Adolescence

by Stephen Paget

Besides, it is the accepted way of intelligent children to be inquisitive: it is their birthright to ask us any amount of questions. A child who never asks a question about sex is indeed, so far as that goes, a backward child: what we call unobservant. In some ways, this non-questioning mind is good for young children; but surely it is unnatural that the children should attain to adolescence and still be ignorant of what they are.

Whether these incurious children tend to be passionless in early adult life, I do not know; nor can I make any guess as to the proportion, in adolescence, of temperaments devoid of passion. Only, if they who are incurious during childhood do tend to be passionless in later years, that is no reason why we should admire them as children. For, in the design of our nature, and in the fabric of our nature, there is a place, and a very honourable place, for passion held under control. And they who have nothing to control are to be congratulated, because they are out of the way of temptation; but we admire, even more, those who are in the way of temptation and withstand it.

If this be true, or anywhere near true, that a measure of inquisitiveness in childhood, and a measure of passion in early adult life, are welcome signs of a sane mind in a sane body, such as Juvenal bids us pray for, then it follows that we ought to give careful regard to these inquisitive children, and wise and honest answers to their embarrassing questions.

But we grown-up folk are not agreed, nor ever shall be, what to tell them, and when to tell it. We have no set method of talking to children about sex, nor of warning older boys and girls against the miseries into which it may, if they let it, bring them. Of course, this want of agreement is not altogether our fault; we are so divided, because the children are so diverse. Their differences of temperament are reflected in our different ways of dealing with them. The fact remains, that we have no common plan, no authorised programme: and, if ever we do invent one, which we never shall, it will not suit all the children. Each of us, in this perplexity, judges for himself or herself; there is nothing else to be done.

Still, we can be agreed over some points; we can make one or two rules, and keep them before us. It is a good rule, surely, that we should prepare ourselves and arm ourselves against the shock of a sudden question. We must have our answers ready. We must rehearse, we must learn almost word for word, as it were by heart, what we will say, when the inevitable demand for facts is sprung on us. That is our bounden duty, to make up our phrases beforehand, so that we shall not be caught unawares. It is not fair to the children that we should give them stupid floundering answers, or snub them, or shut them up. They have a perfect right to a well thought out answer. That is the meaning of what Horace says, that the utmost reverence is due to them. We cannot better reverence them than by deciding, long before the question comes, how we will handle it. Think for a moment what silly things are said to children, all for want of careful self-preparation.

To this good rule we might add another—that we must never tell them a lie. We ought not to be liars, not even to small children. Take, for instance, one of the best of all opportunities for telling the truth; take the arrival of a baby brother or sister. Where did it come from? I have no patience with people who say that the angels, or the doctor, brought it. There is enough nonsense already talked about my profession without that. What business have they to lie to an honest child? Or take a more heart-searching instance. Imagine a child at Christmas-time playing with that most beautiful of all Christmas toys, a little crêche, with little figures of Mary and Joseph and the Babe lying in a manger; and the child turns round and asks you where Baby Jesus came from. What answer will you give? What harm can it do to a child, to know that children are born of their mothers? What does harm the minds of children is not our plain speaking; it is their own secret reading, gossiping, and imagining.

Now let me venture a bit further. In the kingdom of a child’s mind, it is not one set of thoughts, but two, which gradually rise to power, as the child grows to adult life. Right away from the nursery age, these two ideas are important above all others; important alike to the child and to us. One is the child’s notions about sex; the other is the child’s notions about God. Everything else wavers and shifts; we see the children change every scrap of their minds over and over again: their likes and their dislikes, their plans and their decisions, flourish and perish, and are no more than stages or phases. But these two purposes of their curiosity—the desire to know what sex is, and the desire to know what God is—these endure, and are more imperative with every added year of life.

As the children ask very absurd questions about sex, so they ask very absurd questions about God. As we are taken aback, and say foolish things to them over the one subject, so we do over the other. As we ought to prepare ourselves for the one opportunity, so we ought for the other. As we must answer properly about sex, so we must answer properly about God. It is bad enough to shut them up over sex; it is worse to shut them up over God. They are trying to get at something. They, at their end of life, are like Sir John Falstaff at his end of life—you remember the account of his death, by the hostess of the Boar’s Head Tavern:

So ’a cried out—God, God, God!—three or four times. Now I, to comfort him, bid him ’a should not think of God; I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.