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

the nurturing values, attitudes, and beliefs that will guide them toward being kind, thoughtful, and responsible people.
    Your children get their first messages about love from you in the very first days of their lives and beyond. Physical contact, eye gaze, bodily warmth, your voice, a mother’s milk, and responsiveness to their needs are all early messages of love. This initial love, so simple and pure, lays the foundation for your love as your children get older and love (and life) gains complexity. Your ability to continue that simplicity and purity of love in the context of an increasingly complicated and demanding life will ultimately determine the relationship they develop with love throughout their lives.
    You want your children to feel your love and for love to become woven into the very fabric of your family life that envelops and protects them every day. You want your family life to be so imbued with love that your children feel your love in everything you do with and for them. This feeling provides a solid foundation ofcomfort and security that frees them to experience love deeply within themselves, reciprocate your love openly, and express their love for others.
    So please, love your children fully and openly, but don’t send messages of love that are unwise or indiscriminate. It’s never too early to start expressing love in the most healthy ways possible. When you send your children messages of healthy love when they are very young, you provide them with a template of what love should be. Just as important, you are training yourself to give healthy love to your children so that when they get older and life becomes more complicated and demanding, you will continue to communicate messages of love for them that will be as sweet and pure as when they were babies.
CATCHPHRASES FOR LOVE
     
    Pretty much from day one of each of their lives, every night before Catie and Gracie went to bed, I would softly whisper in their ears the question, “How much do I love you?” Obviously, when they were infants, I didn’t expect an answer, and the question was intended to be rhetorical; I hoped they could feel how much I loved them. Then, one evening at bedtime when Catie was about two and a half, in response to my question, she said, “Sooo much!” The message had gotten through! And “Sooo much!” has been our catchphrase for love ever since.
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    CATCHPHRASES FOR LOVE
     
“Sooo much.”
“Bigger than the world.”
“Big love!”
“Explosion of love.”
“My love, my lovette, my loveling.”
“I love you.”
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    A catchphrase used by one mother, Susannah, is “Bigger than the world.” She wants to give her love for her children a physical dimension that they can literally and metaphorically grasp. They havea globe in their living room that, when her three children were young, seemed immense. Susannah would say “bigger than the world” and point to the globe. They would then wrap their arms around it to feel the size of her love for them. She would also point to her heart and the globe to send this message a different way. As her children got older and really understood how big the world was and learned about space and the solar system, they got to have some fun with the catchphrase. She would say “bigger than the world” and they would get into a competition to see how big their love could be, for example, “bigger than Saturn,” “bigger than the sky,” and “bigger than the stars.” When Susannah gives her love physical dimensions, she is able to make very tangible the immensity of her love for her children.
    Jake, the father of two boys, plays a lot of basketball, a sport with its share of catchphrases (e.g., “slam dunk”) and physical expressions of emotions (e.g., chest bump). After a basket, players on his league team often shout “big shot” and pound their chests with their fists. While he was shooting baskets in his driveway one day with his young boys watching nearby, he made a shot and spontaneously shouted “Big love!” and pounded his chest over his heart with the L sign (thumb out, pointer finger up). His boys cackled with joy and “Big love” became his catchphrase for them. Now nine and seven years old, his boys, both of whom are now passionate basketball players, shout “Big love” and pound the L sign on their chest after they sink a basket at home.
    Catchphrases don’t even have to be words, but can be sounds, too. Another father, Dave, told me that when