Well, hello moms and dads.
I'm Dr.
Gary Chapman, author of The Five Love Languages and a number of other books
on marriage and family.
And I just want to take a few minutes informally
talking about how to be really good parents.
I think that's what all of us want to do.
So I'm going to give you some suggestions from my perspective,
looking back on having raised two children and now have two grandchildren, ok?
Number one, I think I think I would put it number one.
We have to meet the need of our child to feel loved.
Almost everyone agrees that our deepest emotional need is the need to feel loved.
And if you're a child, the person you most
want to love you is your is your parents.
And if your child feels loved,
I like to picture that they have a love tank
and if the love tank is full, they grow up emotionally healthy.
But if the love tank is empty,
they grow up with a lot of internal emotional struggles.
And in the teenage years,
they will likely go looking for love, sometimes in the wrong places.
So this is where the five love languages and many of you are familiar with that.
And you're already using this. But if you're not.
Let me just review it for you. Because what makes one child
feel loved doesn't like another child feel loved.
That's why a 13 year old can sit
in my office and say, My parents don't love me.
They love my brother, but they don't love me.
I knew his parents. I knew they loved him.
The problem is they never learned how to communicate love to him.
So there's five fundamental ways that people receive love,
whether you're a child or whether you're an adult.
And let me just review them quickly.
One is words of affirmation.
You look nice today.
I really appreciate what you did.
Just verbalizing things that you appreciate about the child.
And then there's acts of service.
It's doing things for the child.
Cooking their favorite meal, cooking
their birthday cake, mending a doll dress,
or helping them with a bicycle tire. Just doing things for them.
Actions speak louder than words to these children.
And then there's quality time giving them your undivided attention.
Sometimes in conversation, other times in playing games with them.
But they have your full attention.
For some children, this is what makes them feel love.
And then there's physical touch.
Holding hands,
hugging giving them high fives as they get older.
Wrestling with them.
But physical touch.
Affirming physical touches, ok?
And then gifts.
For some children.
Receiving a gift is what really makes them feel love.
Doesn't have to be an expensive gift.
You can pick up a stone in a city parking lot and give it to an eight year old guy.
You know, say, Hey, man, I found this. Look at the colors.
I wanted you to have this.
And if that's his love language,
you'll find that stone in his dresser drawer when he's 23.
Okay?
Because that really communicated to him.
So each of your children, if you have three children,
they may have three different love languages.
So I want to challenge you to discover each of the child's love languages.
And you can do that by observing their behavior.
How do they respond to you? If they're always hugging you
and running up and crawling on your legs when they're young
physical touch is probably their language
What do they complain about?
If they're saying you went to the store and didn't bring me anything?
They're telling you gifts is their language.
And what do they request of you most often?
Mommy, can we play a game together?
They're asking you for quality time.
You figure out their language, you give them heavy
doses of that language.
Then you sprinkle in the other four because we want the child
to learn how to receive love and give love in all five languages.
That's the healthiest adult. Okay?
So I believe that's the first essential to being a good parent.