There is no self-consciousness, no personal shamefacedness, about a tiny child. It accepts the great truths of the universe in the grand manner.
If the mother has never failed her child, has always given it what she could of wisdom, she will retain his trust and his confidence. When he gets a little older she can teach him to go to no one else for talk about the intimacies of life, which the child is quick to realize are not discussed openly amongst strangers.
Then, later on, when personal consciousness and shyness begin, there need not be the acute constraint and tension of the shame-faced elder speaking to a mind awakening to itself. Deep in the child’s consciousness, deeper even than its conscious memory goes, the true big facts are planted.
To tell a child of twelve or fourteen the truth is, for most parents, an impossibly difficult matter. The reason for this is that it is then too late for essentials; only details are then suitable or necessary.
Little children spend much of their early time in exploring themselves and their immediate surroundings—all is mysterious, all at first unknown. Their own feet and hands, their powers of locomotion and of throwing some object to a distance, the curls of their own hair, the pain they encounter in their bodies when explorations bring them in contact with sharp angles: all are equally mysterious, together forming a wonder-world. And babies are very young indeed when they explore with all the rest of their bodies, the rudiments of those of their racial organs with which they can acquaint themselves. In my opinion, the attitude of a man or woman through life is largely determined by the attitude adopted by the mother towards the racial organs BEFORE the child was old enough consciously to remember any instruction that was imparted.
Advice is often given in these more enlightened days to instruct your boy or girl in his racial power or duties when he or she is ten or twelve years old. This to many seems very young, and they hesitate and defer it till they are older and “can understand better.” In my opinion, this is already eight or ten years too late.
The child’s first instruction in its attitude towards its sex organs, its first account of the generation of human beings, should be given when it is two or three years old; given with other instruction, of which it is still too young to comprehend more than part, but which it is nevertheless old enough to comprehend in part. Very simple instruction given reverently at suitable opportunities at that early age will impress itself upon the very texture of the child’s mind, before the time of actual memories, so that from the very first possible beginnings its tendencies are in the direction of truth and reverent understanding.
A child so tiny will usually not remember one word of what was said to it, but the effects on his outlook will be deep. For at that early age, children are meditatively absorbing and being impressed by the psychological states and feelings of their instructors and companions, and if, in these very earliest months, the mother or guardian makes the mistake of treating ribaldly the tiny organs or of speaking lightly in the child’s presence, or of directly lying to the child about these facts, that child receives a mental warp and injury which nothing can ever eradicate entirely, which may in later years through bitter and befouling experiences be lived down as an old scar that has healed, but which will have permanently injured it.
I hold this to be a profound truth, and one which it is urgent that humanity should realize. I trust that my view will establish itself on every hand. If that were my way, I could easily write a whole volume on this theme, and coin a polysyllabic terminology in which to mould and harden thought on the subject. But I prefer that a few simple words should slip like vital seed into the hearts of mothers, and that they may mould the race.