Teach Your Children About Love

Have you noticed we teach our children all kinds of things about everything except love. And if you remind me that ‘sex education’ takes places a lot these days, I’ll make a face at you. Love is not covered by sex education, enough said.

We could sit around all day trying to figure out why the most important topic there is in this life is left off the list of topics we make sure our children study during their academic years.

We would probably come to the conclusion that ‘love’ is a topic that can only be taught by the family and other institutions. And we wouldn’t want to step on their toes would we?

Well, by the look of things going on these days, the family needs a little help getting those love life lessons in. My guess is that too many families are struggling with so many other issues, worries, problems, their own love lives, etc. that there is neither time nor interest to do the kind of teaching I’m talking about.

Worse yet, by not teaching about love, families teach that the topic of ‘love has a low priority and should be left out, handled by whatever experiences the child has with love by simply growing up in a particular family, good or bad. All this sounds dangerously like business as usual to me.

The problem being, that the lessons learned about love are never really challenged especially when they guarantee that certain love life mistakes and miseries will be painfully repeated sometimes over multiple generations.

Since the ‘need for love’ that comes with us when we enter this world is not going away any time soon, we have limited options. We can ignore it and hope for the best while continuing to suffer the consequences of breeding unhealthy love lives. Or we can make available other ‘sources’ of information about love to our children.

Whether this takes place in structured learning situations at schools or public programs is yet to be determined. At this point, we’re still trying to get over the defensiveness that emerges when this type of proposal gets made.

Comments? Welcome. Dr. Tom Jordan