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 a