her and up to the place
where the baby is to grow."

To many this will seem a very cold, stark, and inadequate presentation
of a deeply psychic experience. In these first explanations of human
reproduction, pregnancy, birth, fertilization, and mating, I believe it
would be out of place to try to bring about any considerable awareness
of either the sensuous or the emotional involvements in the act of
procreation. That knowledge comes later. But the feeling which all our
first teaching conveys is important. It is especially important in
relation to the three major experiences, pregnancy, birth, and mating,
about which so much resistance has centered in the past. Our teaching
should carry with it a natural acquiescence to Nature's own plan, rather
than any outward expression of our own mental philosophy toward it. Most
children, given a knowledge of the basic facts of reproduction, usually
grant them a ready and happy acceptance.

Those parents who met their children's questions and other expressions
of interest as they arose, and also those who were not able to, seek, as
junior-high-school days approach, the assurance that their children are
ready for that wider experience. "I don't know how much she knows--she
doesn't say anything, and she doesn't want me to." Certainly the last
thing one does is to probe or question. If you have reason to feel that
something must be done, you may go about it in several ways:

1. You may take the initiative by introducing into family conversation
some topic of current interest which will promote questions--incubator
babies, the Dionne quintuplets, child marriages, the recent
thirteen-year-old father.

2. Pets are marvelous biological laboratories--white mice, rabbits,
puppies, snakes, turtles. Of course there must be mates and matings.

3. Well-chosen books, not only sex-education books, but simple biologies
and Nature books as well, open up thought and discussion.

4. Visits to the zoological gardens, to natural-history museums and art
galleries, are valuable teaching experiences.

If the subject is not marred by too much realism or sentiment or
moralizing, older children will respond with interest to a discussion of
human reproduction. Even when a child is approachable, if your own
emotional balance is insecure, it is, perhaps, well to work out these
objective and tangible activities with the children, as with a fellow
student. The joint interest is a way of achieving in the end