TEACHING PHASES: FOR CHILDREN
_By William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr._
My children when they were little were fascinated with a book which their
mother used to read to them, called _Mother Nature and Her Helpers._ Each
chapter or lesson was made up of interesting information and ideas
suggested by the pictures. At the head of the first chapter was a picture
of a mother sitting by a cradle with every surrounding and circumstance of
humble, happy home life. Succeeding chapters were upon the cradle and the
home of plants and animals. Ovaries of plants and nests of birds and
squirrels were all set forth in terms of the child's experience of home
life, home-building, home-protecting, and feeding the baby. Doubtless the
design of the author was to lead the child to an understanding and
appreciation of its own home life and love by showing it home life in its
origins and elements. But an equally important implication lay in the
fact that the child was brought into its intimacy with plant and animal
life along the angle of its own human experience and of its own home
ideals. After such an introduction to the homes of plants and animals,
whenever it should seem best to apprise the child of the details of plant
and animal reproduction, the additional facts would instantly find their
places in close relation to facts already familiar and already related to
his highest childish affections and ideals.
For the basis of sexual instruction for a child should be the difference,
not the similarity between man and animals. If the basis is made the
similarity between man and animals, the child, as time goes on and as its
own sexual life increasingly awakens, may tend to imitate animals, may
attempt to justify the natural and unrestrained promiscuousness of its own
instincts, may justify unrestrained sexual life in the name of nature as
against the alleged artificialities of civilization. The basis must be
human, not animal; moral, not biological.
Biology goes far to explain humanity, but the interpretation is found in
the spiritual affections, experiences, and implications of family life.
The family life of animals is constituted of animal instinct freely
followed. The family life of man would be ruined by the free following of
animal instinct. There is a distinct danger in all so-called sex
instruction of children which makes plant and animal life the norm.
The definite and clean instruction of children in the physical facts of
reproduction may rightly and wisely begin with the simple facts,
anatomical and functional, of plants and animals; but it is important that
a true philosophy lie back of this instruction. Man is not only a higher
order of mammalia; he is a worshiper of God and capable of practicing his
presence. And from this base our instruction to children, drawn from the
anatomical and functional life of plants and animals, must always subserve
the moral, the spiritual superiority of man and the human family.
The little child will understand and even idealize plant and animal life
if he learns of plant and animal life first in human terms. His moral
development is menaced if this process is reversed so that a
counter-tendency is set up,--a tendency to interpret the human functions
in animal terms. It is better for the child to humanize animal
relationships than to animalize human relationships,--and this can be
achieved only through a constant observance of the human basis in the
sexual as indeed in all phases of a child's education. The little book
which I mentioned at the beginning does just this,--it introduces the
child to the home life of animals, it interprets animal life in ideal
terms. It lays a basis for relating later information of sex functions to
the home life of plants and animals. At the proper time in a child's
development, he is prepared to place a true and intelligent value upon the
differences between the home life of animals and the home life of human
beings, and to justify intelligently and with full consent of mind and
sanction of conscience the differences of sexual practice as between
plants and animals on the one hand and human beings on the other. He is
prepared to see that it is enough for the sex life of plants and animals
that it be physically and biologically normal. It is not enough for the
true and ideal family life of man that the sex relation should be
biologically normal. It must be morally normal--normal, that is, to the
highest human interests.
The more concrete and detailed problems of method would not be serious if
every child's mind were a blank or even if its instincts were analogous to
normal animals. But neither is the case, and the problem of method and
means of instruction is therefore amazingly complicated. If the sex life
of a child were analogous to that of normal animals, it would not awaken
at all until puberty. And if the child's mind were a blank on sex matters,
it need only be kept from the invasion of wrong ideas from outside. But
the sex life of a child begins long before puberty,--both physically and
mentally. In the child, the physical signs are more or less detached from
the mental signs,--at this or that phase of a child's life, the one or the
other may have precedence; but the two are subtly interrelated, and tend
to contribute to each other. In the human being a sex life that is normal,
both biologically and morally, is an achievement; not a thing which would
take care of itself if the child were left alone and merely kept ignorant
of the abnormal. The human child is born abnormal,--that is to say, with
latent possibilities of sexual abnormality, physical and mental,--and this
by virtue of the mere fact that he is not only with animals a creature of
instinct, but with humanity a being with ideas.
This statement is doubtless oftener true of the sex life of boy children
than of girl children; but it is a fact and a very important fact, and it
lies at the bottom of the problem when we come to consider the details of
instructional method. If it were not for these facts, it would make no
difference who imparted sex information to the child, so the facts were
accurately told; and it would make no difference what facts were given, or
at what age the child received them, if no lies were conveyed. But because
the child's physical and mental sex life awakens early, and because every
child has latent tendencies to abnormality and latent responsiveness to
the abnormal, it is of critical importance that we decide who shall teach
the individual child, when the child shall be informed, and what the child
shall be told. It is of critical importance because, if the instruction
comes wrongly, we may, even with good intentions, contribute to the very
abnormality that we wish to forefend or overcome. With some children we
could perhaps safely take chances so far as the self-awakening sex life
is concerned if we did not know that it is impossible, without more harm
than good to keep the child from such perfectly normal relations with
other children as almost certainly will expose it to disastrous
misinformation a suggestion.
Whatever ought to be said of the importance of the home tradition and
ideals and the general physical and moral regimen of the child (and these
are of supreme importance), the facts of the last two paragraphs lay the
ground for this general statement: that in the case of a child whose moral
and sexual environment has been bad and perverting, proper sex instruction
cannot make matters worse, whereas in the best families much harm may
arise from the lack of such instruction.
If any information is imparted to the child at all, the first instruction
should properly come from one or other of the child's parents. It is
sometimes the case that opportunity for the first information is presented
when the child asks questions. And the supposed question of the child is,
"Where did the baby come from?" Our course would be much smoother if
every child asked its mother or father this question, or if every child
began with this particular question, or if every child asked any question
at all. Sometimes the child asks the nurse this question; sometimes the
child is an only child or for some other reason this question never occurs
to it; sometimes the child's first question pertains to some curiosity
about its own navel, or "where eggs come from," or "why the hen makes
them," or "how they get into the hen," or what is meant by "half shepherd
and half St. Bernard." But children do not ask the questions that the
books say they ask, and ready-made answers do not always apply.
Whether a child asks the conventional questions or the unexpected
questions, and whether it asks questions or not, the parent ought to have
some pretty definite notion of when, what, and how to tell a child. A
child's questions about the baby should be answered truthfully; all such
replies as escape by the stork, cabbage-patch, or grocer-boy route should
be avoided. It goes without saying that children's questions should be met
seriously and even reverently, and that parents should never speak of nor
allude lightly, jokingly, or irreverently to sex relationships in the
child's presence.
A child may ask a question prematurely, or at a time when the parent finds
it impossible to answer in such a way as to make the desired impression or
to avoid the undesirable impression. The postponement should be frankly a
postponement, and the parent should answer the question at some later time
chosen by the parent and upon the parent's own motion. If the child never
affords the parent a natural opening for the first or later conversation,
the parent should make the opening by reference to the recent arrival of a
baby in the child's home, or in some neighbor's family, or even to the
arrival of kittens or chicks.
Such preliminary information should come at or near the first asking of
questions, or if no questions are asked, at any convenient time between
the ages of six and eight years, and in any case before the child goes to
school or mingles much away from home with other children. It is a mistake
to suppose that very much need be said to the young child. If the child's
normal curiosity is satisfied in a clean way from the right source, that
is sufficient. Especially should it be advised of the truth about those
facts concerning which it is liable be misinformed in its contacts with
other children. Only, parents ought to remember that their child, however
carefully brought up and protected, at any time and of its own motion, may
itself be that corrupting "other child" against which we are so sedulously
warned!
Or, again, the child when it has been duly instructed by parents may
without harmful intentions talk too freely with other children. It may do
some harm to other children in this; but what is more likely, it may
receive harm by calling out uninformed and hurtful conversation from the
other side. For this reason, a parent in talking to children should be
careful to explain that they should not talk to others. If they are
properly brought-up children, their modesty will respond, and their
trained obedience will keep faith.
This is the place to try to make clear the importance of such secrecy and
confidence between parents and child. There is a secrecy which adds a
glamour of pleasurable naughtiness, leading straight to prudery and
pruriency with all their consequences. Such secrecy is the sort that
develops when parents do take the child into their confidence. Such
harmful secrecy is not to be confounded with the confidence between parent
and child. In opposing the harmful kind of secrecy, there are those who
very wrongly, as I believe, object to any secrecy; who say, "All things
are clean; why should any difference whatever be made between the lungs or
the stomach, and the sex organs; it is often the very making of any
distinction that causes and helps cause all the trouble." Now the case
against all secrecy would be valid if the premises of the argument were
sound. Roughly speaking, lungs are lungs, and stomachs are stomachs, but
the sex organs and their impulses, reflexes, and irradiations are
connected with the subtlest complexes of mind and affections, inextricably
connected with everything human, with further irradiations into the entire
social body.
By all that makes it important to prevent the private and mutual secrecies
of children, by so much and ten times more is it important to establish
confidential secrecy between parent and child. For in so doing, you not
only prevent the undesirable secrecy, but you build normally on modesty;
you lay foundations for a true sense of shame, disgust, and disgrace; and
in doing so, set up one of the strong defenses against perversions and
prurient allurement and seduction.
Prudery should be made impossible and true modesty conserved by proper
secrecy in sex matters, and back of that by the proper attitude,
conversation, and practice in the child's familiar domestic functions.
Prudery and modesty must not be confounded; for by as much as we condemn
the one, ought we to value the other.
Up to the time, then, that a child goes to school, everything has probably
been done that can be done so far as its instruction is concerned, (1) if
the child has been kept as far as possible from foul suggestions from
others; (2) if the child has had its questions honestly answered or
temporarily though unevasively postponed; (3) if the child knows from its
parents' lips that it came into the world from its mother's body, first
growing there "beneath its mother's heart" until it was strong enough to
be born; and that the mother would never have wished to have her child
grow in her body had it not been that there was a strong man who would
care for both mother and little child with great love and tenderness; that
there has to be a father to love the mother and child, and that,
therefore, mother and child must love the father, and the child must love
both father and mother, and that this love is what makes the home; and (4)
if in the process of imparting information, confidence has been
established and modesty conserved.
Anyone who has ever seen a group of six- to ten-year-old boys and girls
stand side by side and gaze with rapt but natural wonder and delight at a
bureau drawer or chest full of the beautiful little garments waiting and
ready for an expected child can never doubt the wisdom of a child's
knowing from the start some better version of the story than any of the
evasive temporizings of the conventional parent.
What shall the parent do who has never spoken of these things to his child
until now the child is ten, eleven, or twelve years of age, and especially
if the parent has given the child one of these evasive answers in reply to
its innocent questions? It may be said in passing that if the parent has
thus evasively answered the child's first questions, he will never be
bothered in all probability with any more questions. For the best way to
set up the barrier is to answer questions falsely; and one way to
establish confidence and to facilitate further communication is to answer
truthfully.
The child may know more or less than you think it knows. The parent does
not know what a ten- or twelve-year-old child knows or does not know.
Again, a parent does not know at what time or in what way or to what
extent the child's sexual life and impulse have already awakened. And the
parent does not know to what extent the child may know "what ain't so." It
is a mistake in most cases for the parent to try to find answers to these
questions by questioning the child. For just as a parent may start wrong
by deceiving the child, so the child may start wrong by deceiving the
parent, and even a pretty good child, especially after it has been
deceived by the parent, is likely to follow the same cue when it is
questioned by the parent. The parent should not tempt the child to such a
misstep.
Again, the parent, whether mother or father, should never try to open the
conversation or resume it at a time when the boy or girl is likely to be
interrupted or distracted or is eager at the moment to be somewhere else
and doing something else. The mother and daughter quietly sewing together,
or the father and son off for a walk, or sitting on a log, or lying on the
grass, are ready for a confidential talk.
If the boy or girl was deceived in response to its first questions, the
father or mother may retract in some such way as this: "Do you remember,
Molly, that when you asked me where your baby brother came from, I told
you the doctor made us a present? Well, that's the way fathers and mothers
answer little children, just as we told you that Christmas presents came
from Santa Claus. You came to know that papa and mamma are Santa Claus and
that Santa Claus is a fairy story--and so you have probably already
learned how the baby came. The baby really grows in the mother's body--did
you know that? Do you know how long it takes for it to grow there? No? It
takes nine months. Before you were born, you were growing inside of your
mother's body. The blood from your mother's body flowed into your body;
in this way your body grew. When the baby comes out of its mother's body,
it does not hurt the baby, but it hurts the mother. It was so when you
were born, but your mother was so happy to think she was to have a baby
and to feel it growing inside her body that she did not think much about
the pain. If your mother is ever a little tired and cross, you must
remember that she loves you beyond anything that pain can measure and that
she deserves your tenderest care."
At this or some other fitting time, the father or mother may give the
child some further intimation of the process by which the child comes to
grow in the mother's body, and in some such way as follows: "Some one may
have told you how babies come to grow in their mothers' bodies. But most
people are ignorant about these things. I think I can explain it to you a
little if you will look for a moment at this flower that I have in my
hand, because the coming of a baby in the mother's body is in some ways
like the coming of the seed in the body of the flower. You have probably
learned at school in your nature-study work that these are--what? Yes,
the petals. And these stamens, and this is the pistil. Do you notice the
powder on the end of the stamen? That is called pollen. If you put that
powder under magnifying glass, each grain will look like a grain of wheat.
Now, do you notice that the pistil spreads out here at the base like a
vase with a narrow neck and big bowl? I am going to cut the thick part
open. Do you notice those tiny things like seeds? Yes, those are seeds,
but they would not grow just by themselves. A grain of that pollen gets on
to the end of the pistil (sometimes the wind, sometimes a bee puts it
there), and immediately it begins to send a long thread from itself right
down the center of the pistil, and this thread carries at the front the
heart of the pollen grain, and when it reaches the tiny seed the two go
together and the heart of the pollen joins with the heart of the seed and
then it is a true seed and can grow,--and can grow into another plant that
can have flowers that can have seeds, and so on almost forever. No one
fully understands this very wonderful fact. We only know that it is a
fact,--that the heart of a seed from a father flower had to join to the
heart of a seed of a mother flower before a true seed that can grow into
a plant is born. And we only know that something like this is true about
father and mother animals, and that something like this is true of our own
human father and mother."
So much to show how the parent may "break in," for that is often the
crucial thing. After the start is made, details may be found in the books
provided for just this purpose.[40] Indeed, after beginning, it is
sometimes better to put the right book into the boy's hands; or better yet
to read the book with the child. Especially is the latter course
preferable if the book seems at any point unwise,--and there are few books
prepared for children which are not at some point or other unwise. Only,
in all this process of definite instruction in which analogies from the
life of plants and animals are used, the instructor must make sure that
the illustrations are thought of as analogies for the anatomy and biology
only, and guards must be reserved, implicitly and explicitly, against the
child's supposing that everything in plants and animals is normal for
human beings. All that the child learns of reproduction of plants and
animals should be related to the home and affectional life even of
animals, and the analogy between animals and man should stop far short of
that to which in all the animal world there is no real analogy--the life
and meaning of the higher order of human family life.
If the proper person to teach the child is the parent and if the parent
does not know how, the obvious thing to do is to call the parents together
and to try to teach them how. Besides meetings for parents (fathers and
mothers together), excellent results have come from meetings for fathers
and sons addressed by a man, and from meetings for mothers and daughters
addressed by a woman.
The following details as to arrangement and conducting of parents'
meetings may be of value. For such meetings in the public school, the
consent of the local school board must be obtained. This ought not to be
granted if those seeking permission are either cranks or quacks. The Viavi
people are said to be obtaining such permission for use of schoolhouses
under the specious plea of social hygiene. Others, well intentioned but
with extreme purist ideas and unwise methods, occasionally volunteer their
services. The school authorities should be cautious. But when those who
apply are intelligent and honest and above question as to their standing
and judgment, school boards ought not only to consent, but to support and
coöperate. A grudging consent, mixed with indifference, finds its way by
capillary attraction to the school principals and teachers and constitutes
a real hindrance. When the consent of the school authorities has been
obtained, the next step is the selection and training of speakers and the
notification or the parents. Where permitted, the notices or invitations
should be sent out by the school in which the meeting is to be held, by
mail, sealed, to every home in the district whence pupils in that school
come. This should be done even if the local society has to pay the
postage. If the school authorities will not or cannot do this, then cards
of invitation should be sent home through the pupils. In either case, the
invitation should be so worded as to do no harm to the children who may
read it.
Parents' meetings may be addressed by two speakers, a physician and a
layman. The two speakers should get to the schoolhouse in time to see that
the speaker's desk and chair are not on a high platform too far from the
little group of parents. The chair and table should be brought down to the
floor close to the seats and the parents brought forward. The principal of
the school should introduce the layman, accompanying the physician, to be
chairman of the evening. The chairman should make a brief address, as
outlined in the syllabus provided by the Committee on Education of the
Society, introducing the physician. The physician should make a brief
address as outlined in the syllabus, and then, after proper explanations,
the physician should resume his chair. Both physician and layman, seated,
should engage in a dialogue, in which the layman should endeavor with all
the intelligence, sympathy, and skill at his command to put himself in the
place of the humblest parent in the room and ask such questions of the
physician as such a parent might ask or ought to ask. For example:--
Layman, "Doctor, I have a little boy four years old. When ought I to
talk to him about sex matters?"
Physician, "When the child asks questions."
Layman, "What do you mean by that?"
Physician, "Well,--suppose the child asks where the baby came from?"
Layman, "What do you say if the child asks that?"
Physician, "I would tell it that the baby grows in its mother's body,"
etc.
Layman, "I have a little boy eight years old to whom I have never
talked about these things. What do you advise?"
Physician, "I would take the first opportunity, some time when the boy
is not likely to be interrupted. Refer to some newly arrived or
expected baby and tell him frankly where the baby comes from."
Layman, "But Doctor, I have already told him that a stork brought the
baby."
Physician, "Then tell him you told him that as a fairy story like the
Santa Claus story, but that now he is old enough to know the truth.
Then tell him the truth."
Layman, "But I find it hard to talk about these things and I am afraid
my child might ask me questions I could not answer."
Physician, "There are books, a list of which will be handed you, which
you can read, and parts or all of which you can read to your child."
Layman, "What if my child asks me a question I can't answer."
Physician, "Don't dodge or evade. If you must postpone an answer, do
so frankly with a promise that when you can you will answer, or that
you will put him in the way of getting good information by reading or
otherwise."
This conversation should be extended to apply to adolescent boys and girls
and to young men and women. Enough has been given to show the nature and
spirit of the dialogue. The people's interest never flags. The layman must
ask all the strategic questions, and he must keep at it until he gets
answers in simple, understandable terms. If the physician uses "function"
or "coöordinate" or "puberty" or "adolescence" or other academic terms,
the layman must force simple words at every turn; and in any attempts to
describe what a parent should say to a child, the layman should take care
that a child's comprehension is reached and that the parent is guided as,
to vocabulary. Both speakers should lift the level of their counsels above
that of mere physical prudence; they should explain and duly emphasize the
moral issue.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] A classified bibliography is provided at the end of this volume.