Self Knowledge and Guide to Sex Instruction: Vital Facts of Life for All AgesShannon, Thomas W. (Thomas Washington)
Philosophy
Self Knowledge and Guide to Sex Instruction: Vital Facts of Life for All Ages
Shannon, Thomas W. (Thomas Washington)
Sex; Sexual health
All along the almost socially inaccessible rock-bound shores of this sea
of human passion, the churches and philanthropists are building and
maintaining rescue and foundling homes at an outlay of millions in
money. They are not, and cannot, rescue one in twenty. The foundling
homes are crowded to a dangerous, unsanitary overflowing with
illegitimate children, whose mothers are out in the rapids of vice, or
entirely lost in the maelstrom of immorality. Too long have the churches
been satisfied with snatching, here and there, a piece of human wreckage
from the waves of vice, instead of erecting a lighthouse system of
properly warning and informing the childhood of the land.
=The new way.=--We have seen the results of the old way of dealing with
children in matters of sex. Is there a new and better way? We shall see.
“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” The new and
better way is to tell the truth to the child.
=How shall a child be told.=--One day when our little girls were four and
six, wife said, “Husband, I am in trouble about our little girls. They
are asking where they were before they were born and how they got into
this world. How am I to answer them?” “Tell them the truth,” was my
reply. “But, they are not old enough to be told the whole truth,” was
her reply. We talked over the problem and arrived at the following
solution of the problem: Since I had been a teacher of biology for
years, and it was presumed that I was familiar with the stories of life
among the plants and animals, it was agreed that I should at once tell
them a nice little story about God’s beautiful plan of bringing all the
little plants into the world. Six months later I was to tell them the
story of life about the oysters and fish. Every six months to a year I
was to tell them a more advanced story. As they were girls, wife
reserved the right to tell them the last story to be told when they were
nine and ten.
These stories were all told in the order given. Our girls are now twelve
and fourteen. We have never had an occasion to regret that we have
followed this natural method of instructing them. They seem to have no
morbid curiosity about questions of sex. They look upon the facts as
being natural, sacred and pure. Wife and I can approach them on these
subjects without embarrassment to them or us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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