greater
poise for yourself.

Before we leave the subject of the biological aspects of sex teaching, a
word concerning preparation for maturing. In general, experience shows
that explanations of the outward phenomena which mark the onset of
adolescence--menstruation and seminal emissions--should be made to both
boys and girls long before they are likely to occur--at ten, surely, or
even earlier if questions arise. Many children become acquainted with
them through older children at school and receive not too pleasant
impressions. In pre-adolescence the whole matter can be presented so
that it is accepted objectively and impersonally. With both boys and
girls there is often a feeling of prideful expectancy, and some day you
may expect to hear a joyful announcement, "Mother, oh, Mother--it's
come!"

At this point I should like nothing better than to leave our teaching to
do its own good work for the children. But in the minds of parents there
is an ever recurring anxiety--the use to which the children will put
this new knowledge. Ideas are not, we know, soporific. They tend to
translate themselves into action. Will the children talk? And won't they
start experimenting? The matter of "talking outside" is rapidly taking
care of itself through the general adoption of sex-education teaching by
most young parents. Nobody runs around telling what everyone knows. It
has become a commonplace. Occasionally one may caution young school-age
children not to say much to the other children, but if they do in their
enthusiasm or in a casual moment, no great harm is done. Certainly one
does not punish for it.

Children who are overweighted either with too much sex knowledge or with
fears and cautions are usually the neighborhood offenders. One father
recently told me that he didn't dare give his son the usual terms for
his reproductive organs because he would go straight out and shout them
from the housetops. As a matter of fact, that was just what the boy was
doing with the substitute terms. Realizing that a wooden gun is as good
as a real one when it frightens everybody, the child used his substitute
terms to shock his father and the world at large. In reality, there
_are_ no substitute terms. Everyone knows them for what they are, and in
addition as confessions of weak courage.

Modern sex teaching is filling the great need of other days in its
adoption of correct terms for the functions of the body and its organs
as they apply to