§ 53
The best parental environment, the one that gives the erotic its due, is that in which the child is allowed to remain a child until he is required to develop certain phases of the egoistic-social environment. The best home environment is that in which the parents are themselves, and particularly the father, emotionally, i.e. erotically, adult and not, as in so many homes, emotionally childish.
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.