PARENTING

By LEN LANTZ, M.D.

AN EYE-OPENING EXPERIENCE

I was at my computer the other day because I decided that I wanted to continue writing about effective approaches to parenting. To get my creative juices flowing, I decided to do a little internet search. I was looking for the top internet searches on parenting to find out what information parents wanted to know, so I typed “How can I get my child”—and my heart sank at the first phrase Google autopopulated: “to stop hating me.”

Well, that made me feel sick to my stomach. I shared my experience over dinner, and we started wondering if people really were looking up these phrases on the internet. My daughter grabbed her phone and entered the search phrase “How to get my mother,” and Google supplied the rest: “to love me.” Taken aback, she then tried the search phrase “How to get my father,” and Google supplied the rest of the phrase “to love me.” We guessed that these were frequent teenage searches, so I decided to try it. I entered “How to get my mother” and Google supplied the rest of the phrase “into a nursing home!” In full disclosure (and before you rat me out to my mother), I have not been searching for information on nursing homes. While my daughter and I have not been searching for answers to these questions, people in our respective age groups probably are.

The Love Disconnect

If it’s true that a sizeable number of kids are not perceiving love from their parents, then I think we need to ensure that our parenting approaches include something very basic: the communication of love. Are we as parents effectively conveying our love to our children? I don’t mean for any of this to sound critical or accusatory. I ask myself these same questions. It’s one thing to love your children with lots of hugs and kisses, and hopefully you do. However, it’s important to consider whether you are conveying your love for them in a manner that they can see it, hear it, and feel it the most.

Books have been written about conveying love to your kids. Some of the best known are The 5 Love Languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell and How to Really Love Your Child by Ross Campbell. The first book does a great job of explaining that each person has a different love language, a preferred way of understanding and receiving love. You might have a different love language than your child. Have you ever done something really nice for your child only to have it blow up in your face? Not speaking your child’s love language could have been one of the reasons why. The second book gives some very concrete ways of conveying continued on page 9