Kiss her baby's or child's mouth. This practice remains common in some families. In the program Sans rendez-vous on Europe 1, Catherine Blanc, sexologist and psychiatrist, answers the question of an auditor who is asking questions about the decency of this type of hug.
Virginie's question
"Why do many parents kiss their children or babies on the mouth? Isn't that very unhealthy?"
Catherine Blanc's response
"It is extremely common and you have to understand why. Why do many of us kiss our children on the mouth? Simply because an infant, when he is in contact with you, it goes through the mouth, because he is fed. His first area of contact with the world is by mouth. His curiosity is by mouth. He sees an ant, he takes it, he puts it in your mouth. You put it on your knees, he sees a glass or a colored thing that he is going to grab, he puts it in his mouth. So when you want to approach him and you stretch your face towards him to kiss him on the cheek, anyway will turn his butcher towards your mouth because it will go where the place of contact is made. You stretch your lips to reach his forehead or his cheek, stretch his mouth to come to meet what you are stretching yourself- even.
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So is it rather natural for a baby?
It is absolutely natural and has no sexual overtones. So in fact the notion of "unhealthy" would reside in the parent's erotic desire which would put a sexual consonance on it. Or who would not respect the time when, for the child, it becomes sexual. And therein lies the difference. Otherwise, we are not in this scenario.
Why do adults want to kiss their child?
From a psychological point of view, we want to eat our children. We are also getting closer to this area where the saliva is dried, where it smells of dried milk. There is a particular odor, that of the skin of our babies, which is an important olfactory imprint and a report to the bond. And there are all these stories also of microbiota which is not only transmitted by the vagina at the moment of birth, but also with all that we contain of microbes and the mouth is an area extremely rich in microbes, good and bad, and therefore there is certainly a high quality exchange that is done intuitively on this side.
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From what age should you stop?
From the moment the child begins to position himself sexually, that is to say around two and a half years, three years, it is important to move on to something else. That does not mean that we arrive with a clear split, but the child will start to eroticize things. He will begin to position himself according to how mom is with dad, how dad is with mom and according to all the codes that he has perceived of what makes the relationship of the couple erotic. At that moment, we start to say: 'No, now you are a grown-up, it will be for your lover or your lover.' That doesn't mean it's unhealthy if you haven't stopped dead, that's not the issue. We always have the happiness of sharing things with the child, just like the child with the parent. You just have to help him quietly to go to his erotic world. Of course, he will continue to play the lover, but it must be said: 'There, that's another story.'
Is there a difference in attitude to adopt whether one is a father or a mother?
We are absolutely all on an equal footing. And it shows the received ideas that we have. As if when a man is in action with something that could be compared to the carnal or the sexual, he is a pervert. When a mother is always a white goose ... No no and no, a mother can be as perverse as a man. Let’s stop excessively and always negatively sexualizing men or de-sexualizing women, which implies that we do not see what could be just as perverse on the part of women. "