Some problems, in this connection, are difficult, and require much tact. The most difficult is death. The child soon discovers that plants and animals die. The chances are that somebody he knows will die before he is six years old. If he has at all an active mind, it occurs to him that his parents will die, and even that he will die himself. (This is more difficult to imagine.) These thoughts will produce a crop of questions, which must be answered carefully. A person whose beliefs are orthodox will have less difficulty than a person who thinks that there is no life after death. If you hold the latter view, do not say anything contrary to it; no consideration on earth justifies a parent in telling lies to his child. It is best to explain that death is a sleep from which people do not wake. This should be said without solemnity, as if it were the most ordinary thing imaginable. If the child worries about dying himself, tell him it is not likely to happen for many, many years. It would be useless, in early years, to attempt to instil a Stoic contempt for death. Do not introduce the topic, but do not avoid it when the child introduces it. Do all you can to make the child feel that there is no mystery about it. If he is a normal healthy child, these methods will suffice to keep him from brooding. At all ages, be willing to talk fully and frankly, to tell all that you believe, and to convey the impression that the subject is rather uninteresting. It is not good either for old or young to spend much time in thinking about death. Apart from special fears, children are liable to a diffused anxiety. This is generally due to too much repression by their elders, and is therefore much less common than it used to be. Perpetual nagging, prohibition of noise, constant instruction in manners, used to make childhood a period of misery. I can remember, at the age of five, being told that childhood was the happiest period of life (a blank lie, in those days). I wept inconsolably, wished I were dead, and wondered how I should endure the boredom of the years to come. It is almost inconceivable, nowadays, that any one should say such a thing to a child. The child’s life is instinctively prospective: it is always directed towards the things that will become possible later on. This is part of the stimulus to the child’s efforts. To make the child retrospective, to represent the future as worse than the past, is to sap the life of the child at its source. Yet that is what heartless sentimentalists used to do by talking to the child about the joys of childhood. Fortunately the impression of their words did not last long. At most times, I believed the grown-ups must be perfectly happy, because they had no lessons and they could eat what they liked. This belief was healthy and stimulating.