How well do you love your kids?
It’s a question that’s been simmering in my mind and heart this past year.
“I love you” falls from my mouth so easily and so often, but we all know that being loved and feeling loved can be two very different things.
Though we love our kids deeply, how can we convey the feeling of love? Love is more than a feeling and more than words. Love is a choice. It is an action. Love does something.
Saying “I love you” is easy, but showing it is a different story.
Here’s a simple place to start: If I want to communicate love to my children, I need to be speaking their language!
Most people have heard of Gary Chapman’s best-selling book, The Five Love Languages, which introduced us to the idea that we all give and receive love in different ways. In case you need a reminder or a quick introduction, the five love languages are:
- physical touch,
- words of affirmation,
- quality time,
- acts of service, and
- gifts.
While identifying your child’s love language might be relatively easy, actually speaking that language might be a little more challenging because though we might be familiar with each language, many of us don’t know how to speak those languages.
We may have grown up speaking “quality time” and need a crash course in how to speak love through “acts of service.” Others of us might be well-versed in “words of affirmation” but struggle with how to demonstrate love through giving “gifts.”
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