If the child has a brother or sister born when he is old enough to ask questions about it, say after the age of three, tell him that the child grew in his mother’s body, and tell him that he grew in the same way. Let him see his mother suckling the child, and be told that the same thing happened to him. All this, like everything else connected with sex, must be told without solemnity, in a purely scientific spirit. The child must not be talked to about “the mysterious and sacred functions of motherhood”; the whole thing must be utterly matter-of-fact. If no addition to the family occurs when the child is old enough to ask questions about it, the subject is likely to arise out of being told “that happened before you were born”. I find my boy still hardly able to grasp that there was a time when he did not exist; if I talk to him about the building of the Pyramids or some such topic, he always wants to know what he was doing then, and is merely puzzled when he is told that he did not exist. Sooner or later he will want to know what “being born” means, and then we shall tell him. The share of the father in generation is less likely to come up naturally in answer to questions, unless the child lives on a farm. But it is very important that the child should know of this first from parents or teacher, not from children whom bad education has made nasty. I remember vividly being told all about it by another boy when I was twelve years old; the whole thing was treated in a ribald spirit, as a topic for obscene jokes. That was the normal experience of boys in my generation. It followed naturally that the vast majority continued through life to think sex comic and nasty, with the result that they could not respect a woman with whom they had intercourse, even though she were the mother of their children. Parents pursued a cowardly policy of trusting to luck, although fathers must have remembered how they gained their first knowledge. How it can have been supposed that such a system helped sanity or sound morals, I cannot imagine. Sex must be treated from the first as natural, delightful and decent. To do otherwise is to poison the relations of men and women, parents and children. Sex is at its best between a father and mother who love each other and their children. It is far better that children should first know of sex in the relations of their parents than that they should derive their first impressions from ribaldry. It is particularly bad that they should discover sex between their parents as a guilty secret which has been concealed from them.