A tragedy of childhood—_The Awakening of Spring_, by Frank Wedekind—How we have ignored the need of the young for sexual enlightenment—The old method of silence a fatal mistake—Our fear of sex—The question of the sexual education of the child—Conflicting opinion—The twin causes of our civilisation prudery and prurience—The manner in which parents shirk and evade the natural inquiries of their children about birth and the facts of sex—The inevitable harm of this action—The early activity of the child’s intelligence—Foolish stories and lies—Stimulate instead of quiet curiosity—Sex knowledge gained from servants and vicious companions—This danger from servants greater in the case of boys—Many young boys seduced by women—The duty of the mother to instruct her children—The difficulties that hinder parents—The child and the sexual impulse—The teaching of Freud—The danger from mistakes in the early training of the child—No age too young for education to begin—Mistakes that may be made—Our unconscious teaching stronger than anything we say—The mistake of set lessons—Sex not a subject to be taught like arithmetic—What is necessary is to tell the child the truth—Its questions must be answered as soon as they are put—The importance of not arousing curiosity—The child, not the mother, to be the guide—Cases in which we must be prepared to fail—The mother cannot always help her child—Recapitulation—The real difficulty in sexual education arises from our treatment of sex as something apart from the rest of life—We are afraid—Nothing worth doing can be done until this is changed. CHAPTER XIV THE MOTHER AND THE CHILD “The child at its mother’s knee is not too young to hear from her lips the sacred facts concerning his own origin; in a few years, indeed, he will be too old, for he will have learnt those facts from a worse source, perhaps in the gutter; and instead of being beautiful to him, as they might and could be, they will be merely dirty.”—HAVELOCK ELLIS.