e doctor, job,
friend, or lover to have to take any back talk. As soon as the first
signs of a candid relationship appear, they are off, bag and baggage, to
newer hunting grounds. We may suspect that what they really want is to
outrun their own personality.

This appears in their willingness to slough off even their children, in
an adolescent impatience with any barrier to an immediate desire. So
contrary is this to nature that regret follows closely their decision.
The children, however, are laden with a burden put on them by their
parents. Instead of joyful confidence, they experience a divided
affection. Driven to a choice of loyalties or caught between competing
rivals who attempt to win their love, they are thereby denied security,
the one gift every home owes a child.

Depending as he must upon his parents for this, it is a shattering
experience for him to find that the twofold support of his existence is
no longer holding together. He wants and needs not his mother or his
father, nor just his mother and his father, but his two parents
love-linked together as the one source of steadiness in a universe which
otherwise is in flux and turmoil.

The child who finds his parents have given up trying to maintain their
affectionate interdependence is hurt beyond any other hurt that can come
to him. Precociously matured by being denied that security of
encircling affection which is his right, he is forever cheated of his
childhood and therefore can never become fully mature emotionally, but
must have great gaps in what should have been the slow development of
his emotions, before they hardened into adult form.

The monogamic fellowship normally encourages the coming of the child.
Neither husband nor wife can awaken in the other the strong normal urges
that come to expression in love fellowship, without bringing forth the
desire that seems rooted in human nature for a child of their own. In
any case, when the child does enter the home, experience soon makes
plain his need of security. Where there is no monogamic commitment, he
is forced into family life that is confused, incomplete, and uncertain.
In such a situation, open as he is to first impressions, he suffers
most, and not infrequently so deeply as to carry emotional scars for
life. The friend of children recoils from the thought of any sort of
transient motherhood or fatherhood. Monogamy provides a stable home in
which each member--husband, wife and child--althoug