Implications for Prevention

      Unfortunately, it is not possible to assure every boy of growing up
in a family which contains a sister. (See the chapter titled "Parenthood
Aspirations" for a scientific technique that can allow parents to choose
in advance the genders of their future children with up to 85 percent
accuracy.) However, there are certain things which parents and
elementary school officials can do right now to provide sisterless boys
(particularly the socially isolated and withdrawn) with a viable alter-
native to the experience of having a sister.
      I would recommend the development of a new children's recrea-
tional organization to be called the "Coed Scouts". For many decades such
organizations as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, Boys Club of
America, Brownies, Campfire Girls, YMCA and YWCA, have done big
business. But these organizations have all traditionally segregated chil-
dren according to gender. I believe that this traditional practice is coun-
terproductive in our contemporary quite coeducational world. And this
is particularly true as far as socially isolated, shy and inhibited young
boys are concerned. Satisfactory adjustment in adulthood absolutely
requires an ability to get along smoothly and harmoniously with both
genders. Boys who are shy and withdrawn vis-a-vis their own gender
at the elementary school level are almost always afflicted with incipient
love-shyness. Thus there can be no question but that such boys would
benefit enormously from membership in an organization comprised of
equal numbers of girls and boys which entails weekly recreational activ-
ities, and which makes it both very easy and very pleasant for the two
genders to interact socially.
      From the time children reach the age of two, American parents
begin taking steps to encourage their children to play in gender-segregated
peer groups, and to develop friendships exclusively with individuals of
their own gender. Yet research evidence has shown that young children
do not naturally ("instinctually") gravitate towards gender-segregated
peer groups. If left entirely to their own devices a majority of children
in fact choose to play in coeducational peer groups.
      I believe that the easy availability to all children of a coeducational
peer group would represent an extremely useful preventive device for
nipping heterosexual love-shyness in the bud. The little boy who will
eventually develop into a young man so severely shy with girls that he
cannot date or marry can easily be spotted in kindergarten and in the first
grade. And inasmuch as he can be readily spotted, failure to take positive
action to stem the tide of his ever worsening love-shyness is both unnec-
essary, unethical, and immoral. The very shy man is of little use to
himself or to his society and community. Failure to take action where
it is warrented is tantamount to discarding valuable human resources.