Miss Garrett, one of the most successful teachers of sex and
reproduction, tells the story of some city boys who had been taught
these things, and who had decided, in their club, to raise rabbits.
The selection of a father rabbit and a mother rabbit was too
important a matter to leave to a committee, so the whole club went
in a body to attend to these preliminaries. The care the boys took
of the mother rabbit during her pregnancy was in itself an
education. Later Miss Garrett saw the leader of the club--who had
been the "toughest" of the gang--with another boy on the street,
while a pregnant woman was trying to cross with a heavy basket.
"Come on, Jim," he called, "let's help her across." This same boy
but a few months back would have ridiculed the poor woman in her
plight.

Every child can learn what Jim and his companion learned. He can
learn to respect motherhood and to be considerate of mothers as
mothers. It is very interesting to see the great differences in this
regard between families in which the fact of motherhood is a secret,
and those in which it is a matter of common knowledge. I was
visiting a friend whose six-year-old boy knew that another baby was
expected, and he was very careful to avoid annoying his mother. Of
course, the attitude of the other members of the family also had an
influence upon the conduct of this child. But another mother
complained that she received very little consideration during
pregnancy from her oldest son--a boy of fourteen--although all the
other members of the family were as careful and as thoughtful as
could be desired. This second mother, however, had allowed her older
boys to grow up on the assumption that sex and reproduction had
nothing to do with life, or, at any rate, were of no concern to them