Is it immoral to have sex in front of your children?

[Marat]

Children are exploited and abused in countless ways by adults, but it is important to distinguish gross from trivial exploitation. Many parents insist that their children outperform everyone else in school, not because this is good for the children, but just because the parents' ego requires it. Some parents make their children earn money by working so that the parents can be lazy or wasteful with their own incomes; other parents force their children to endure psychiatrically-damaging religious inculcation because this satisfies the parents' unexamined superstitious beliefs, and the parents don't consider it worth their time or effort to ask whether those beliefs are valid before subjecting their children to that baneful influence. Almost all of these exploitations and abuses of children by their parents are tolerated by society, though some might be mildly criticized though still left within the parents' discretion. In Yoder v. Wisconsin the U.S. Supreme Court decided that if parents wanted to bring their children up to be dumb as bricks in order to fulfill the demands of the parents' own religious superstitions, then that was within the parents' religious freedom right. Was the parents' exercise of their religious freedom right in that case more or less harmful to their children than having sex in front of the children would have been? If I had been one of the children in that case, I would have infinitely preferred being exposed to the unnerving image of my parents having sex rather than to have been brought up ignorant.

[Mr Skeptic]

If I had been one of the children in that case, I would have infinitely preferred being exposed to the unnerving image of my parents having sex rather than to have been brought up ignorant.

 

Doubtful. You wouldn't know what you were missing out on. That is, of course, the nasty thing about ignorance -- that you don't know about it. In fact, ignorance would probably make you feel more confident about the fullness of your knowledge:

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/10626367

Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

 

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

[ajb]

One could also go back in history of western societies. As mentioned, separate bedrooms (or separate rooms for that matter) were not that common. It would be or interest to see, how they managed it then.

 

Right, indeed.

 

Any historians here want to comment?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

A member who is unable to comment on this topic (postcount limit), Gallstones, has sent me a link to this:

 

http://www.ipce.info...dSexuality.html

 

There are societies, and the United States is not one of them, in which no effort or only limited effort is made to conceal parental sexual encounters from children. Among the Melanesian Islanders where a certain amount of parental privacy is considered desirable, if a child becomes too curious and bold it is told to mind its own business and is instructed not to look. (Brecher and Brecher, 1966, p. 188). But among the Alorese, by the age of five children are informed on details of the reproductive act. Members of the Pukapukan household sleep in the same room and although parents may wait until the children are asleep, there are opportunities for youngsters to observe adult sexual activity and sexual matters are talked about. Lesu children are free to observe adult coitus with the exception that they are not to watch their own mothers having coitus. On Ponape children are given instruction in coitus from the fourth or fifth year. Trukese children receive no formal education but they learn by watching adults at night and by asking their elders about sexual matters. (Ford and Beach, 1951, p. 188-189).