A Word of Hope Raising emotionally healthy children is an increasingly difficult task these days. The influence of media, the cultural push for kids to grow up quickly, the violence and drugs that plague some communities—not to mention the fact that many parents are struggling economically—challenge families daily.
It is into such stark reality that we speak a word of hope to parents. We want you to enjoy a loving relationship with your children. Our focus in this book is on one exceedingly important aspect of parenting—meeting your children’s needfor love. We have written this book to help you give your children a greater experience of the love you have for them.
This will happen as you speak the love languages they understand and can respond to.
Every child has a special way of perceiving love. There are five ways children (indeed, all people) speak and understand emotional love. They are physical touch, words of affirmation,
quality time, gifts, and acts of service. If you have several children in your family, chances are they speak different languages, for just as children often have different personalities, they may hear in different love languages.
Typically, two children need to be loved in different ways.
Whatever love language your child understands best, he needs it expressed in one way—unconditionally.
Unconditional love is a guiding light, illuminating the darkness and enabling us as parents to know where we are and what we need to do as we raise our child. Without this kind of love,
parenting is bewildering and confusing. Before we explore the five love languages, let’s consider the nature and importance of unconditional love.
We can best define unconditional love by showing what it does. Unconditional love shows love to a child no matter what. We love regardless of what the child looks like;
regardless of her assets, liabilities, or handicaps; regardless of what we expect her to be; and, most difficult of all, regardless of how she acts. This does not mean that we like all of herbehavior. It does mean that we give and show love to our child all the time, even when her behavior is poor.
Does this sound like permissiveness? It is not. Rather, it is doing first things first. A child with a full love tank can respond to parental guidance without resentment.
Some people fear that this may lead to “spoiling” a child, but that is a misconception. No child can receive too much appropriate unconditional love. A child may be “spoiled” by a lack of training or by inappropriate love that gives or trains incorrectly. True unconditional love will never spoil a child because it is impossible for parents to give too much of it.
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