Not all parents love their children, at least not always, not in all situations, parents love their children. It is a fact. But if you talk in terms of «should», then «love your children» is a parental responsibility. Like it or not, but these are your children, you gave birth (gave birth) to them, now you need to feed them, take care of their health and education, educate them and prepare them for the future adult life. Normal parents are required to love their children.
But if the children have already grown up, if they have already reached the age of majority, then from a formal point of view, the parents have fulfilled their duty, their mandatory program. It is clear that if parents have loved their children for 18 years, they will not stop doing it, but they no longer have the duty to love their children.
This means that parents have an excellent opportunity to start teaching Love to their children. Attention, follow the logic …
It is probably very wrong if there is no warm, sincere, close relationship between parents and children. There must be close and warm relations between children and parents: but who should create them? While the children were children, these relationships were created by the parents, if only because it was their parental duty. After the children come of age, this obligation is no longer on the parents, which means that now let the children be responsible for the warm and close relations between children and parents!
Dear adult children, are you ready? Are you taking on this job?
In the experience of our family, the children were surprised by such a formulation of the question, but they accepted the challenge, at least in words. We asked why we decided to do this. In response, we asked if it is important for them that they know how to love: not just to respond to love, but to be the initiators of warm and close relationships, the creators of love? Answer: Yes, it matters!
“But we can do this, right?”
— And who taught you this? In our opinion, we have taught you this little. For 18 years we have taught you to enjoy the love of your parents, well, sometime to respond to this love, and that’s it. You are excellent children, we are proud of you, but the ability to love, if you mean not the love that VKontakte is talking about, but Love with a capital letter, you still do not have this ability to love. However, we will be very glad to make a mistake and rejoice for ourselves and for you when you demonstrate your Love to us.
For the sake of experimentation, we, parents, are now getting out of the mode of loving you and will treat you well, but in a consumer way, as most children treat their parents. That is, we are now not up to you, you are in some fifth place after our other interests, we can now be offended by you, treat you according to our mood: once your kind attitude towards us will be answered in the same way, and when take it for granted and not respond with anything, or even with dissatisfaction …
To keep you abreast of your progress, we are now starting a sheet “I love my family” and we will write down in it: 1) a daily assessment of your love for us, parents and 2) those tasks and exercises that we would recommend that you learn how to do it. Let’s start with the following exercises:
- Every morning we meet parents as if they were loved ones: with a joyful face, warm words (preferably different each time), hug, kiss.
- During the day, until the evening, ask a couple of times how to help, find reasons to thank us at least three times and never reproach us.
This is for starters. Then we will load with other tasks. Are we playing?
… Played for a year. It is clear that not everything was easy, we had to come up with a lot of training exercises, but the main thing is the results. The results are great!
Video from Yana Shchastya: interview with professor of psychology N.I. Kozlov
Topics of conversation: What kind of woman do you need to be in order to successfully marry? How many times do men get married? Why are there so few normal men? Childfree. Parenting. What is love? A story that couldn’t be better. Paying for the opportunity to be close to a beautiful woman.