Wherever youth congregate, this subject crops up, and those who talk most freely to the others are just those with the most distorted and vicious ideas, whose discourse abounds in obscene detail and ribald jest. Your child must learn either from ignorant, unclean minds, or be taught in a clean, sacred way, which will rob sex of secrecy and obscenity; _learn he will_; if you will not teach your child, his pet rabbit will.
When children ask awkward questions, say quietly that such matters are not discussed with children, but promise to tell them all about it when they are ten years old; delay no longer, for most children learn self-abuse between ten and twelve.
Self-abuse is a bad habit, and no more a "sin" than is biting the nails. Unfortunately, people with no other qualification than a desire to do good, wrongly harp on the "sin" of it and draw lurid pictures of physical and mental wreck as the end of such "sinners", ignorant that if all masturbators went mad the world would be one huge asylum.
Exaggeration never pays in teaching youth. Tell the truth, which is bad enough without adding "white lies" with an eye to effect.
Coitus causes slight prostration, Nature's device to remind man to keep sexual intercourse within bounds, for while in moderation it is harmless, in excess it causes great prostration. _Exactly the same applies to self-abuse_, for, paradoxical as it seems, the real harm is done by the _fear_ of the supposed harm.
The masturbator first suffers from the knowledge he is indulging in a pleasure he knows would be forbidden, and from fear of being found out; later he learns from friends, quack advertisements, or well-meaning books that self-abuse is a most deadly practice, and thereupon a tremendous struggle occurs between desire and fear, each act ending in an agony of remorse and dread of future consequences, which struggle does a thousand-fold more harm than the loss of a little semen.
The ill-effects of these mental struggles disappear after marriage, which means greater indulgence, but indulgence free from mental stress. In neuropaths, these mental struggles are the worst things that could occur, for they tend to make permanent the states we are trying to cure.