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Love is the Foundation
Speaking your child’s primary love language does not mean he or she will not rebel later. It does mean your child will know you love him, and that can bring him security and hope; it can help you to rear your child to responsible adulthood. Love is the foundation.
Only the child who feels genuinely loved and cared for can do her best.
We need to fill our children’s emotional tanks with unconditional love—a full love that accepts and affirms a child for who he is, not for what he does.
Most parents love their children and also want their children to feel loved, but few know how to adequately convey that feeling. Here are five ways children (indeed, all people) speak and understand emotional love:
- Physical Touch
- Words of Affirmation
- Quality Time
- Gifts
- Acts of Service
A child’s emotional tank must be filled before any effective training or discipline can take place. A child with a full love tank can respond to parental guidance without resentment.
Remind yourself that if you do your part as a parent and love them, despite their childish behavior, they will mature and give up their childish ways. Further, their development and behavior is as much your responsibility as it is theirs.
A universal need of children is for security and safety. A child has a need for healthy self-esteem or an appropriate sense of self-worth.
A child needs to develop relational skills so that she will treat all persons as having equal value and will be able to build friendships through a balanced flow of giving and receiving. An important aspect of relational skill is the ability to relate properly to authority.
A great deal of research indicates that the emotional foundation of life is laid in the first 18 months of life, particularly in the mother/child relationship.
Children need to reach appropriate emotional levels of maturity before they are able to learn effectively at their age level.
As children grow, they are extremely sensitive to the emotional state of their parents. If you have had a terrible day and you’re down and discouraged when you return home, you don’t feel especially loving. But you can behave in a loving way because behavior is simple. They know when you don’t feel loving and yet they experience your love behaviorally.
Your children will sense how you feel about them by how you behave toward them. Behavioral expressions of love can be divided into physical touch, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and words of affirmation.
If your child is under age five, don’t expect to figure out his primary love language. You can’t. His love language is rarely clearly seen. You will want to show them love in all the languages and then teach them how to use these for themselves.
One mark of a mature adult is the ability to give and receive appreciation through all the love languages. Few adults are able to do this; most of them give or receive love in one or two ways.
Love Language #1: Physical Touch
Hugs and kisses are the most common way of speaking this love language.
A dad tosses his year-old son in the air. He spins his seven-year-old daughter round and round, and she laughs wildly. A mom reads a story with her three-year-old on her lap.
Even when they are busy, parents can often gently touch a child on the back, arms, or shoulder.
Infants & Toddlers
Research studies have come to the same conclusion: Babies who are held, hugged, and kissed develop a healthier emotional life than those who are left for long periods of time without physical contact.
As a baby grows and becomes more active, the need for touch does not lessen. Hugs and kisses, wrestling on the floor, riding piggyback, and other playful loving touches are vital to the child’s emotional development.
School-Aged Children
When your child begins school, he still has a desperate need for physical touch. All children need physical contact throughout their childhood and adolescence.
Boys tend to be responsive to more vigorous contact such as wrestling, jostling, playful hitting, bear hugs, give-me-fives, and the like.
When you are playing games together in the backyard, you are combining both quality time and physical touch. A favorite kind of physical touch for many parents is to hold a child while reading a story.
Approaching Adolescence
During the preadolescent stage, girls have a particular need for expressions of love from their fathers—which seems to reach a zenith around the age of eleven.
Teenagers
A teenage girl needs the hugs and kisses of her father; and if he withdraws, she will likely seek physical touch from another male and often in an unwholesome manner.
Unless a girl initiates a hug in public, it is well to refrain. But at home, you can take the initiative.
You are a role model for your children. You can tell if they are following your example by watching how they use physical touch. It is wonderful to see your children using this love language effectively in relating to others.
When your child’s primary love language is physical touch…
A tender hug communicates love to any child, but it shouts love to these children. Conversely, if you use physical touch as an expression of anger or hostility, you will hurt these children very deeply.
For many children, physical touch speaks louder than words, gifts, quality time, or acts of service.
Love Language #2: Words of Affirmation
One child was asked if his father loved him, and he responded, “Yes, because when I play ball, he always cheers, and after the game he tells me, ‘Thanks for playing hard.’”
Words of affection and endearment, words of praise and encouragement, words that give positive guidance all say, “I care about you” and nurture the child’s inner sense of worth and security.
Conversely, cutting words, spoken out of short-lived frustration, can hurt a child’s self-esteem and cast doubts about his abilities. The tone of voice, the gentleness of mood, the ambiance of care all communicate emotional warmth and love.
Affection and love mean expressing appreciation for the very being of a child.
We express praise for what the child does, either in achievements or behavior or conscious attitudes. Children know when praise is given for justified reasons and when it is given simply to make them feel good, and they may interpret the latter as sincere.
Of course, we want to praise children we care about, but we want to make sure that the praise is both true and justified.
When children learn to speak, the process is enhanced if the adults not only pronounce the words clearly but also give verbal encouragement to the child’s struggling attempts to say them correctly.
In two-parent households, the parents should encourage one another.
The more anger present in the parent, the more anger the parent will dump on the children.
The volume of a parent’s voice has great influence over a child’s reaction to what the parent says.
Ask yourself, “Are my children receiving positive and loving guidance?” Too often parents give the right message but in the wrong manner. Words of guidance must be given in a positive way. A positive message delivered in a negative manner will always reap negative results.
Negative is necessary, but only as part of the guidance we give our children. Make a conscious effort to give words of affirmation, starting with comments about what you like about your child. Make your words communicate, “We care about you, we love you, we like you.”
If you have a hard time saying affirming things, keep a notebook titled “Words of Affirmation.”
It is essential for parents and other significant adults in a child’s life to quickly apologize for negative, critical, or harsh remarks.
Love Language #3: Quality Time
What’s a mother to do? Is it possible to love a child and still get your own work done? If a mother gives a child 15 minutes of quality time before she starts the potato salad, she probably can prepare the salad in peace.
Even if your child’s primary love language is not quality time, many children crave the undivided attention of parents. Quality time is focused attention. It means giving a child your undivided attention.
Few of us have enough time to do everything we need and want to; giving a child quality time may mean that we must give up something high on our list of preferences. The older the child is, the harder this may be, especially as you try to make private time for each child while staying involved in their more public activities.
Finding time to be alone with each child is not easy, and yet it is essential.
In many homes, children would miss their TV sets more than they would miss their fathers.
Looking in your child’s eyes with care is a powerful way to convey love from your heart to the heart of your child. Studies have shown that most parents use eye contact in primarily negative ways, either while reprimanding a child or giving very explicit instructions.
Quality time is not only for doing active things together; it’s also for knowing your child better. With younger children, one of the most effective times to initiate conversation is at bedtime, when they are especially attentive.
All children love stories. Reading to them is a great way to begin your bedtime ritual—and do make it a ritual, because this will help to keep communications open when they become teenagers.
Few young people today understand how to handle their feelings, especially anger. This lack is a primary reason for drug use, inappropriate sexual activity, and antiauthority attitudes and behavior.
Bedtime rituals that are warm and close, gentle and relaxed, sound just the opposite of the busy world in which so many parents live. To succeed in this goal will require setting priorities and then resisting the tyranny of the urgent.
Mealtimes are natural events around which to plan. Over the years, a regular family dinner hour together can be one of the most bonding experiences that you will have. Some families are able to have breakfast together. And, you may be able to meet a child for lunch once a month.
Consider overnight trips…without making plans, you may find that you have little quality time with your children.
Love Language #4: Gifts
The giving and receiving of gifts can be a powerful expression of love, at the time they are given and often extending into later years. The most meaningful gifts become symbols of love, and those that truly convey love are part of a love language.
Parents will use a combination of physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, and service to keep the love tank full.
Giving and receiving gifts as a way to express love is a universal phenomenon. When a parent offers a gift if the child will clean his room, this is not a true gift but a payment for services rendered.
It’s often tempting to shower children with gifts as substitutes for the other love languages. For many reasons, parents sometimes resort to presents rather than being truly present to their children. Lavishing too many gifts is like taking a child into a toy store and saying, “All of this belongs to you.” The child may be excited at first, but after a while is running in all directions and playing with nothing.
Parents and grandparents may need to give less rather than more, carefully choosing gifts that will be meaningful rather than impressive.
Except for Christmas and birthdays, many gifts should be chosen by both you and your children.
It is true that all children—and adults—want to have more and more. But those whose language of love is receiving gifts will respond differently when they get their gift.
Love Language #5: Acts of Service
Acts of service are physically and emotionally demanding. Parents must give attention to our own physical and emotional health. For physical health, we need balanced patterns of sleeping, eating, and exercising. For emotional health, self-understanding and a mutually supportive marital relationship are crucial.
Making time for your marital relationship is an essential part of good parenting.
If parents give in to desires or even demands for too many gifts and too much service, our children remain childishly self-centered and become selfish.
As you express your love by acts of service to your children, doing things they may not yet be able to do for themselves, you are setting a model.
We serve our children, but as they are ready, we teach them how to serve themselves and then others. We want to help them develop their own skills, follow their own interests, and become the best they can be using their endowments from God.
Because service to a child is constant for so many years, and takes place in and around so many obligations, parents can forget that the daily and mundane acts they perform are expressions of love with long-term effects.
When parents serve their children with a spirit of resentment and bitterness, a child’s physical needs may be met, but his emotional development will be greatly hampered. What we want for our children—to be able to perform acts of service with compassion and genuine love.
It is difficult for children to feel good about expressing appreciation when they are commanded to do so. It’s the difference between, “Say thank you to your father,” or “Would you say thank you to your father?”
Children will become more aware of story times and family play, of parents teaching them to ride a bicycle, helping them with homework, caring for them when they are ill, comforting their feelings when they are hurt, taking them to special places, and buying treats and gifts. Eventually, these children will notice that their parents do things for others.
Your family can take a day or week to offer your services to a mission, a camp for underprivileged children, a food pantry or soup kitchen, or a nursing home. When parents and their children work together in such acts of service, the activity becomes a powerful lesson in the joys of helping others.
Psychologists tell us a major road to change is through behavior modification—a way of relating to people that rewards or punishes them for certain behaviors through positive or negative reinforcement.
“What’s in it for me?” is a predominant attitude in our society. And yet, it is exactly opposite to the love language of acts of service (and contrary to the heart of Christian social and missionary service).
Family hospitality is a great treasure, for in this act of service people truly get to know each other and to form strong friendships.
Make it your goal that your children will learn to be comfortable in serving others.
How to Discover Your Child’s Primary Love Language
As we speak love in the five languages, all the while specializing in her language of love, we show her how to love others and her own need to learn to speak others’ love languages.
When we as parents learn to speak our children’s love language, even though it differs from our own, we are showing them the way of unselfishness, the way of serving others. Remember that she will go through periods where her primary love language can temporarily change, especially during adolescence.
Positive parenting does not mean giving your child everything they want.
Employ the following methods as you seek to discover your child’s primary love language:
- Watch your child; he may well be speaking his own love language. This is particularly true of a young child, who is very likely to express love to you in the language he desires most to receive.
- Observe how your child expresses love to others.
- Listen to what your child requests most often.
- Notice what your child most frequently complains about. If the complaints fall into a pattern so that more than half the complaints focus on one love language, then they are highly indicative. Their frequency is the key.
- Give your child a choice between two options. Lead your child to make choices between two love languages. Giving choices will be helpful only if you do it often enough to see a pattern showing a clear preference in love languages. You probably will need to offer twenty to thirty choices before you can see a clear pattern emerging.
We need to remember that learning the love languages is a maturational process, and that becoming mature is a slow, painful, and often difficult journey. As we become multilingual, we also will be helping our children to learn how to give and receive in all love languages.
Speaking the Love Languages in Marriage
The quality of your marriage greatly affects the way you relate to your children—and the way they receive love.
There is a difference between love and being “in love.” The “in love” feeling is temporary, a primitive emotional reaction that often has little logical basis. Genuine love places the needs of the other person first and desires for the partner to grow and flourish.
The kind of marriage people dream of can be a reality when couples learn to speak each other’s primary love language on a regular basis. It will make them stronger parents, working more as a team while giving the children security and a greater sense of love.
Speak words of affirmation in the presence of other family members or friends and you gain extra benefit. Not only does your spouse feel loved, but you have given others an example of how to speak affirming words.
Parents, may you know…really know and use…the love languages of your children, so you can help them shoot for the stars!