Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the FutureStopes, Marie Carmichael
Science
Radiant Motherhood: A Book for Those Who are Creating the Future
Stopes, Marie Carmichael
Mothers
The child who has been brought up in a home of love and tenderness and
beauty will find this a thrilling and beautiful thought, like a little
boy whom I know personally, and to whom this fact was told in this way.
Solemnly, and without a word, he went away from his mother into the
middle of the room and stood deep in thought for several minutes. Then
he turned, looked round, and rushed across the room, threw himself into
his mother’s lap, his arms round her neck and cried: “Oh, Mummy, Mummy,
then I was right inside you.”
For days afterwards he was filled with a rapturous joy, and at times
used to leave his play and come to his mother and put his arms round
her neck, saying: “Oh, Mummy, that is why I love you so.”
Whatever form the child’s feeling may take, the opportunity should not
be allowed to pass without a little addition to the conversation, and
the mother should say:--
“And you see that is why you must never talk to any one but Daddy
and Mummy, or God through your prayers, about such things. As God
and Daddy and Mummy, and no one else made your little body, so
every thing you want to know about it, all the questions you want
to ask, you should ask of them and no one else. You see, you are
different from any other child in the world, and as Daddy and
Mummy helped to make you, only they know your works. So whatever it
is you want to know, or whatever it is that goes wrong, it is Mummy
and Daddy who can tell you about it.”
Once may be sufficient for a child to be told the greater truths
it desires to know, but it is seldom that the child will leave so
wonderful a subject entirely alone after first learning of it, and many
portions of the beautiful facts will have to be repeated in a variety
of forms, or in just the same words, as are repeated again and again
the beloved fairy tales. The child, however, will be quick to know
the difference between this story and fairy tales, for children have
an instinct for truth at a much earlier age than grown-ups generally
remember.
A further series of questions will probably arise when the child is
about twelve.
The essential difficulties of these later questions, and the shamefaced
self-consciousness so usual between parent and child will never arise
if from the first the deep truths have been known to the child.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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