In the later infantile period, the child, besides wanting to exhibit his own body, shows marked interest in looking at the bodies of others, and marked curiosity on sex-questions in general. He particularly wants to know "where babies come from." If his questions are unfortunately met by embarrassment or laughing evasion, or by obvious lying about the stork or the doctor or the angels, his curiosity is only whetted, and he comes to the very natural conclusion that all matters of sex are sinful, disgusting, and indecent, and to be investigated only on the sly. This conception cannot be brought into harmony with the unconscious mental processes arising from his race-instincts nor with his instinctive sense that "whatever is is right." The resulting conflict in some four-year-old children is surprisingly intense. Astonished indeed would many parents be if they knew what was going on inside the heads of their "innocent" little children; not "bad" things, but pathetic things which a little candor would have avoided. 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.