you.  When, however, he does tell you something which happened in the school play-ground or otherwise out of the range of your knowledge, be careful not to moralize over it.  Make yourself as agreeable a secret-keeper as his best friend of his own age; let your moralizing be so rare that it is effective for that very reason.  If the occasion needs moral reflection at all—­and that seldom happens—­the wise way is to lead the child to do his own reflecting; to arrive at his own conclusions, and if you must lead him, by all means do so as invisibly as possible.  For the most part it is safe to take the confessions lightly, and well to keep your own mind young by looking at things from the boy’s point of view.

[Sidenote:  The Subject of Sex]

If, however, there is to be perfect confidence between you, the one subject which is usually kept out of speech between mothers and children must be no forbidden subject between them; you must not refuse to answer questions about the mystery of sex.  If you are not the fit person to teach your child these important facts, who is?  Certainly not the school-mates and servants from whom he is likely to learn them if you refuse to furnish the information.  Usually it is sufficient simply to answer the child’s honest questions honestly; but any mother who finds herself unable to cope with this simple matter in this simple spirit, will find help in Margaret Morley’s “Song of Life,” in the Wood-Allen Publications, and the books of the Rev. Sylvanus Stall.[B]

In respect to these matters more than in respect to others, but also in respect to all matters, children often do not know that they are doing wrong, even when it it very difficult for parents to believe that they do not intend wrong-doing.  As we have seen from our analysis of truthfulness, the child may very often lie without a qualm of conscience, and he may still more readily break the unwritten rules of courtesy, asking abrupt and even cruel questions of strangers, and haul the family skeleton out of its closet at critical moments.  Such things cannot be wholly guarded against, even by the exercise of the utmost wisdom, but the habit of reasoning things out for himself is the greatest help a child can have.

[Sidenote:  Righteousness]

The formation of the bent of the child’s nature as a whole is a matter of unconscious education, but as he grows in the power to reason, conscious education must direct his mental activity.  It is not enough for him, as it is not enough for any grown person, to do the best that he knows; he must learn to know the best.  The word righteousness itself means right-wiseness, i.e., right knowingness.