and grow fully, until they find
their true places in the master pattern of our world adventure?

Answer that question honestly. Live up to your real decision. And if
with all your heart you seek the joy of these others, your love will be
met with the high tide of love, and even out of anguish you will win
your way into the meaning and the glory of existence.

_Frances Bruce Strain_

CHAPTER NINE

_Sex Instruction in the Home_

A young woman who has won a place for herself as an artist tells the
story of her first nude drawing. She was of scarcely more than
kindergarten age when, one day before supper, her fancy produced a
sketch of her ten-year-old brother in nature's own attire. Pleased with
the result, she took it to the supper table and gave it to him--"A
picture I made of you."

Brother looked, glanced swiftly at Mother, and started to pocket the
sketch. Mother said, mother-fashion, "Let me see it," and then, after
seeing, also started to slip the picture out of sight. Father held out
his hand. "Let's have a look." Around the table the drawing passed from
hand to hand. No one praised, no one spoke, no one smiled. When one of
the younger children started to say something, he was abruptly told to
eat his supper. Heavy hung the weight of unexplained guilt over the
five-year-old artist. After the meal her mother took her quietly aside
and said, "When you draw a picture of a boy, you don't have to draw
everything!"

"It was years," the artist confessed, "before I could draw, comfortably,
a male nude."

Many of the young men and women among our readers, who are concerned
with love and marriage, have undoubtedly become aware of inner handicaps
of their own--handicaps of thought and feeling which they recognize as
their heritage from a generation of other-mindedness in regard to
matters of sex. There were silences that caused wonderings, punishments
that were not understood, prohibitions which built up timidities, over a
long zigzag trail of unrest and fear through childhood up to maturity.

We hear young people say because of their own experience, "I'll see to
it that my children don't go through what I went through." And they _do_
see to it. Mothers of school-age children, of kindergarten and
nursery-age children, mothers of babies, even mothers in their first
pregnancies, come with their questions in order that they may _start
right_.

At what age do you begin explaining life to children?

How much