Inspiration & Paradox 105: Perfectly Imperfect Love

This morning I had a chat with Jackie’s child-care teacher…

Children are eager to please the people they love, and they do this by performing - behaving well and doing things right. And honestly, we adults often take advantage of that, don’t we. We show our anger and even say unkind words to our children when they misconduct. And often, they attach our emotions and reactions to how much we love them. Well, this happened to Jackie. In her most grown-up voice, she jested in the middle of our regular bedtime story-telling session last night, “When I don’t share my toys with my friends, teacher won’t love me.” Subsequently, a string of questions led me to discover that her childcare teacher has been teaching the kids to “win her love with good behaviour”.

So there I was at the child-care centre, trying pretty hard to put it across to the teacher in a nice way so that she wouldn’t feel embarrassed or offended, and frankly, most importantly, it wouldn’t cause a backfire on Jackie. I shared with her my concern about what Jackie had been picking up in the child-care, and my earnest request that the kids learned the correct reasons for good behaviour. I told that I would like Jackie to understand that our love for her was not a result of how good her behaviour was, and that her disobedience would not make us love her lesser even though we could be upset and appear to be very angry with her.

Awfully tough, isn’t. As much as we know the right things to do with our kids and want them to grow up feeling confident and secure, sometimes, we adults cannot even really grasp the concept of unconditional love ourselves very well, let alone a three-year old. Without a loving relationship, children don’t seem to have any reason to want to learn to behave in an acceptable. And it’s so hard for them to understand why when they do the wrong things, the love adults flaunt about is not expressed in the way they can understand (hugs and kisses).

God, help us flawed parents (and teachers) have a significant positive impact on our children’s lives with our imperfect love for them!