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

responsibility, or substantial things such as an education or a career. Why should love be any different? But the key is to attach the right strings to your love.
    Instead of outcome love, you should use
value love,
in which love is conditional on your children’s adopting essential values and acting in socially appropriate ways. Value love nurtures the development of positive values and moral behavior and fosters healthy growth. You can instill values such as respect, responsibility, empathy, compassion, and generosity by giving approval (which children perceive as love) when your children demonstrate these values and showing disapproval (which children perceive as withholding love) when your children don’t demonstrate these values.
    You can also encourage your children’s achievement efforts using conditional love without resorting to outcome love. You do this by offering conditional love for values and life skills that will support their academic, athletic, or artistic aspirations—for example, hard work, discipline, good decision making, time management, patience, and perseverance.
    There are several important differences between these two very different forms of conditional love. First, value love is about the overall development and well-being of children; it’s about creating well-rounded, capable, and decent human beings. In contrast, outcome love may create the opposite. Yes, children raised with outcomelove will probably achieve some degree of success—they had better, or their parents won’t love them!—but because their parents focus so much on achievement, rather than on the whole person, these children are more likely to miss out on all of those great values and healthy life skills that make just plain good people.
    Second, outcome love is outside children’s control. They don’t always have control over whether they can meet their parents’ expectations; they may simply not be good enough to clear that bar, or another child, such as an opponent in a sport, may simply be better, which is no fault of their own. Conversely, all of the values and life skills that are fostered by value love are within children’s control. They have the power to act in valued ways and gain the benefits or not do so and suffer the consequences.
    Third, with outcome love, children sense that their parents are acting on their own needs and interests rather than on what is best for the children. This perception can create several harmful results. It causes conflict between children and parents that can generate anger, resentment, and resistance on the part of the children. Parents, in turn, probably unaware of their use of this unhealthy form of conditional love, are bitter toward their children, whom they perceive as ungrateful for their efforts to help them succeed. The ultimate result of this conflict is that children may sabotage their own efforts as a way to exact revenge on their parents. And, sadly, the relationship between parent and child is severely damaged, sometimes irreparably.
    Finally, children raised with outcome love internalize their parents’ style of love and use it as the basis for loving themselves. In other words, they come to love themselves only when they live up to their now-internalized expectations, and they hate themselves when they fail to do so. Children raised with value love, by contrast, learn that form of love and are able to love themselves independent of their achievements and gain healthy self-love from their deeply felt values.
MESSAGES OF LOVE
     
    The messages about love that you send to your children at a young age are important because love, as the many books, poems, plays, movies, and songs have described, is a powerful, complex, often wonderful, and sometimes painful emotion that will play a central role in their lives. The messages you communicate in your expressions of love toward your children provide the context for the relationship they develop with love: their feelings of love for themselves and others, how they give and receive love, and their willingness to communicate their love to you and others. In the purest sense, your early expressions of love are the first inputs your children receive that will shape their view of themselves. Am I loved? Am I safe? Am I worthwhile? Your love molds their perceptions of the world in which they live. Is it safe? Is it hospitable? Is it supportive? Your early messages of love also lay the foundation for teaching your children