Loving Our Children

Loving Our Children – 2

Mrs. Alexandra Kpikpi

Do you love me?

I have read before that the unspoken question that children are always (unconsciously) asking is: “Am I loved?” Does my new teacher love me? Does my mummy love me? Does my daddy? Do Mummy and Daddy love me now that we have moved house? Or now that there is a new baby? Do Mummy and Daddy love me, even though I failed my spelling test?
Do you love your children? How much do you love them? Most of us would say, “Of course I love my children!” It can be difficult to express how much we love our children – we love them to the moon and back. One of the main reasons we work as hard as we do, is to provide for our children – and we do this because we love them. We also cook for them, wash and iron their clothes, make sure they have a place to sleep etc – all because we love them.
Despite all this, many children do not know that their parents love them, or they do not know how much they are loved. We need to get better at communicating our love.

Ways to show our children that we love them

Tell them! When was the last time you told your child you loved him/her? Let’s tell them often.
Smile at them when you see them (this lets them know that you are happy to see them). So many things that children do in the course of a normal day can irritate us so, if we are not careful, the face we may usually turn to them could be a frowning one. At the end of a school day, we can tell them to tuck their shirt in after we have smiled at them!
Look at them when they are talking to you. Be willing to stop what you are doing sometimes. Turn and look at them. Making eye contact signals to your child that you are really attending to them and therefore that they are important to you. It also helps you to see if they are troubled about something – and that might be something that they are not even talking about at that precise moment. We can all benefit from working on our listening skills. There is something called ‘active listening’ - which is making an effort to hear and understand what another person is trying to communicate (however imperfectly) through their words and, beyond that, what they are feeling. If we’re not careful, we simply hear the words and shoot out an answer. “Mmm-hmmm” or, “That’s nice” or, “Oh, don’t mind him” or, “You should have…” or, “It’s your own fault, I told you not to…” or, “Don’t be such a baby”. Such responses don’t help our children process the emotions they are feeling. They may be reaching out to us for affirmation (or help to navigate a troubling situation) and finding none.

Find out your child’s love language. Everyone has a love language. Our love language is the way love can most easily be communicated to us and also the way we are most likely to show love ourselves. Usually, we have one major love language and then one or two lesser ones. Your primary love language can be different from your husband’s or wife’s love language, and it can be different from your child’s love language. And your children can have different primary love languages from each other.

It is worth finding out what our own primary love language is and what the primary love languages of other members of the family are. A family member with a different love language to us may be showing us love using their love language and it is not registering with us because that is not our love language. You can see that the opportunities for hurts and disappointments are many in the area of love languages – for both you and members of your family.

There are several love languages, so I will just mention some of the most common ones. Some of our children feel loved when we speak encouraging words to them or about them. Others feel loved when we make affectionate physical contact. Some children feel most loved when we spend quality time with them or when we give them gifts. Another love language is acts of service or kindness.

Let’s pray and ask for wisdom to discern our children’s love languages. We may be ignoring their love offerings to us. And let’s pray for grace to show love to them in the way that communicates our love for them the most effectively – very difficult when our child’s primary love language does not feature amongst our own.

Take care

We cannot do these things if we are not living in the same country, town or house with our children and we cannot do these things if we always return home so late that they are asleep by the time we get back. If we are not living with or spending time with our children, we need to reorganise our lives. There is only this time (NOW!) to do it. Once children reach a certain age, they will leave home and we will have lost our opportunity to show them how much we love them.