, she was trying unsuccessfully to fit some toy together and at each failure was exclaiming: "Oh, f it !" Later we, quite wrongly I think now, told her that some people did not like the word and she should not use it when visitors were present. She said O.K. A week later she was doing something difficult to accomplish; she looked up and said to our Language Mistress: "Are you a visitor ?" The lady replied: "Of course not," and Zoë gave a sigh of relief and cried : "Oh, f it !"

If I look as if I were paying too much attention to the opinions and taboos of the outside world, I remind readers of the fact that I have seen many a child who was free to say what he liked ostracised by other homes . . . "We can't possibly have Tommy to the party because we can't have our children corrupted by his awful language." To be sent to Coventry is a painful punishment to a child.
The difficulty we all have is knowing where to draw the line. We put pants on our child so that she won't offend local antilife adults, but when the children of these adults, warped and modelled and hateful sling mud at our child, must we tolerate it because of the sacred Freudian axiom that one must face and adapt oneself to reality? At the present stage of the self-regulation movement the problem is insoluble, mainly because we aspiring adults have not ourselves dropped all vestiges of Mrs. Grundyism. Again, what are we to do about the aggressiveness of other children? If we send self-regulated Willie to the local school where he is bound to meet cruelty and aggression and spitefulness among other children, are we to let him find out for himself that he can be hurt by hate and violence.

When Peter was three Reich told me he would teach him how to box so that he could fight against hate in others, and he was right in a Christian world in which turning the other cheek is a sign, not of love and charity, but of cowardice. If we do not do something positively our selfregulated children will be heavily handicapped at school if not later on, for our schools, with an infinitesimal fraction of exceptions, are not in favour of self-regulation for the individual child or selfgovernment for the group. The parents will have to make up their minds whether they will take a firm stand against, say an antilife teacher of infants, going to the length of refusing to allow their child to attend school and making as public a protest as possible in subsequent legal proceedings against them.

I have had no experience of the self-regulated child's reaction to the arrival of a new baby. Whether jealousy is an everlasting trait in human nature I do not know, but the absence of any visible sexual jealousy among the Trobriands suggests that it may be a byproduct of our more complicated civilisation. Jealousy arises from the combination of love with possessiveness about the loved object, and it has yet to be known whether the selfregulated child has a strong possessive attitude to its parents. The Trobriands are under a matriarchal rule, and if the absence of jealousy has any connection with this fact, it may be that the self-regulated child will be less jealous than the trained one, for in a self-regulation home I take it that the patriarchal and the matriarchal are blended, so that there is no "authority" either dual or single. In jealousy is always a definite fear of loss, and not only in sexual jealousy; the easy illustration is that of the opera singer who hates the other prima donna, dreading that her applause will suffer in volume and intensity, indeed it is possible that fear of loss of appreciation and esteem accounts for more jealousy than all the love rivals in the world. Much depends, therefore, on the elder self-regulated child's feeling of being appreciated.

If self-regulation has given him so much independence that he does not need to ask for his parents' approval and appreciation all the time, then his jealousy of a newcomer will be less than it would be in the case of a moulded child, that is, one tied for ever to mother's apron strings, and therefore never independent and outgoing.
This does not mean that the parents should stand aside and merely observe how the elder takes to the younger. From the start any actions that might aggravate jealousy should be avoided, such as a too obvious showing the baby off to visitors. Children of all ages have a keen sense of justice, or rather of injustice, and wise parents will see to it that the younger child is not in any way favoured, given preference over the elder, although this is almost impossible to avoid to some extent. That baby has mother's breast may seem an injustice to his older brother, but it may not if the older one feels that he lived out naturally his breast feeding stage. Here we need much evidence before we can be dogmatic.

In my long experience with children I have found that many in later life retain with angry emotion some memory of what they considered injustice in their infancy or kindergarten days, especially the memory of an incident in which the elder was punished for something that the younger did. "I always got the blame," is the cry of many an elder brother or sister. In any quarrel baby cries first, and the automatic reaction of a busy mother is to storm at the elder. Some years ago I tried out a questionnaire on elder children. "When do you mostly get annoyed with your little brother (or sister) ?" In, I think, every case the answer was the same . . . "When he breaks my toys." I know that since the days of Cain and the Prodigal Son the elder brother has been blamed as a selfish person, blamed unjustly, for he was a better fellow than his weak, cringing younger brother, who, if he had any guts, wouldn't have gone home guiltily as a scrounger on the old father. It is a fallacy that responsibility should be reckoned by age, a fallacy that puts the lives of youth in the hands of the feeble old men whom we call statesmen, and who might better be described as static men.

It is this fallacy that assumes that every member of a family is the protector and guide of the ones immediately younger than himself, that fills our poorer streets with poor, pale faced girls of twelve wheeling babies in prams, although in this case the cause is economic rather than moral. It is hard for parents to realise that their son of six is not a reasonable, logical being who will understand such a sentence as:
"You are older than Tommy and at your age you should know that he isn't allowed to run out on the road." Few parents, or for that matter, teachers, ever grasp the truth that talking to a young child is wasted breath; no child that ever lived ever reacted to the timehonoured parental reaction to pulling the cat's tail . . . "How would you like it if someone pulled your ears till they hurt?" Further, no child ever got a positive reaction from the more intense situation where parents say: "So you stuck a pin in baby? Just to show you that a pin hurts, I'll . . . (screams) that will stop you doing it again." It may, but the ultimate results throng our children's clinics.
I am trying to convince parents of the fact that a child cannot see cause and effect. To say to a child: "You've been so naughty that you wont t get your Saturday penny, is wrong, for when Saturday comes and he is reminded of his misdeed and its punishment, he simply is genuinely angry and frustrated, because what happened on say— Monday is a thing of the long, long past, a thing with no connection with the present Saturday penny. He does not feel the least bit guilty, but he does feel very hateful against the depriving authority. In Summerhill we have a Danger to Life Fine of a pudding; it is applied in such cases as climbing on high roofs, using catapults, etc. It is a bad punishment because when Tommy is fined his midday pudding, his hate takes the form of swearing at the cook who has nothing to do with the fine and is the innocent means of carrying out the law of the community. The children feel that it is not a good law, but they cannot think of a better one.

The question of punishment very often arises for the first time in a home when there are two children, and the subject is of vital moment to the new type of parent. Is it possible to rear a child with self-regulation and punishment together, that is too mutually antagonistic systems? No, it cannot be done. Punishment must be done away with, and, in case this sounds like a counsel of sentimental perfection, I must make clear what I mean by punishment. If baby plays with the cat and gets scratched it is not punishment; if it plays with matches and gets burned, it is not being punished. Natural reactions do not constitute punishment, because there is no suggestion of right or wrong in them. Punishment implies the judgement of an authority, be that authority parent, teacher, police, parliament. Under self-regulation there is no authority in the home, meaning that there is no loud voice that declaims:
I say it; you must obey. In actual practice there is of course something resembling authority; this might be called protection, fore care, adult responsibility! it sometimes demands obedience but at other times gives obedience itself. Thus I can say to my daughter: "You can't bring that mud and water into our sittingroom," that is
not more of a demand by authority than is her saying to me: "Get out of the nursery, Daddy; I don't want you here," a wish that I of course obey without a word.

Akin to punishment is the parental demand that a child should not bite off more than it can chew. . . literally, for often a child's eye is greedier than its stomach and it will demand a plateful that it cannot eat. To force the child to finish what is on its plate is wrong. Good parenthood is the power of identifying oneself with a child, feeling his motives, realising his limitations, but having no ulterior motive.
So far as I have observed the self-regulated child does not need any punishment. Punishment forms a vicious ~. A child is spanked; spanking is hatred and each spanking makes his hate more and more; so his behaviour gets worse and more spanking is applied.

The result is a ill mannered, sulky, destructive little hater, so innured to punishment that without it he would feel lonely, and thus he "sins" in order to get some sort of emotion from his parents (a hate one will do when there is no love one); he is beaten, he repents... and begins again next morning. But the self-regulated child does not go through this hate cycle. He does not need to behave badly; he has no use for lying and breaking; his body has never been called filthy or wicked; he has not had occasion to rebel against authority or to fear his parents. Tantrums he will have but they will be shortlived and not tending to neurosis. My knowledge of anthropology is almost nil, but I am told that roughly there are two schools of thought about primitive man; one, that he was a savage, a killer, a wife snatcher, a brute: the other, that he was peaceful, social, kindly. The adjectives used suggests the difference between the disciplined and the self-regulated child. Children when allowed to be themselves are peaceful and social and kindly. The view held by so many psychologists, especially the Freudians, that the inner man has to be restrained, disciplined, sublimated has no meaning to those who have seen free children. The fundamental difference between the Freudian school and Reich is simply the one I am exanuning now; Reich believes that life isn't evil, that the Unconscious isn't a devil, that all individual and social evils are manmade, made by interference with the life process; I do, however, know that, since some educators and parents do not interfere with the life process, adult interference is not a fixed and final attribute of human nature.

But punishment of children comes under the heading of adult interference with life itself. Facing the question frankly and openly we have to grant that most punishing stems from the irritation of adults simply because childhood is not young adulthood; children and grownups are in many ways antagonist in their interests. Our Summerhill dining room is one big noise most of the time, so that the Staff segregate themselves for their evening meal. Children have not got our adult values of material things, and much of parental anger is on account of tools and books and what not spoiled by neglect.

Punishment, like jealousy, is very much the product of adult possessiveness. In practice the divergence of adult and youthful interest in the home can be mitigated if not solved by an honest give and take. Zoë respects my desk and shows no coinpzlsion to play about with my typewriter and papers. I respect her nursery and clear out of it when she wants me to. The problem is not so easy for a friend of mine whose boy of six wants to use his father's precision tool workshop. He has made a compromise by giving the boy some tools for himself, and I am wondering what to say to him when he complains that the boy wants to saw a chunk off the piano lid: I suppose the only answer is in the words of the popular song: "You can't do that there here," an answer that the idealistic self-regulation adherents will find either frivolous or unsatisfying.

I wish that the advocates of punishment could all see and digest the delightful French film telling the life story of a crook, how that when he was a boy he was punished for some misdeed by being forbidden to partake of the Sunday evening meal of poisoned mushrooms, how that, as he watched all the family coffins being carried out, he decided that to be good didn't pay... and lived for ever afterwards on this assumption. An immoral story with a moral, which many a punishing parent cannot see. If punishment were ever successful there might be some argument in its favour. True it can inhibit through fear, as any exsoldier can tell us, and if parents are content with children who have had all their spirit broken by fear, then let them agree that punishment succeeds. What proportion of chastised children remains castrated for life, and what proportion rebels and gets worse no one can say. In nearly fifty years of schools I have never heard a parent say: "I have beaten him and now he is a good boy." On the country I have heard, scores of times, the mournful story: We have beaten him, reasoned with him, helped him in every way, and he has got worse and worse."

That I am wasting words and space now; the only necessary thing to write is that punishment means hate writ large, and since hate and self-regulation are opposites, there will be no punishment in the new nursery.
Sex instruction should not be necessary for a self-regulated child, for the term instruction implies previous neglect of the subject. If the child's natural curiosity has been satisfied all the way by open and unemotional answers to all his questions, sex will not stand out as something that has to be specially taught. After all we do not give a child lessons on his digestive apparatus or his dietary or his excretory functions. The term sex instruction springs from the fact that sex is inhibited and made a mystery. The new State inclusion of sex instruction is the curriculum with its dangerous opportunities for encouraging sex repression by moralisings, is certainly a hopeful attempt to put sex into its place in perspective, while retaining its dread of anything emotional about the relationship of the sexes. The mere term, sex instruction, suggests a formal, awkward lesson on anatomy and physiology by a timid teacher who fears that his subject may slip over the forbidden border. To tell the whole truth about love and birth in most State schools would be risking the sack. Public opinion, as represented by the mothers, would not stand it, and I have known more than one case of irate mothers threatening dire consequences to a woman teacher who corrupted their children by her "filthy, godless obscene teachings." Such mothers, I grant, do not come into the self-regulation picture, yet later they may do, for it is the offspring of such repressed mothers that the self-regulated child of school age has to mix with.

The only difficulty about giving a free child all the knowledge about sex that he asks for is that of knowing how to make things clear. A child of four wants to know why every male horse is not a stallion, or every male sheep a ram. The answer involves concepts beyond the range of a four year old, for castration implies a process that cannot be explained in simple terms. Here each parent must make his or her own experience, remembering all the time that nothing must be done in the way of lying or evasion.

A boy of five found a condom in his father's pocket and naturally asked what it was. His father's clear and simple explanation was accepted easily without any evident emotion. I cannot see any objection in some cases to saying that the subject is too difficult and should wait. One often does this about other subjects, for example when a child asks how a motor engine works or who made God. It is obviously a case for that abused term common sense; it is better and safer to postpone an answer than to do what some foolish parents have done, to tell a child far too much, like the parent who brought her daughter to Summerhill when she was ten. "She is oriented about sex," said the mother, and not many days later I learned that the silly woman had informed the child about all the sex perversions known to sexologists.

My wife and I have never had to think twice about Zoë and her sex education. Indeed that aspect has never given us a thought. It all seemed so simple, so obvious, so charming, even if it had its awkward moments, as when she informed a spinster visitor that she, Zoë, had come because Daddy fertilised Mummy, adding with interest: "And who fertilises you ?" By the way we have found that a self-regulated child very early learns tact; Zoë could speak thus at three and a half, but at five would, as it were automatically, realise that some things must not be said to some people. I have seen a similar sophistication in other children who had not had self-regulation from the beginning. This partly answers the tiresome question: How do children who are free adapt themselves to the outside world later? And note that this kind of adaptation does tint involve repression or acceptance; it is a conscious altruistic, social act, deliberately seeking to live at peace with others by conceding something to their point of view.

Parents of a self-regulated child will be likely to avoid all the dangerous and stupid mistakes about sex education, the mistakes that connect sex with wrong and sin, butt I am not so sure if there is a danger from another quarter - the idealistic quarter. Long before there was any talk of self-regulation there were parents who taught their children that sex was sacred and spiritual, something to be treated with awe and wonder and a kind of mystical, religious reverence. Some Theosophists and their like took this line with their children. The new parent may have no temptation to follow that kind of teaching, yet may succumb to something similar, the worship of the sexual function as a newfound god. It is difficult to define, perhaps it is too vague to define; all I can sense is a sort of holiness attached to sex, a subtle change in the voice when it is mentioned; it suggests a fear of pornography .

"God, if I don't speak about sex with awe, they'll think I am one of those who think it something to make jokes about." Recently I have been somewhat perturbed to see young earnest parents use words and tones not much different from those of the old brigade that talked reverently about the parts of the body that are holy. Sex has been so long a vulgar joke that the tendency is to jump to the opposite extreme and make it the light that never was on land or sea, to make it the unmentionable, not because it is too evil but because it is too good. That attitude must surely lead to a new sex fear and repression. If the child is to have a healthy attitude to sex and a subsequent healthy love life, sex must remain on the earth:
it has in itself everything, and all attempts to enhance it by raising it to a higher power, are futile attempts to paint the lily.

This subject is important. As the religious hatred of sex slowly dies, other enemies arise. We have the sex instruction enthusiasts who show children diagrams and tell of the bees and the pollen, saying, in effect: Look, sex is just science. Nothing exciting about it, is there? This in a world full of the secondaries of sex... in film and novel and lipstick and brilliantine and all the other evasions of the essence of love. We have all been so conditioned about sex that it is almost impossible for us to see the middle, natural way; we are too pro or too antisex. To be prosex is good, but to be prosex as a protest against an anti sex. training in childhood is likely to be neurotic.

Hence the necessity of finding a sane attitude to sex, an attitude we can find only by noninterference with and approval of the natural child's acceptance of sex. If that sounds vague or difficult or impossible, I suggest that if the young parent can avoid entirely any show of shame or disgust or moral feeling, if he or she can refrain from all attempts at teaching or raising to a higher power or placating the neighbours, the sex of a baby will grow without inhibition or hate of the vile flesh, and sex will never have to be a subject of instruction or warning or anything else.

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