If, however, there is to be perfect confidence between you, the one subject which is usually kept out of speech between mothers and children must be no forbidden subject between them; you must not refuse to answer questions about the mystery of sex. If you are not the fit person to teach your child these important facts, who is? Certainly not the school-mates and servants from whom he is likely to learn them if you refuse to furnish the information. Usually it is sufficient simply to answer the child's honest questions honestly; but any mother who finds herself unable to cope with this simple matter in this simple spirit, will find help in Margaret Morley's "Song of Life," in the Wood-Allen Publications, and the books of the Rev. Sylvanus Stall.[[B]]
In respect to these matters more than in respect to others, but also in respect to all matters, children often do not know that they are doing wrong, even when it it very difficult for parents to believe that they do not intend wrong-doing. As we have seen from our analysis of truthfulness, the child may very often lie without a qualm of conscience, and he may still more readily break the unwritten rules of courtesy, asking abrupt and even cruel questions of strangers, and haul the family skeleton out of its closet at critical moments. Such things cannot be wholly guarded against, even by the exercise of the utmost wisdom, but the habit of reasoning things out for himself is the greatest help a child can have.
Righteousness
The formation of the bent of the child's nature as a whole is a matter of unconscious education, but as he grows in the power to reason, conscious education must direct his mental activity. It is not enough for him, as it is not enough for any grown person, to do the best that he knows; he must learn to know the best. The word righteousness itself means right-wiseness, i.e., right knowingness.
To quote Froebel again, "In order, therefore, to impart true, genuine firmness to the natural will-activity of the boy, all the activities of the boy, his entire will should proceed from and have reference to the development, cultivation, and representation of the internal. Instruction in example and in words, which later on become precept and example, furnishes the means for this. Neither example alone, nor words will do; not example alone, for it is particular and special, and the word is needed to give the particular individual example universal applicability; not words alone, for example is needed to interpret and explain the word, which is general, spiritual, and of many meanings.
"But instruction and example alone and in themselves are not sufficient; they must meet a good pure heart and this is the outcome of proper educational influences in childhood."
Moral Precocity
Lest these directions should seem to demand an almost superhuman degree of control and wisdom on the part of the mother, remember that moral precocity is as much to be guarded against a mental precocity. Remember that you are neither required to be a perfect mother nor to rear a perfect child. As Spencer remarks, a perfect child in this imperfect world would be sadly out of joint with the times, would indeed be a martyr. If your basic principles are right and if your child has before him the daily and hourly spectacle of a mother who is trying to conform herself to high standards, he will grow as fast as it is safe for him to grow. Spencer says: "Our higher moral faculties like our higher intellectual ones, are comparatively complex. As a consequence they are both comparatively late in their evolution, and with the one as with the other, a very early activity produced by stimulation will be at the expense of the future character. Hence the not uncommon fact that those who during childhood were instanced as models of juvenile goodness, by and by undergo some disastrous and seemingly inexplicable change, and end by being not above but below par; while relatively exemplary men are often the issue of a childhood not so promising.
"Be content, therefore, with moderate measures and moderate results, constantly bearing in mind the fact that the higher morality, like the higher intelligence, must be reached by a slow growth; and you will then have more patience with those imperfections of nature which your child hourly displays. You will be less prone to constant scolding, and threatening, and forbidding, by which many parents induce a chronic irritation, in a foolish hope that they will thus make their children what they should be."