The Social Emergency: Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
Science
The Social Emergency: Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
Sex instruction
Whether a child asks the conventional questions or the unexpected
questions, and whether it asks questions or not, the parent ought to have
some pretty definite notion of when, what, and how to tell a child. A
child's questions about the baby should be answered truthfully; all such
replies as escape by the stork, cabbage-patch, or grocer-boy route should
be avoided. It goes without saying that children's questions should be met
seriously and even reverently, and that parents should never speak of nor
allude lightly, jokingly, or irreverently to sex relationships in the
child's presence.
A child may ask a question prematurely, or at a time when the parent finds
it impossible to answer in such a way as to make the desired impression or
to avoid the undesirable impression. The postponement should be frankly a
postponement, and the parent should answer the question at some later time
chosen by the parent and upon the parent's own motion. If the child never
affords the parent a natural opening for the first or later conversation,
the parent should make the opening by reference to the recent arrival of a
baby in the child's home, or in some neighbor's family, or even to the
arrival of kittens or chicks.
Such preliminary information should come at or near the first asking of
questions, or if no questions are asked, at any convenient time between
the ages of six and eight years, and in any case before the child goes to
school or mingles much away from home with other children. It is a mistake
to suppose that very much need be said to the young child. If the child's
normal curiosity is satisfied in a clean way from the right source, that
is sufficient. Especially should it be advised of the truth about those
facts concerning which it is liable be misinformed in its contacts with
other children. Only, parents ought to remember that their child, however
carefully brought up and protected, at any time and of its own motion, may
itself be that corrupting "other child" against which we are so sedulously
warned!
Or, again, the child when it has been duly instructed by parents may
without harmful intentions talk too freely with other children. It may do
some harm to other children in this; but what is more likely, it may
receive harm by calling out uninformed and hurtful conversation from the
other side. For this reason, a parent in talking to children should be
careful to explain that they should not talk to others. If they are
properly brought-up children, their modesty will respond, and their
trained obedience will keep faith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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