I am of opinion that this is the ideal to be sought, but that there are obvious difficulties at present in the way of attaining it.

In any case, however, the mother should be in possession of a very precise vocabulary for all the bodily parts and acts which it concerns her children to know.
It is sometimes said that at this early age children should not be told, even in a simple and elementary form, the real facts of their origin but should, instead, hear a fairy-tale having in it perhaps some kind of symbolic truth.

This contention may be absolutely rejected, without thereby, in any degree, denying the important place which fairy-tales hold in the imagination of young children.

Fairy-tales have a real value to the child; they are a mental food he needs, if he is not to be spiritually starved; to deprive him of fairy-tales at this age is to do him a wrong which can never be made up at any subsequent age.

But not only are sex matters too vital even in childhood to be safely made matter for a fairy-tale, but the real facts are themselves as wonderful as any fairy-tale, and appeal to the child's imagination with as much force as a fairy-tale.
Even, however, if there were no other reasons against telling children fairy-tales of sex instead of the real facts, there is one reason which ought to be decisive with every mother who values her influence over her child.