February is love month…whatever that means. Valentine’s Day is a holiday celebrated worldwide on February 14th. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered there are many women who feel pain on Valentine’s Day. It reminds them that they are alone and makes them feel unloved.
It’s also a challenge for parents. What does a mom do about Valentine’s Day? Who does your first grader give a Valentine’s card to – just the kids they like or everyone? What if they don’t get Valentine’s cards from other children? How does a parent deal this whole event in a way that helps the child learn something?
What if Valentine’s Day was utilized to talk about doing love acts rather than getting love tokens? One of the biggest challenges parents face today is to train children to be self-sacrificing rather than self-centered. One parent said it well, “My twelve-year-olds favorite thought is ‘Me! Me! Me!’”
February offers parents a great training tool to teach what love really means to their children. Rather than commercializing it and making it about how many cupid and heart cards a child collects, use it as a teaching opportunity of one of life’s greatest lessons – showing acts of love. Imagine how much fun your family would have by using February or “Valentine’s month” to focus on how each family member could demonstrate love to others the best way possible?
Let’s begin with the rational for this effort in training about what love is by learning what it isn’t. Love is not selfish. From a developmental point of view: Self-centered people are never happy. They are never able to indulge themselves enough. Families filled with self-centered children are not fun to be around. Everyone is out for themselves. Each sibling competes to see who can get the most attention. Self-centered people grow up to be users: people who use those around them to find happiness.
Families that don’t attempt to train their children about what it means to love other people end up raising adults who function with adolescent mindsets. When a person’s constant thought is me, he or she is very unmarriageable. Part of training a child into adulthood is to teach a child to think of others rather than be obsessed with self.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8a states, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
Christ was asked what the most important thing is for each of us to do. He responded by saying first and foremost is to love God. Then He said second was to express that love for God by loving the people around us (by loving our neighbor) (Matthew 22:39). Why teach our children to learn how to express love to the people around them? It is a command from God himself.
Another reason this must be taught, is because children today need to learn to separate the action of loving another person from the act of sex. Sex and love are not synonymous. In fact, they are quite often in conflict. Sex can easily be something a person takes rather than gives.
As we face February and love month, our children are going to see a lot of diamonds being marketed on television. They could be left with the opinion that love is something expressed with money – first, with the purchase of a card – years later, with the purchase of a gem. Love is so much more than that; and it has to be taught.
Love is something that a person does to serve the needs of another person. Children need to see their parents love each other by serving each other as part of the training process.
It just might be that Valentine’s Day presents one of the year’s great parent training opportunities – a time to teach our children that love is something you do…not something you feel. If we don’t, who will? If we neglect to teach this life lesson, we will actually hamper the potential for our children’s future happiness. They could spend a lifetime waiting to be loved and miss the fact that it is actually their responsibility and privilege to love – starting with the people around them…their neighbors.
