My children when they were little were fascinated with a book which their mother used to read to them, called Mother Nature and Her Helpers. Each chapter or lesson was made up of interesting information and ideas suggested by the pictures.  At the head of the first chapter was a picture of a mother sitting by a cradle with every surrounding and circumstance of humble, happy home life.  Succeeding chapters were upon the cradle and the home of plants and animals.  Ovaries of plants and nests of birds and squirrels were all set forth in terms of the child’s experience of home life, home-building, home-protecting, and feeding the baby.  Doubtless the design of the author was to lead the child to an understanding and appreciation of its own home life and love by showing it home life in its origins and elements.  But an equally important implication lay in the fact that the child was brought into its intimacy with plant and animal life along the angle of its own human experience and of its own home ideals.  After such an introduction to the homes of plants and animals, whenever it should seem best to apprise the child of the details of plant and animal reproduction, the additional facts would instantly find their places in close relation to facts already familiar and already related to his highest childish affections and ideals.

For the basis of sexual instruction for a child should be the difference, not the similarity between man and animals.  If the basis is made the similarity between man and animals, the child, as time goes on and as its own sexual life increasingly awakens, may tend to imitate animals, may attempt to justify the natural and unrestrained promiscuousness of its own instincts, may justify unrestrained sexual life in the name of nature as against the alleged artificialities of civilization.  The basis must be human, not animal; moral, not biological.

Biology goes far to explain humanity, but the interpretation is found in the spiritual affections, experiences, and implications of family life.  The family life of animals is constituted of animal instinct freely followed.  The family life of man would be ruined by the free following of animal instinct.  There is a distinct danger in all so-called sex instruction of children which makes plant and animal life the norm.

The definite and clean instruction of children in the physical facts of reproduction may rightly and wisely begin with the simple facts, anatomical and functional, of plants and animals; but it is important that a true philosophy lie back of this instruction.  Man is not only a higher order of mammalia; he is a worshiper of God and capable of practicing his presence.  And from this base our instruction to children, drawn from the anatomical and functional life of plants and animals, must always subserve the moral, the spiritual superiority of man and the human family.