Alongside the rudimentary impulses of showing and looking, there is developed another set of trends which Nature needs to use later on, the so-called sadistic and masochistic impulses, the desire to dominate and master and even to inflict pain, and its opposite impulse which takes pleasure in yielding and submitting to mastery.  These traits, harking back to the time when the male needed to capture by force, are of course much more evident in adolescence and especially in love-making, but have their beginning in childhood, as many a mother of cruel children knows to her sorrow.  In adolescence, when sex-differentiation is much more marked, the dominating impulse is stronger in the boy and the yielding impulse in the girl; but in little children the differentiation has not yet begun.

=Gang and Chum.= At about four or five years the child leaves the infantile stage of development, with its self-love and its intense devotion to parents and their substitutes.  He begins to be especially interested in playmates of his own sex, to care more for the opinions of the gang—­or if it be a little girl, of the chum—­than for those of the parents.  The life-force is leading him on to the next step in his education, freeing him little by little from a too-hampering attachment to his family.  This does not mean that he does not love his father and mother.  It means only that some of his love is being turned toward the rest of the world, that he may be an independent, socially useful man.

This period between infancy and puberty is known as the latency period.  All interest in sex disappears, repressed by the spontaneously developing sense of shame and modesty and by the impact of education and social disapproval.  The child forgets that he was ever curious on sex-matters and lets his curiosity turn into other, more acceptable channels.

=The Mating-Time.= We are familiar with the changes that take place at puberty.  We laugh at the girl who, throwing off her tom-boy ways, suddenly wants her skirts let down and her hair done up.  We laugh at the boy who suddenly leaves off being a rowdy, and turns into a would-be dandy.  We scold because this same boy and girl who have always been so “sweet and tractable” become, almost overnight, surly and cantankerous, restive under authority and impatient of family restraint.  We should neither laugh nor scold, if we understood.  Nature is succeeding in her purpose.  She has led the young life on from self to parents, from parents to gang or chum, and now she is trying to lead it away from all its earlier attachments, to set it free for its final adventure in loving.  The process is painful, so painful that it sometimes fails of accomplishment.  In any case, the strain is tremendous, needing all the wisdom and understanding which the family has to offer.  It is no easy task for any person to free himself from the sense of dependence and protection, and the shielding love that have always been his; to weigh anchors that are holding him to the past and to start out on the voyage alone.