And such a feeling seems not unnatural when we see, as in the case of the author of _Almost Fourteen_, that a nominally civilized country, instead of loading with honors a man who has worked for its moral and physical welfare, seeks so far as it can to ruin him.
I may add that while it would usually be very helpful to a mother to be acquainted with a few of the booklets I have named, she would do well, in actually talking to her children, to rely mainly on her own knowledge and inspiration.
The sexual education which it is the mother's duty and privilege to initiate during her child's early years cannot and ought not to be technical.

It is not of the nature of formal instruction but is a private and intimate initiation.

No doubt the mother must herself be taught.[24] But the education she needs is mainly an education in love and insight.
The actual facts which she requires to use at this early stage are very simple.

Her main task is to make clear the child's own intimate relations to herself and to show that all young things have a similar intimate relation to their mothers; in generalizing on this point the egg is the simplest and most fundamental type to explain the origin of the individual life, for the idea of the egg--in its widest sense as the seed--not only has its truth for the human creature but may be applied throughout the animal and vegetable world.

In this explanation the child's physical relationship to his father is not necessarily at first involved; it may be left to a further stage or until the child's questions lead up to it.
Apart from his interest in his origin, the child is also interested in his sexual, or as they seem to him exclusively, his excretory organs, and in those of other people, his sisters and parents.