Expressing love in ways that touch your family

Solid connection with parents helps children feel more secure, confident, and fulfilled. Relationships in which expressions of love are sent and received easily also make it easier for the family to resist getting sucked into those negative cycles of interaction that make living together hard and frustrating instead of warm and dynamic. Yet sometimes we find ourselves at a loss for how to convey the love we feel. And at other times we may be expressing love fervently while our child or partner isn't getting the sense of being loved.

In a manner inspired by combining Parenting from the Heart, Parenting by Connection, and the idea of Love Languages, consider noticing these categories of ways we can try to transmit our sense of love to another person:

• Quality time and emotional play
• Empathy and appreciation
• Physical touch and physical play
• Acts of caring and giving

While this may be a simplistic break-down, there's a useful idea here: be mindful about what kinds of interaction with you really touch your children (and other loved ones). Probably for most young children, love gets conveyed best by a combination of quality time, physical contact, empathy, physical play, and emotional play (silliness). As we get older, appreciation and acts of caring and giving can also become important. Noticing within these which seem to be most connecting for your family members depending upon their tendency, mood, and routine can help build family closeness.

Quality time and emotional play
In part, quality time means quantity time. It often means spending a long period of time together at once. The quality part is about attention and presence. If we're distracted by emails, phone calls, text messages, the tv, or other people coming and going, the quality is interrupted. The person we're trying to convey a sense of being loved to is craving our focused attention.

Some useful ideas about how to create quality time come from Hand in Hand Parenting's Parenting by Connection. Read about their ideas of Special Time, Playlistening, and Staylistening.

Empathy and appreciation
Words of affirmation may be a more complicated way of expressing love than it sounds. While children and adults may feel a hunger for approval or other external positive judgements, this may not meet the need for love. Instead something more like empathy may be much more meaningful and touching. Empathy means understanding how someone feels and what they're wanting well enough to feel touched by it. Empathy itself is both a natural ability and sometimes challenging, so there's a more developed introduction here.

Appreciation is like empathy, except turned inward and then shared. For example, instead of saying "good job cleaning the living room," one could look inside and share how it feels and what desires were met by the living room being cleaned, for example, "I'm relieved and happy seeing the living room so clean -- I enjoy the way it looks so much more now and I also feel less overwhelmed by things to do." Sharing appreciation in this way can take longer, and at the same time can give the other person both a greater feeling of being noticed in their contribution and a greater sense of what their contribution meant.

Physical touch and physical play
Many adults have developed some awkwardness with physical touch (possibly from difficult or embarrassing experiences as a teenager or in college). Perhaps because of this awkwardness, many adults use tickling as a way to engage in physical touch with children. The play aspect can seem very attractive. However, being tickling rarely meets physical touch needs.

Other forms of touch, where the child doesn't feel powerless can be more helpful and bonding, including: sitting close together while reading to each other, non-sexual cuddling, being held in an adult's lap, hair brushing/combing, holding hands, being carried or worn, wrestling (where the child gets to play the stronger role), and many others. Obviously, the energy level and kind of touch depends on the mood of both parties.

Acts of caring and giving
We can also express our love through particular actions meant to enrich the other person's life. Our actions that are expression of love tend to be received more clearly as loving when we are fully aware or our intention. Thus, helping a child with their homework might get received as loving if we're feeling warm and happy about doing it but might instead inspire discomfort if we're feeling anxious or frustrated or carry a sense of obligation. Acts of caring can include offering to help a person with a task, and at least as often mean partnering with our children as doings something for them.

Warning about giving: as our culture has become more and more consumer-oriented and as the holidays have become larger and more purchase-ridden, the meaning of giving has become distorted. Children may not find it nourishing at all to have things bought for them. Instead, gifts are meaningful things that we share or offer to someone. For example, a flower you picked, a card you made, a special rock you found in a stream, a stuffed animal from your childhood, a favorite meal you prepared, a love note, a toy you crafted, a costume piece you created, a game you invented, and so on. An important feature of giving in this way is that it touches you to be giving the gift.

For More Information
Empathy: an amazing resource for family connection
NotJustSkin workshops Local workshops on relating joyfully with children and supporting caregivers
Parenting by Connection
Nonviolent Communication Resources for Parents