Another almost equally efficacious means is untruthfulness on the part of parents in their relations with the child. There are some parents who think it not at all amiss to deceive their children. They make promises to them which they do not intend to keep. They threaten them with punishments that never materialise. They make untruthful replies to questions the children put to them. The children are not imbeciles. They note these broken promises, these empty threats, these untruthful replies. They lose faith in their parents, and sometimes it happens that their loss of faith manifests itself in a gloomy brooding, a sullen resentment against the parents. The parents, on their side, regard the sulky child as maliciously naughty and evil-minded. Not an inkling do they have of their own share in the making of the condition of which they complain. They blame only the child. Even the practice, common among parents, of telling their children "white lies" with regard to delicate matters is at times productive of sulkiness _as a symptom of nervousness due to inner mental conflict_. Almost every child is at an early age inquisitive about his origin and the manner of his coming into the world. If his questions on these subjects are evaded or answered in a fantastic way, the child's curiosity is likely to be increased rather than satisfied. In exceptional cases there may result an obsessional pondering of the evaded topic, intensified when the child discovers that his parents have deceived him. Extreme nervousness, accompanied with sullenness, is then a likely result. But, apart altogether from the possibility that nervousness and sulkiness may be caused by parental deception of this sort, the danger of losing control over their children is itself serious enough to warn parents to be straightforward in answering their children's queries regarding sex subjects. Havelock Ellis, the foremost authority on the psychology of sex, does not exaggerate when he assures us: