Teach them that before they can understand and help others, they must know themselves. Begin with their earliest instinctive questionings to answer truthfully, and glorify the thoughts that nature has implanted in every human heart, and that unless properly understood will become a snare and temptation to them. Many girls who have gone astray, or in some measure have become victims of their ignorance, have said to me in their remorse, “Oh, doctor, if my mother had only taught me these things, I should not have made the mistakes I have made. Why do mothers keep their girls in such ignorance?”
And many a mother, who has grown grey with the weight of care and years, after listening to a talk on maternal responsibilities, has exclaimed, “If I had only known these things while training my children, what a difference it would have made with my boys and girls, and how much of sorrow and regret I could have spared them all these years. How much less of regret should I have had.”
I like to think that in great measure, the mother is responsible for what her children know and don’t know. Ah, but you say, how can a mother be responsible for teaching her children aright when she has not been so taught herself? Doesn’t this very question prove my statement? Because the mothers behind you have shirked their responsibility, have you a right to shirk yours? Remember what we have already quoted, “What we need most is a generation of educated mothers.” And by this word “educated” is not meant “college trained” alone, but thoughtful, earnest, wide-awake, self-cultured women as well, who have at heart the highest good of themselves as well as those who come after them; and who are willing to give time and careful painstaking thought and research to the care of the home and to the mental, moral and physical training of their children. To such mothers every question of the little ones comes as the divine right exercised by the individual child, and as such receives proper attention and reply.
Never does such a mother turn her child away with the rebuke or fretful rejoinder, that she has no time for such questions. For what is a mother’s time given but to guide the feet of her babies into true paths; to be the answer book for all their puzzling problems? A true woman never compels her children to go elsewhere for the answers to questions which she herself should give. In answering be so truthful that they may never, even in thought, question your word. Blessed child of a more blessed mother, was the little girl, who when a mate questioned the truthfulness of a certain statement, excitedly replied, while her eyes flashed, “It is so, for my mamma said it was; and if my mamma said it was so, it is so if it isn’t so.”
When shall I begin to teach my children those things which pertain to their being and well-being, many mothers ask; and I would reply, just as soon as they begin to question. Not always will it be wise to answer their questions fully; but you may always, and should answer them as far as best, and then say, “That is all you can understand now, but as you grow older mamma will tell you more about it. Always come to me when you want to know about these things, for God gave you your mamma purposely to teach you in the right way, and who ought to know as well as a mother what her children should know?” I am often asked, “Isn’t it unsafe to tell children all that they want to know? will they not talk of it when and where they should not?” No, not if you teach them aright. If you do not tell them, some one else will, and often in a way which you should blush to know about. Unless you answer them frankly and truthfully concerning these pertinent questions of their being, the entire realm of sex, of nativity, of fatherhood and motherhood, which should be among the most sacred things of their knowledge, will be associated in their minds with sin, darkness and unholiness.
One needs to think long, earnestly and prayerfully along these lines, before these lessons can be taught in all their sweetness and purity. We need to go patiently back and divest them of all their coarseness and sin, with which wrong teaching, or no teaching at all, has clothed them, and then, dressing them in their legitimate garments of whiteness and purity, tell them to our girls and boys, so that it will be no longer necessary to say to our young men and women, “Know Thyself” for all shall know themselves, from the least to the greatest, and all that “self” stands for.
At the mother’s knee is the true primary school for these great questions to be learned, and happy the mother who can take her children through all the higher grades, until their education in these things is completed.
Every child is an animated interrogation point, and they have a right to be, for so they learn. Meet them with loving frankness and you will never need confess that you have lost the confidence of your children. They will turn to you as steel to a magnet, attracted by this loving bond of sympathy and truthfulness. “Mamma, where did I come from?” opens the way, dear mother, for the most beautiful truth you can teach your child, next to its new birth.
“But I don’t know how to teach it,” you say; then tell your little one, “that’s a long question, darling, and mamma must think out the simplest way to answer it, and in a few days I will tell you all about it.” Then away to your own room and down on your knees before God, until the subject is divested of every shadow of sin and darkness, and then in this pure light think for your life, and if you cannot formulate your thoughts as you would, hurry at your first leisure to the wisest woman you know in these things and talk with her about it. It is so simple after all, and if told in a matter-of-fact way, with no hesitation or blushing, it will be so received by your child.
The simplest way is to teach them that the egg from which the little bird or downy chicken comes, is laid by the mamma bird or hen, and then she sits upon it to keep it warm, while it grows in the shell until it gets too large to stay there longer, when it bursts the bonds and comes out a downy, active little bird or chicken. “In much the same way, my darling, you grew; only instead of your being able to see the little egg, which was your beginning, it was kept warm and snug in a little room in mamma’s body, while you grew from a tiny speck of an egg, so small that you could not see it with the naked eye, into a fat, beautiful, rollicking baby; then you came out through a little door made purposely for it, and was nestled in mamma’s bosom forever after. I think it must be you are kept hidden away while you grow, because mammas are so busy, you might be forgotten if you were in any other nest, and you would get cold and die. As it is, mamma carries you wherever she goes, and whatever she is doing; and you are always nestled snugly and warmly in the little cradle God made purposely for you, and where mamma can feel you moving about as you grow, for you are right under her heart.”