Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting,
family communication and good relationship building all over the world through the lens
of self-government. In this video we're going to be talking about teaching children about love.
In this video we're going to learn about how to present the concept of love to children
but also about things that you can do in your family culture to increase love at your house.
The principle of love is something that everyone recognizes when they feel it, when they get close
to it. We know when we feel loved or appreciated by somebody else. In fact appreciation has a lot to do
with love. If we don't appreciate someone, chances are we aren't feeling very loving
about that person at the time. So, how do you share what love really is to a child? How do you explain
it to them? Well hopefully in your family, you have a habit of expressing love in any of the
different ways that you can. So, there's a book all about loved languages where there are five
languages of love that are identified. So there's words of affirmation, service, quality time, physical
touch and then gifts. Those are five ways that people show love to each other and I think most
people think gifts is the quickest and the easiest but it's actually the least common of those love
languages. So for the majority of people, they're going to want some sort of a connection with you,
whether it's a piece of your time or some of your words or even just a warm embrace.
So in your family, talk about how there's different ways that we express love to each other and
that we want to know how each other likes to feel loved. Usually one of the ways to know that
is to identify how that person shows love to you. Do they give you service to try to surprise you?
Well then probably service is high on the list of the ways that they like to receive love too. If you
can identify that about your family members then you have the chance of helping them understand
love a little bit deeper, also understanding that there's the way that we feel love and the
way that we express love to other people. Those can be two different things depending on who it
is that we're trying to express our love to. Many people associate love with attraction but I think
it's important for children to understand that attraction can actually not have anything to do
with love. Attraction can be purely physical, it can be something that the eyes or you know a sense of
structure or design can present to a person. They can say I like that, there's something about that
that pulls me in, it intrigues me, that can be attraction, that's different than love. So many
people get attracted to objects and people, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have
full love. So what is love? Love is actually this deeper bond that you have with another person
where you care about the success of that person. It's more of a self-less act than a selfish act.
When people associate love with attraction, they actually are making love selfish.
It's what I get out of it, I want that thing over there or that person over there but when people
focus on real love, they start being self-less and thinking how can I give to that person,
what can I do to make that person's day better? It's a giving, it's something that makes you
a better version of yourself because you put some of yourself aside to become that person, that's
when love truly is real and that's why we see the deepest love within family bonds usually.
I'm going to talk a little bit about what love does for a person and some other ideas for how
you can help your children nurture love in your family but before I do, click on that subscribe
button now. There are a lot of great videos that come out on this channel all the time, you are not
going to want to miss them they'll help strengthen your family culture and your relationships. Click
on that link now. An author named Natan Sharansky who was a religious freedom fighter and a Jew
back in the 1980s over in the Soviet Union and who was imprisoned in the gulag the day after
he got married for his religious freedom views wrote a book called Defending Identity. In this
book, he talks about a person's identity and how that identity is actually born from love.
So even though people try to equate identity to love in an attraction sense nowadays, they're
kind of missing the mark. They're going in the right direction but it's a miss.
When a person develops identity, they develop that identity through the bonds that happen in their
deepest relationship. So, family actually instills identity in a person more than anything else. So he
said that when he was imprisoned in the Gulag, the guards that were trying to get him to be afraid
of them to recant his statements on religious liberties. He said you know they're trying to make
me afraid of them but what they don't understand is I'm not going to be afraid of them because I
fear my God more. I know who I am, my family taught me about what it meant to be part of their family
and that our family loves God and they helped me develop a relationship and an identity with God
and that identity with God and that identity with family helped me know who I was and so
I would not back down. So, he talked about identity as this understanding of self-evident truths that
were born out of the nurturing and deep love that happen in a family, not out of attraction
or pacifying some sort of a physical desire or feeling of need. No, it's deeper than that. So when
a person loves family and loves God, they end up developing a better identity with themselves. They
have more of a moral footing to stand on and at that point, they end up loving other people around
them more too because you don't ever love other people if you're not secure in who you are.
People who are constantly worried about what everyone else is thinking about them stay in
a selfish place and they don't give of love as freely. So, what's one key thing that you can do?
You can definitely nurture those relationships in your family. Make sure they are your top priority.
All the lessons and you know musical instruments and sports and all those things are not as
important as the family. So if the family relationships are struggling, if the feeling
of love in the home is struggling, scale back all that other stuff for a time. Take a year off
and just focus on the family, prioritize. Teach them to become the kind of person that will lead them
to successful relationships and employment and everything for their future. It's all found in
love and identity. One of the key things you can do in your home is set an example
of love which means you have to be willing to sacrifice and serve the other people around you.
This doesn't mean that you become the slave and they do nothing, everybody should be serving and
sacrificing. And if we're having a hard time with people following instructions and sacrificing for
each other we might want to create a picture of who we're becoming as a family. So, I talk about
in my teaching self-government parenting course, I talk about creating a vision of who we're becoming
as a family. This 20-year vision gives the family a reason why they would care about adjusting some of
the ways that they communicate with each other. So, I highly recommend getting deliberate about
the direction you're pointing that entire family group. Another thing that's super important for
love and that feeling of love in the family is gratitude. Gratitude is the seed of love. If you are
not grateful for a person, then you're not going to love them. If you can't show gratitude, chances
are you're not feeling love for that person at the time, you're feeling selfishness instead.
So if your family is struggling with gratitude then you know you've got a love problem
and one of the ways to fix the love problem is to increase the gratitude. Just teaching someone to
say thank you is okay but it's not quite as much as actually spending time as a family, talking
about what you are grateful to each other for. Be open with your praise for other people and teach
them as siblings to praise each other as well. When we talk about the good things that people
do and don't just gripe about the stuff that bugs us, that actually promotes a culture of gratitude
which in the end increases love. Years ago, I did treatment foster care for troubled teens as I
was raising my own family at the same time and there was one of my foster children that was
very difficult to love. She had some extreme behaviors. She was a diagnosed kleptomaniac,
she had compulsive lying problems, she has some other processing issues that she was dealing with
and every day when she came home from school, she had stolen something. So, we had to search her every
single day to make sure that we found everything that was stolen so that we could help her conquer
this problem with the kleptomania. It was difficult. I started not looking forward to her coming home
from school and so I realized that I actually wasn't grateful for her. I wasn't feeling love
for her and I knew that if I didn't love her, I couldn't help her. So, I created a plan for myself
that every day at 3:45, I would go to my room and I would pray and ask god to give me some of his love
for her, that I would pray for love for her until I felt it which usually took me about 15 minutes and
at four o'clock, she would walk in the door so then I was ready to love her no matter what I would
find, I wouldn't take it personal. I could see her as a person that I was grateful for because I knew
she had value to God. Sometimes just going back to a higher authority than ourselves helps remind us
about the value that other people have so that we can love them and be grateful for them. So
if you have a child or someone in your life that's hard to love, make sure that you seek some help
from a higher authority than yourself in order to increase that love when you're having a difficult
time. Love is instrumental for creating strong bonds in the family and it means that we can't be
selfish. When a person loves another person, they're willing to give. If the family is learned to love
the family unit then they'll be willing to give. If they haven't learned that yet, you might need to
take some steps in that direction and scale back in other places that are distracting your focus
from the family unit. In an effort to help you with this, I would like to help you improve calmness.
Calmness is vital for having a family where they're bonded together and loving
each other, solving problems in a calm and effective manner can make all the difference.
I have a calm parenting toolkit and I want to give it to you for fre.
In the description below this video, there is a link that says teachselfgov.com/toolkit,
that will take you to the calm parenting toolkit for free. Click on the link to that
toolkit now so that you can start getting the the skills and principles that you need to help
improve your calm communication and to help your family too so that the love can increase now.