Young Love

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As with so much else in childhood, things get more complicated once kids reach the social incubator of elementary school. Nowhere near sexually mature, they nonetheless become sexually active--in their own fashion. The opposite-sex teasing and chasing that are rife on playgrounds may give teachers headaches, but they teach boys and girls a lot. The games, after all, are about pursuit and emotional arousal, two critical elements of sex. "There are a lot of erotic forms of play," says Barrie Thorne, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Gender Play: Boys and Girls in School. "It can be titillating, and it may involve sexual meaning, but it comes and goes."

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More enduring--for a while at least-- is the gender segregation that begins at this age. Boys and girls who once played in mixed groups at school begin to drift apart into single-sex camps, drawing social boundaries that will stay in place for years. In her 1986 study that is still cited today, Thorne looked at 802 elementary-school students from California and Massachusetts to determine just what goes on behind these gender fortifications and why they're established in the first place.

To no one's surprise, both groups spend a lot of time talking and thinking about the opposite sex, but they do it in very different ways. Boys experiment more with sexually explicit vocabulary and, later, sexual fantasies. Girls focus more heavily--but hardly exclusively--on romantic fantasies. The two-gender world they'll eventually re-enter will be a lot more complex than that, but for now, the boys are simply practicing being boys--albeit in a very rudimentary way--and the girls are practicing being girls. "Among the boys, for example, there's a lot of bragging talk," says Thorne. "You're supposed to be powerful and not vulnerable."

When puberty hits, the wall between the worlds begins to crumble--a bit. Surging hormones make the opposite sex irresistible, but the rapprochement happens collectively, with single-gender groups beginning to merge into co-ed social circles within which individual boys and girls can flirt and experiment. Generally, kids who pair off with a love interest and begin dating will hold onto a return ticket to the mixed-gender group. Jennifer Connolly, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, studied 174 high school students in grades nine to 11 and found that when things go awry with couples, the kids are quickly absorbed back into the co-ed circle, with the old single-sex group increasingly eclipsed. "Once the progression has started," Connolly says, "we don't see kids retreating back into only same-gender interaction."

Almost all of these early relationships are, not surprisingly, short-lived--and a good thing too. If the purpose is to pick a mate for life, you're hardly likely to find a suitable one on your very first go. What's more, even if you did get lucky, you'd almost certainly not have the emotional wherewithal to keep the relationship going. Adults often lament the love they had and lost in high school and wonder what would have happened if they had met just a few years later. But the only way to acquire the skills to conduct a lifetime relationship is to practice on ones you may destroy in the process. "Kids don't really have a sense of working to preserve a relationship," Connolly says. "Adolescence is a time for experimentation."

Sexual experimentation is a big part of that--and it's a part that's especially fraught. Pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are just two of the things that make sex perilous. There are also emotional conflicts kids bring into their early experiences with intimacy. Psychologists have long warned that children who grow up in a hostile home or one in which warmth is withheld are likelier to start having sex earlier and engage in it more frequently. In a study that will be published in March, Trish Williams, a neuropsychology fellow at Alberta Children's Hospital, studied a group of 1,959 kids ages 11 to 13 and did find a striking correlation between a volatile home and earlier sexual behavior. A few of the children had had intercourse at as young an age as 12, and while the number of sexually active kids wasn't high--just 2% of the total--the cause was clear. "Hostile parenting is highly associated with problem behavior," says Williams.

Even kids without such emotional scarring can be pretty undiscriminating in their sexual choices. Two studies conducted by sociologist Wendy Manning in 2005 and 2006 showed that while 75% of kids have their first sexual experience with a partner they're dating--a figure that may bring at least some comfort to worried parents--more than 60% will eventually have sex with someone with whom they're not in any kind of meaningful dating relationship. Hooking up--very informal sex between two people with no intent of pursuing a deeper relationship--takes this casualness even further. A 2004 study Manning worked on showed that the overwhelming majority of hookups involve alcohol use--an impairer of sexual judgment if ever there was one--and according to the work of other researchers, more than half the times kids hook up, they do not use a condom. Manning's studies suggest that hooking up prevents kids from practicing the interpersonal skills they'll need in a permanent relationship and may lead to lowered expectations of what those relationships should be like--and a greater willingness to settle for less.

For all these perils, the fact is, most people manage to shake off even such high-stakes behavior and find a satisfying life partner, and that says something about the resilience of humans as romantic creatures. In the U.S., by the time we're 18, about 80% of us have had at least one meaningful romantic relationship. As adults, up to 75% of us marry. Certainly, nature doesn't make things easy. From babyhood on, it equips us with the tools we'll need for the hardest social role we'll ever play--the role of romantic--and then chooses the moment when we're drunk on the hormones of adolescence and least confident in ourselves to push us on stage to perform. That we go on at all is a mark of our courage. That we learn the part so well is a mark of how much is at stake.