TELLING CHILDREN.
Sir,-I think that M. R. Kent in her article on "Telling Children about Sex" forgot that body and soul are indistinguishable to the child mind. Perhaps when nine out of 10 children ask where a baby comes from the physical truth is called for but in the tenth it might be cruelty to give it. The soul of a child who looks on his baby brother or sister as something wonderful, angelic, and other-worldly (and there are many) would be starved and even shocked by .- a physical explanation. Surely the tenth
child is as entitled to his Wordsworthian truth as the other nine are entitled to their physical one, I should not be happy to lay down the same rules as to how and when sex instruction should be given to different members of my own family, and I should not trust all the child-psycholo-gists, hygienists and educationists in the world to form a safe scheme for schools where the children are of mixed sexes, mixed sects, mixed races, and mixed propensities. ' Your correspondent should wait another eight or nine years before advocating expert sex-instruction and then, especially if peace is in the land and economic conditions are fair, she will be charmed and surprised by the crystalclear minds and sex-normality of Sonia and Iris, while in another 20 years she will be wondering why all this fuss
about. sex anyway.-
OUT OF THE
EVERYWHERE
(Dunedin),
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 189, 5 February 1943, Page 3
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238TELLING CHILDREN. New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 189, 5 February 1943, Page 3
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