Give & Get Love in Healthy Ways
Today, I’m introducing Happy Mom Habit #7. I believe that in order to be a Happy Mom, you must learn how to give and get love in healthy ways.
Giving love well takes a lot of work and receiving it is even harder for most of us. Sure, we feel love intensely and we do the best we can in loving our kids, but we wonder of how well we are doing.
We need to know that we are doing it right. Because if we fail at this–giving love in a healthy, meaningful way to our children–we feel that we might as well hang up this whole mothering thing. Sure, it sounds simple, natural, romantic and easy. But it isn’t.
It is gritty. It makes us feel crazy and exhausted but we must continue to work at it because without giving or getting love, life wouldn’t be worth living.
The Giving — Why we muddy love with need and expectations:
Before our children are born, we begin painting pictures of what they will be and what they will give us. After we have them, our expectations continue. We want them to behave a certain way or excel at certain things. We want them to be academically strong and physically strong.
High expectations are good for kids but they are not synonymous with love.
That is extremely important because when kids feel that they need to meet our expectations of their behavior, appearance or performance in order to get love from us, they feel trapped. Every child should know that regardless of what she does, even if it means that she sits in her closet for the rest of her life, we will love her and express our love to her. When we do that, we love unconditionally.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your feedback…
One Response to “Give & Get Love in Healthy Ways”
The love between a parent (mom) and child is not symmetrical as would be, say, the love between a husband and wife. The mode in which a parent gives love to a child is, therefore, much different than the mode in which the child reciprocates love back to the parent. The parent expresses love through unending sacrifice and devotion to the child’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well being. This love is not contingent in any way on the child earning it. The parent-to-child love is part of the genetic and spiritual code of normal human existence.
The child, on the other hand, shows love back to the parent in keeping the family code, honoring the parent’s value system, etc. In short, the child shows love back to the parent by striving to live up to the parent’s expectations of them. In my view, a parent must give the child clear expectations so that the child will then have a vehicle by which to express their love back to the parent. If expectations aren’t there, the child is powerless to express love back to their parent.
I’m saying all this assuming normal parent/child relationships. Things go off track when the child has no expectations on which to hang their love, or if the parent expects the child to mirror their love in the form of devotion. This is also how I see God’s love modeled for his children. His love is unconditional and comes to us first. Our love is secondarily back to Him, and is demonstrated by how we keep His commandments (John 14:15) and strive to live up His expectations. In my view, a “sin” is missing the mark on what God expects of his kids.