A thing that no-one can quite believe when I tell them is that, when I was little, my parents never told me they loved me. “Yes, I know,” I tell people, “it explains so much.” But, beyond the joking, I really don’t think that it negatively affected me.
At the time, I didn’t know any different and so I didn’t mind. From here, in my 40s, I can see that my parents were stoic war babies, not encouraged to say things like “I love you”, and probably never told “I love you” themselves. But that doesn’t mean they were unloved. Or that I was.
My husband grew up in a family that had quite the opposite culture. There were – and still are – many words of affirmation among them. When we were first together he would shower me with compliments and lots of love-you-love-you stuff that just made me laugh. Over the years he has come to understand that I don’t need to hear that. I want the bins taken out without me asking and the occasional cup of tea and that’s pretty much it.
Words are cheap! At least, that’s how I see it, because that was how I was raised. It’s what you do and not what you say that matters.
Obviously I think that my way is the best way. If you value deeds and not words you can’t be flattered into doing something you don’t want to do. And you see through unreliable or flaky people very quickly. This, I tell myself, is why I only have four friends.
So of course, I impose this philosophy on my own children. I do tell my children I love them, but it is always tacked on the end of something. “Night, love you!” or “Have a good time, love you!”
I don’t take their faces in my hands and whine “I love you!” at them. Or demand that they tell me that they love me, or anything like that.
Instead of this love-bombing, I make a great effort in my parenting to do two other things, which I think are more effective. The first is “descriptive praise” and the second is “active listening”. This is where words stop being cheap and start becoming filled with value, because executing descriptive praise and active listening is not always easy.
Descriptive praise is so useful, though, so it’s worth making an effort. Rather than saying to a child, “I love that drawing you have done, it’s brilliant,” you say, “What I like about that picture is how you have filled the page and used so many colours.” This is more of a pain for you as a parent because quite often, there isn’t terribly much to say about the random cataclysm of shapes and colours brought to you by a small child. But, without question, it is more useful than words like “love” and “brilliant” because these don’t really mean much when you are five. Why do you love it, why is it brilliant? There is no information here for the kid as to how to repeat this miracle that is so loveable and brilliant.
However, if you say you like how many colours kiddo has used and how they have filled the page, you can be 100 per cent certain that the next drawing they do will fill the page and use 40 different colours. I do this all the time. I got my kids to hang up their own towels after bath time by saying over and again, “You hung up your bath towel! Look how neatly it is hanging there.” And if they do well at school, I tell them that they worked so hard, not that they are so clever. “I can see how hard you worked on this,” I say, my eyes boggling with meaning.
Active listening is much more of an arse-ache than descriptive praise and this, as far as I’m concerned, is where the actual, real love happens. You have to really put your love into action to do active listening. It takes so much more love to do than it takes to say “I love you”.
As a parent, your children bring you bad feelings all the time. I’m just going to say it: this is annoying. Especially if you are feeling good, because a sad child is a total bummer. You are only as happy as your least happy child, (or pet), and this is just a fact. Your instinct is to fix this bad feeling. You want to make it all go away for everyone, so that you can go back to feeling good and watching Presumed Innocent.
Your instinct is to tell your child that they don’t, actually, feel the way that they are feeling. How can they be sad? It’s nearly the summer holidays and it’s pizza for dinner and they had fun at the weekend! But this will make it all worse. Because when someone brings you a bad feeling and you tell them that they’re not having the feeling that they’re having, they then feel stupid and gaslit, as well as still feeling bad.
With active listening, you repeat the feeling that the child is having back to them. This shows that their feelings are normal and that you aren’t scared of them. “I feel sad,” they say. Rather than asking why, you say, “I see, you’re feeling sad.” In a dream situation, this puts an end to it. If this instead unbottles an unholy tsunami of complaints, the thing to do is listen and not argue.
Occasionally say, “You are feeling really hard done by. You really feel like this is unfair.” You’re also not allowed to problem-solve. This is the really difficult bit. You can’t say, “Let’s have some cake and you’ll feel better”, or, “Shall I buy you a pony?” Instead, you can only say, “I wish I had a magic wand. I wish I could make this go away for you.” It doesn’t get you the immediate satisfaction of a click-the-fingers solution but, long-term, it will work wonders.
A key thing for children to learn is that most emotional states are temporary. Tomorrow, or maybe just in an hour, they will feel better. Or at least different. Spending time with your child while they are sad, holding their hand as they make their own way through, and eventually out of, the valley of that dark feeling? Well, now. That’s what I call love.