Proverbs innumerable and daily experience have familiarized every one with the idea that the citizen is moulded and his or her essential characteristics determined in childhood, and as a result of childhood’s training. The most profoundly operative of all his qualities is his potential sex attitude, because it is that which determines his experience of sex and marriage, which colours his thoughts towards women throughout his life, which inclines his mind nobly towards his own racial actions or which leaves him weak and frivolous in his attitude towards the greatest profundities of life.
Children, otherwise brought up with every care and forethought, surrounded by all that love and money can give them, are too generally left, without their mother’s guidance or their father’s wisdom, to discover the great facts of life partly by instinct and partly from the vulgar talk of servants or soiled children a little older than themselves. Worse even than this takes place, because most generally in this connection they not only do not hear the truth from their mother’s lips, but they learn from her their most influential and earliest lesson in lying.
The curious thing about the particularly pernicious form of lying which deals with racial things in the presence of childhood is that we have the habit of thinking it quite innocent. Indeed we have even acquired the habit of thinking it one of the charming form of lies; hence when we are in a reforming mood, seeking for the origins of the wrongs we are trying to put right, we pass these “charming” lies by, thinking them harmless.
Where did each one of us first learn to lie?
Nearly every one who is now grown up got his (or her) first lesson in lying at his mother’s knee. To the little child, in his narrow but ever widening world, the mother is the supreme ruler, the all-wise provider of food, clothes, pleasures and pains. The mother (the child instinctively feels) must be also the source of wisdom.
Question after question about himself and his surroundings springs up in the baby mind. Mother is asked them all, and for every one she has some sort of an answer. Then inevitably, at three or four, or five years old comes the question:—“Mother, where did you find me?”—“Mother, how was I born?”
Then comes the lie.
The child is told about the doctor bringing him in a bag—or a stork flying in through the window—or the accidental finding under the gooseberry bush.
All children delight in fairy tales, but instinctively they know very well the difference between a fairy tale which is recounted to them as a story in answer to their mood of “make-believe” and a fiction which is putting them off when they are seeking the truth.
If the mother who feels herself too ignorant or too self-conscious to answer the truth to the child’s questions takes him on her knee and deliberately tells him in a “make-believe” mood a fairy tale, the child will then not feel that the mother has lied. He will feel, however, that he must ask some one else for the truth.