Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

unconditional love seems quite reasonable. You should love your children just for who they are, regardless of what they do. Children shouldn’t have to worry whether their actions will cause you to love them less. They should be able to count on your love no matter what.
    But, if you look at unconditional love carefully, you can see why it isn’t all its cracked up to be. By taking away conditional love, you lose your ability to influence your children. With unconditional love, you lose your ability to approve of good behavior or disapprove of bad behavior. You give your children carte blanche under the misguided belief that this freedom will somehow build their self-esteem and foster maturity and independence. But what it actually does is create immature, insecure, and irresponsible children, ill prepared for life in the adult world.
CONDITIONAL LOVE
     
    At some point many parents realized that unconditional love wasn’t working. Many children were lazy, disinterested, disrespectful, and out of control. Children raised with unconditional love weren’t good people, and they weren’t successful or happy. Clearly, a change needed to be made. Many parents decided to return to conditional love.
    Unfortunately, those parents reinstated the wrong kind of conditional love, what I call “outcome love.” Perhaps because of the economic uncertainty in recent times or the aspirational and competitive nature of popular culture today, parents decided to direct their conditional love toward their children’s achievement activities, believing that this approach would motivate their children to work hard and become successful. Parents began to make their love conditional on how their children performed in school, sports, or the arts. If Johnny got an A or won a tennis match or earned first violin in the school orchestra, his parents heaped love, attention, and gifts on him. When he received a D or lost that tennis match or didn’t make the school orchestra, they withdrew their love by expressing disappointment, hurt, embarrassment, or anger. As a result, children’s self-esteem became overly connected to their achievement efforts. This conditional love caused achievement tobecome threatening to children because success and failure was too intimately linked with whether their parents would love them.
    At the same time, parents maintained their unconditional love for their children’s behavior and the kind of people they were. Parents gave their children unfettered freedom and few responsibilities, didn’t hold them accountable for their actions, provided no consequences, impressed no good (or bad) values on them, and continued to express their love for them no matter how they behaved—so long as they did well in school, sports, and so on. The mistake parents made was that they got this love thing backward. Parents must reverse their use of unconditional and conditional love.
THE RIGHT KIND OF LOVE
     
    Yes, folks, conditional love can be good! As much as you may have been led to believe that unconditional love is the Holy Grail and that conditional love is Satan (no religious connotations intended), I am telling you that they are not. Like most things in life, unconditional and conditional love are neither good nor bad; it is what you do with them that makes them so. You can use love as a tool for your children’s healthy growth or as a weapon that can harm your children’s development. Rewarding children—love is really the ultimate form of reward—regardless of their behavior robs children of one of their most important lessons, that their actions have consequences. What more powerful inducement to good action is there for your children than the perceived threat of losing your love?
Unconditional Love for Achievement
     
    You need to give your children unconditional love for their achievements so that they will be free from the fear that you will not love them if they fail to meet your expectations. This means whether they win or lose, succeed or fail, you still support andencourage them (assuming they tried their best; more on that shortly). This unconditional love liberates your children from the specter of lost love and encourages them to push themselves, take risks, give their best effort, and achieve at the highest level of which they are capable.
Conditional Love for Values
     
    Love should have strings attached. Most things of importance in life are earned, whether they are values like trust, respect, and