The emotionally childish status, in the erotic sphere of many parents, is due at least partly to fear, which is purely an egoistic-social emotion. Love has in its pure state no such emotion as fear but the fears that are so commonly associated with the expression of love are all of egoistic-social origin. While love is properly identified with sex, there being no real expression of love that is not fundamentally a sex expression, there is every reason why love should be freed from acquired associations with fear; and if the fear which has, through puritanical views, attached to sex could be removed from sex and therefore from love, people today would be able to live a much more fully expressed life; for the inhibitions irrationally associated with sex have taken away from life an inestimable amount of health, strength and beauty. The inference from this is that the only possible time to prevent the acquirement of inhibitions is early childhood, and the only possible people to do it are the parents. The perfect love pattern will never spontaneously originate with the man of the world; but with his children it may if he will, if both parents will, practically refrain from interference. The parents know well enough, sometimes consciously but more often unconsciously, that their love pattern is a poor one—poor in conception and poor in execution. It is poor in joy and rich in misery. According to this perverted pattern they have lived their own love, and if they but pause to think, they will withhold their hands and their words from interfering with the illumination which is slowly reaching the younger generation, but which blinds the parents’ eyes to true life values. § 54 In order to be a wholesome one, the relation between the parent and child must involve a wholesome relation between the two parents.[15] You cannot prevent divorce and prostitution if you do not develop before the children’s eyes a marital pattern which will put both of these family evils out of commission. You cannot annihilate even an idea by repressing it into the unconscious. In order to obviate in the next generation the worst features of this, we must recognize them intellectually and react to them emotionally; and to be specific, in order to remove as far as possible the chances of divorce and prostitution in our own children, we must show them an environment in our own families in which the marital pattern is such that any deviation from it must be revolting to the little boy and the little girl who are now getting their first impressions of married life from their own parents. § 55 _Instinct in Humans Generally Inadequate or Misleading_ Instinctive reactions are adequate responses only in natural environments before civilization has set in. The more complicated life of modern civilization renders purely instinctive reactions more out of date than a twenty-year-old model of an automobile.