A Child’s Wonder of Life, 1930 - Ursula Wise addresses the young child's questions about birth and death

April 23, 1930 in The Nursery World

A Child’s Wonder of Life 

How to answer your child’s questions about birth and death

A week or two ago I promised “A.E.G.” and “E.M.M.” to take up again the points of their letters on the subject of children’s questions as to “where babies come from,” and I should like to go into the problem more fully now. 

It cannot be denied that the problem of how best to deal with little children’s questions on these matters is one that demands a good deal of honest thought. It cannot be settled off-hand by anyone. The difficulties that my correspondents and the letters in “Over the Teacups” have raised are perfectly genuine ones, and have to be frankly faced from the outset. No one can offer simple ready-made advice which clears away all future difficulties and makes everything quite easy and straightforward. After all, we are in contact here with some of the most intimate aspects of human relationships, ones that have always been fraught with the most significant emotions, and the deepest moral and personal issues. It is very hard for us to be as calm and objective when the child touches upon these things as when he asks about engines or birds or butterflies. It is a great help if we can be equally calm and dispassionate; but not easy for the ordinary parent to be so. The trained biologist can look upon birth and marriage, life and death in human beings as objectively as upon any other facts of the science of life- when he is dealing with them asscientific questions. But I have known even trained biologists, with a great store of knowledge at their command, feel embarrassed and hardly know what to reply on the spot when their own children asked for information about their own origin. So that we must not pretend there aren’t any difficulties, or that one or two easy instructions to parents will sweep them away all together. 

            The one thing that has to be remembered, however, is that the child’s difficulties are even greater than the parents. His questions are not a matter of idle curiosity, nor of pure desire for knowledge as such. They spring from deep ponderings about his relationship to his parents and his brothers and sisters, and the relationship of his parents to each other; and from a groping and searching after some meaning in what he dimly senses of his own history and growth, his own past and future.
He sees around him men and women, old and young, big children and little. He sees new babies arrive, or hears of them in other families. where did they come from? How did they begin? Will they grow up too? What is growing up? What is “having” a baby? What does it feel like? Here is a mother, loving and caring tenderly for someone who was not there before - does she love the newcomer better than him? There were brothers and sisters before him – will there be some after him to displace him from mother’s lap and arms? And will he himself ever have this wonderful possession, a little baby of his own? How does one get such marvellous things? And so the child ponders on youth and age, on his own birth and growth. (I have a large number of recorded observations of such questions from both boys and girls).

            How strange it would indeed be if an intelligent observant child did not think about the drama of human life in this way! He would have to be blind and deaf and stupid not to do so. Or (as, alas! does happen only too often) to be locked up in solitary and fruitful musings by shyness and fear.

            What happens in the child’s mind if he asks his questions trustingly and gets no answer, an evasive answer, or an answer that he will sooner or later (and it is usually sooner rather than later) find out to be untrue?

            If he gets no answer, or an evasive one, he is lost and bewildered by the sense that his grown-up friends either don’t know the most important things that he wants to understand, or (and this is the more probable) that they won’t tell him. And if they won’t tell him, why won’t they? It can only be that there is something wrong and shameful about the knowledge they withhold. And, indeed, the voice and tone of expression of mother when she told him to “hush” and “not to ask such things,” or turned away and talked of something else, did suggest that there was something dark and terrible about it. Then that means that behind this great mysterious pageant of youth and age, behind the love of mother and father, behind even mother’s love for the child himself, is something shameful and hidden, too shameful and hidden to be spoken of. What can it be? And in this way the springs of life and love may be poisoned for the child. What could be more destructive of goodness and happiness than to be led to believe that one’s own very existence was rooted in shameful mystery? How infinitely preferable to be helped to understand that babies take their life from the mutual affection of father and mother, and are at first shielded and nourished within mother’s own body!

            Of the evil effects of actual untruths I spoke in my earlier reply. But how dreadful for the child to discover, not merely that mother would not help him to understand, but that she would rather let herself tell a lie to him than answer his groping questions! How terrible the truth must be if mother feels she must lie about it. How much truth or love is there left in which one can really believe and trust?

            These difficulties of the little child – all of them only too real, as my own observations and those of many other people show- are surely much more serious and far-reaching than any temporary embarrassment that can come to us. It is the foundation of the child’s confidence in us as true helpers and honest friends that is at stake. It is worth a little trouble on our part to find the best way of answering and worth a little courage and facing any momentary possibility or social embarrassment among our grown-up friends.