Why the Family is the First School of Love
Since there are not, and in my mind, it is hard to fathom that there ever will be, a multitude of schools that exist primarily for the purpose of cultivating the skills necessary for loving and fostering healthy relationships, one must be resigned to the fact that the family, by default functions as the primary school of love. This being the case, there are as many schools as there are families, most with some overlap in terms of the similarities and differences and very few that can be counted as being the same. It is within the confines of the family that love is defined. The family is where the meaning of love is given a structure and a shape.
This meaning-making is carried out in both verbal and non-verbal ways. The memory of childhood is imperfect and prone to alteration as time passes, but certain moments are indelible and leave lifetime impressions on the mind and the heart, and oftentimes these moments deal with the particular topic of love. What it is and what it isn’t. Looking back, I surely thought love was the feeling I got when my mother took care of me when I was sick, or on days when I wasn’t sick, the feeling I got when my father let me play hooky and stay home from school. Those moments are easy to recollect because of the positive association I have with them. Naturally my world was defined by emotion, and all my value judgments were subject to the approval of my feelings. It takes a long time to realize that love is more like the nights your mother worked overtime at the hospital, the club, the restaurant, the office, wherever, to make sure you had school clothes that fit, and possibly a new pair of shoes to go with them.
Most families are too busy trying to survive and advance, and ironically, trying to love, both individually and collectively, to pay much attention to the actual business of modeling what love is and what it isn’t. When one is accosted on all sides by the trivial and serious, the personal and the political, it is difficult to mind what is happening within the four walls of one’s home, and yet this is the task that is always important, until it becomes urgent.
This difficulty leads to confusion about love and acceptance of some faulty assumptions. The most common of these is the assumption that love is only ever about feeling good. This assumption is understandable on the part of a child who is more than anything else concerned about holding onto whatever good feeling they can find. For some children, the unbearable conditions they are forced to endure, in which they still manage to conjure up some amount of pleasure testifies to that fact.
But at some point, you have to realize that love is not always about feeling good and may in fact have very little to do with happiness, at least not the way we usually think of that word. Love produces a happiness that comes from giving rather than receiving. A fulfillment that comes from nurturing someone or something else rather than satisfying one’s own desires. This kind of love is difficult to understand and difficult to practice, and one comes into it gradually.
It is the responsibility of the family to help its members grow into this understanding. To gently disabuse its members of the faulty belief that love is synonymous with feeling good. What you find is that unhealthy families are ones where the adults themselves are just as preoccupied with feeling good as everyone else. This wish makes them incapable of guiding other family members towards a healthy definition of love. No one is able to receive the kind of nurturance that leads to growth and maturity and instead everyone within the family becomes locked in a battle to preserve their own pleasure. This is in essence a form of neglect that ensures long-term dysfunction due to the fact that everyone is stuck at the level of a child when it comes to understanding love, viewing it only through the prism of reward and punishment.
How to Communicate with Kids for Better Understanding
There are very few things that one does that consistently offer up in combination so many moments of doubt and uncertainty as parenting does. Children used to be hands, and now their mouths is what they say, and I can say that the calloused hands of my grandmothers and grandfathers testify to this fact; I asked one of them about what it was like growing up and she told me, without a hint of sadness, that she was promoted to the fourth grade, but had to quit school in order to go to work as a dishwasher to help the family. These were simply the choices that one made and all I will ever know about them, and all my children will ever know about them, are the secondhand accounts passed down by people, fewer and fewer of whom have actually been there.
Maybe children are only mouths now, which I would like to believe is a positive development rather than the pejorative it is meant to be, though comfort, ease, and progress rarely fit together nicely. What I do believe is true about children, then and now, is that the wishes that spring forth from their mouths are too quickly and too often silenced.
But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is not specifically about children but an issue with communication in general. It’s just that the inevitable breakdown of communication is most clearly seen in the relationship between adults and children, but really the issue is ubiquitous.
We are fearful of things we do not understand and do not want to know because they threaten our identity.
Language is difficult because it functions by way of impressions and constantly shifting meanings. It is an inexact articulation of one’s feelings that makes great demands of us. It is a system of symbols meant to be reordered and re-used for many purposes from moment to moment. Sometimes this all occurs in the same moment–people have these scripts in their head that co-mingle without coexisting, hence the conflict, which seems to evoke one of two reactions–fear or anger. We are fearful of things we do not understand and do not want to know because they threaten our identity. Very often anger serves as a rallying cry in defense of the identity we so badly want to preserve. We think we are angry when we don’t get what we want, but it’s more than that. Anger is connected to our identity, much of which we can recognize by answering the question, what do we want? It seems like wanting is the most basic element of a person’s identity. You’re born, and you’re given a name, a place to stay, and parents to provide for you, which compromises an identity, or a role maybe, but it’s not your identity, and your feelings aren’t either. Your identity doesn’t come in until you make decisions about what it is you want in life.
The unwillingness to tolerate anger is what clears the way for harm to be done in relationships, not the presence of it.
Therefore, to deny one’s wants is to deny one’s identity, and one of the many things that children seem to know better than adults, is the rage that accompanies this refusal of one’s right to exist. For anyone to be shocked by the anger of a child’s response to this, says a lot about how out of touch we can be with the reality of others. The unwillingness to tolerate anger is what clears the way for harm to be done in relationships, not the presence of it. Which is how you arrive at a place where you offer one-sided ultimatums as solutions, where you secure hollow victories that lead to bitterness and resentment instead of communication and understanding. It is better to extend a hand to embrace than a boot to lick, but people don’t even realize it as they’re doing it.
Yesterday I watched my daughter become more and more angry as she struggled and failed to find a shirt she wanted to wear. Her style is ever-changing and sometimes nothing she chooses can satisfy her current sensibilities. I watched her rummage through her drawers in vain and when I offered to help her she turned to me and screamed “No!”
She was feeling angry, and most importantly, beneath her anger, she was feeling painfully insecure. In her mind, my offer to help must have felt like someone shining a light on her insecurity, so she lashed out in order to protect herself. Why would she let anyone see her in such a vulnerable state?
Okay, I can follow that, and I can understand that she couldn’t find the words to say and how getting into her bed and throwing the blankets over her head seemed like the best thing for her at that moment, but I still had a decision to make for myself. In that moment I had to decide how I would communicate, if I would meet her anger and frustration with my own. If I would demand that she respect me, which has nothing to do with actually being respected and everything to do with being feared. If I would ignore the feelings of my four year old just so I could feel a little more comfortable myself.
I sat quietly next to her and waited for what couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, though discomfort does turn any amount of time into an eternity. But after a few seconds had passed in silence, she poked her head out from underneath the blankets, looked me square in the eyes, and started talking to me. She talked about how she was feeling angry, and how she was learning in school that she should take deep breaths to calm down when she feels angry.
“Have you tried it?” I asked.
“This is my first time trying.” Then she took a deep breath and another after that. Then we took one together, and she was quickly able to calm down.
The rest of the evening was easy. There was laughter and there was bickering over little things, and none of it came at the cost of hurting anyone else’s feelings.
The Emotional Toll of Mixed Messages: How Conflicting Parental Signals Affect Mental Health
While walking through the grocery store, I saw something I’ve often seen, that struck me differently this time. A young boy, probably no more than four years of age, was being chauffeured around by the people I presume were his parents, when the man who was likely his father, given his appearance, shoved him as he walked past him further down the aisle. He might have been playing around, but the kid didn’t take it that way. He was upset and to the best of his limited abilities gathered whatever strength he could find and used it to verbally snap back at his father in a small act of dissent. Whatever he said must have registered as a challenge because the father quickly closed the gap between them and dug his hand into the chest of the child, overshadowing his growing frustration. All of this took place in front of me within the span of a few seconds, but it was enough time for an important message to be sent.
This type of messaging creates more problems than it solves. Young children like this boy are constantly learning through their environment, especially through their family. Mostly through what family members do to each other and how they ascribe meaning to those behaviors. Messages that simultaneously communicate it is okay for an adult to hit a child unprovoked, that it is not okay for a child to respond in anger, but it is okay for the adult to retaliate, are mixed up and confusing. Not for the adult who sees no issue with such a self-serving arrangement, but for the child who is forced to make sense of it on their own. An unenviable task for a child, to mentally corral a storm visited upon them by the person tasked with loving them.
Mixed messages can be hidden under the guise of positivity. Some children eventually grow to feel tormented by the message that positive feelings are the only acceptable ones.
Maybe this man is nothing himself but an amalgamation of mixed messages that he received, handed down to him by the adults in his life. It’s impossible to know, but what I suspect will happen over time, from knowledge and intuition, is something like this. The child will eventually internalize these messages if they receive them frequently enough and learn that he must submit to and appease others in order to survive and endure relationships. At least until he is strong enough to imitate them, which will be his form of open rebellion against those who have caused him pain.
Whichever way it plays out, the amount of emotion a child suppresses to handle this situation is immense and this early and persistent lack of expression leads to emotional difficulties. Later, other people will be subjected to these difficulties and will be forced to reckon with them out of their own sense of love and duty. This sets the stage for a sinking pit of reoccurring pain. It gives credence to the generational curses that people speak about, and the idea that trauma is sometimes transmitted through the family, whose rules and behaviors give traumatic experiences their structure and shape. And it is difficult to disentangle, undo, and replace the influence of decades of lessons learned in such harsh ways.
Mixed messages can be hidden under the guise of positivity. Some children eventually grow to feel tormented by the message that positive feelings are the only acceptable ones. They are praised for being sweet, kind, strong, and pretty, or some variation of these things, and taught that this is a standard of behavior they must always reach. Frequently they are punished for falling short of these things, either receiving criticism for being unlike this idealistic image or abandonment by being ignored until they can behave better. They are left to deal with their emotions on their own, like the boy in the grocery store.
The message to them is clear. I love you because you are good. I love you when you are pleasing, which pleases me. I love you for me. A child who associates love with good feelings only is no better equipped for life than a child who associates love with pain. They will seek out the familiarity of this mental programming in their future experiences and find themselves equally frustrated and unsure of what to do.