Conclusion
Presented here were five cases of baby-sitters who became involved in sexual affairs with mature adults. This is certainly not intended as a condemnation of the practice of baby-sitting. Nor is it an effort in expose of its evils, if any such exist.
Most baby-sitting jobs are carried out competently by serious, thoughtful young girls whose major peril is fat or a mild stomachache from raiding the host's refrigerator.
The young girls involved in each of these cases were a baby-sitter only coincidentally. Baby-sitting provided them with the opportunity to indulge their own individual propensity for sexual activity. It is highly probable that, even without baby-sitting jobs, these young girls would have discovered or manufactured the opportunity for their sexual indulgence.
Their age bracket is the essential controlling factor rather than the baby-sitting. Each had just emerged from what Sigmund Freud calls "the period of latency"-from about age seven to puberty-when interest or curiosity about their sex organs is basically dormant. At puberty major physiological changes occur, more noticeably in girls than boys. In girls this is characterized by the emergence of breasts, a rounding out of legs and hips and, most noticeable to each individual, the beginning of menstruation, with a concomitant titillation of the sex organism.
These changes in her physical makeup all tend to focus interest in and curiosity about her sex organ and her own sex potential. This concentration of interest and curiosity may well lead to experimentation-as it did in each of the cases cited-which, in turn, can lead to disastrous results for the young girl, including pregnancy, venereal disease and a general weakening of moral fibre. In some extreme cases-experimentation with the wrong man leading to rape-it can mean death. Suicide is not uncommon at this age level, should a girl find herself in, to her, an intolerable situation-pregnancy, venereal disease or the disgrace of discovery.
There is no single positive solution to the problem. Nature plays this biological trick on young girls who, in our system of social structure and economics, cannot find a normal, legal outlet for their budding desires. Only through thoughtful, sympathetic understanding by parents can a girl be given the necessary advice and help that this difficult period requires.
As Bernhardt says in Natural Sex Techniques, Actually we should not need "sex education" as we usually think of it. Knowledge of sex should be allowed to be integrated to the growth of the child as simply as other bodily functions.
This would call for considerable knowledge and a broad, sympathetic understanding by the parents, particularly the mother-who is the primary source of advice and counsel for a growing child.
So, in a sense, this book is both a warning and an appeal to parents to provide such sympathetic understanding for their children, if they wish to avoid the calamities, such as these case histories, which could overtake a young girl.