What is Love? (Baby don't hurt me.)

So, I've been working on notes for a totally different topic, but I want to write something of a follow-up to a post shared by another blogger. My friend Angela posted about cyberbullying, particularly in a context of middle school. In discussing how we adults (but particularly parents) can respond to these situations, she says, “First, we need to let our middle schooler know they are loved. We need to remind them of their self-worth; their worth in the eyes of Jesus.” You can read the whole post here.

I really want to expand on this point a bit. Parents and mentors often think they are doing this and doing it well. The problem may not be that you're not communicating that your child is loved, but whether or not they're able to hear it.

Too often, I have heard parallel stories from students and parents about the same events, but with very different perceptions of those events. A parent will be celebrating an amazing time they had with their kid, and the kid walked away from the same even feeling unloved. Sometimes it's practically the opposite. A student comes in gushing about this amazing thing his parents did for him, but when I ask the parents about it, they barely remember what the kid is talking about.

Let's face, even with the large number of middle school students facing some sort of bullying situation (cyber- or otherwise), the reality is that most middle schoolers struggle with feeling loved and having an awareness of their worth. If a key aspect of mitigating this somewhat is to communicate love and value to them regularly, but they may be unable to hear or accept it, what do we do?

I'd like to toss out Dr. Gary Chapman's concept of the “Five Love Languages” as a tool that might help. I'm not claiming that his ideas are amazing science, nor that he's pulled them straight from the Bible. What I would say is that his general concept seems to be a helpful tool for a lot of people to understand these gaps in any of their relationships—when someone believes they are communicating love, but the other person doesn't perceive it.

The short version of Chapman's idea is that people give and receive love in different ways, and while all the major ways he identifies are valuable to all people, most people operate out of a primary love language, and understanding a person's love language will allow you to communicate love to them in a way they hear and understand. The five he delineates are gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and physical touch.

The idea is that you should be able to pay attention to what your child does respond to. They may not feel that you love them if you “only” say it in words, but they might react positively to you baking cookies for them, or to you putting away your phone and computer for some one-on-one time with them. You may have another child who you do things for every day, but the complain that their parents don't tell them that they love them!

I only recently figured out (I think?) that my dad is a “gifts” guy. I frankly have never really perceived much in the way of love coming from my dad, but I've recently noticed that he picks out small things that I need and picks them up on occasion when he's out—a calendar, some storage containers, etc. (If you're worried about whether your kid is a “gifts” kid, and you don't have money, don't worry. . . the language of gifts doesn't necessarily mean spending lots of money.) Basically, as an adult, I'm figuring out that it may well be that my dad has tried to express love to me, but we were effectively speaking different languages.

Make sure you're speaking the same language as your kid when your trying to communicate love and affirmation. This goes for parents and mentors. For those of us who are not parents, but mentor other people's kids, this is one of the reasons we need to spend time with the kids—so that we can make sure we're affirming them in their own language. This is another reason small group leaders and parents should regularly share their wisdom with each other—so we can help each other out in the process of loving and affirming these kids.