I have enumerated the names of these little books because they are frequently issued in a semi-private manner, and are seldom easy to procure or to hear of.  The propagation of such books seems to be felt to be almost a disgraceful action, only to be performed by stealth.  And such a feeling seems not unnatural when we see, as in the case of the author of Almost Fourteen, that a nominally civilized country, instead of loading with honors a man who has worked for its moral and physical welfare, seeks so far as it can to ruin him.

I may add that while it would usually be very helpful to a mother to be acquainted with a few of the booklets I have named, she would do well, in actually talking to her children, to rely mainly on her own knowledge and inspiration.

The sexual education which it is the mother’s duty and privilege to initiate during her child’s early years cannot and ought not to be technical.  It is not of the nature of formal instruction but is a private and intimate initiation.  No doubt the mother must herself be taught.[24] But the education she needs is mainly an education in love and insight.  The actual facts which she requires to use at this early stage are very simple.  Her main task is to make clear the child’s own intimate relations to herself and to show that all young things have a similar intimate relation to their mothers; in generalizing on this point the egg is the simplest and most fundamental type to explain the origin of the individual life, for the idea of the egg—­in its widest sense as the seed—­not only has its truth for the human creature but may be applied throughout the animal and vegetable world.  In this explanation the child’s physical relationship to his father is not necessarily at first involved; it may be left to a further stage or until the child’s questions lead up to it.

Apart from his interest in his origin, the child is also interested in his sexual, or as they seem to him exclusively, his excretory organs, and in those of other people, his sisters and parents.  On these points, at this age, his mother may simply and naturally satisfy his simple and natural curiosity, calling things by precise names, whether the names used are common or uncommon being a matter in regard to which she may exercise her judgment and taste.  In this manner the mother will, indirectly, be able to safeguard her child at the outset against the prudish and prurient notions alike which he will encounter later.  She will also without unnatural stress be able to lead the child into a reverential attitude towards his own organs and so exert an influence against any undesirable tampering with them.  In talking with him about the origin of life and about his own body and functions, in however elementary a fashion, she will have initiated him both in sexual knowledge and in sexual hygiene.