Love and Self Esteem

"Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me." Mark 9:37 (King James Version)

If a child feels loved she or he is far more likely to feel safe and secure. To have healthy self esteem and eventually succeed in this lifetime. How can we share more love with our children? How can we show our children we love them? Those three words are easy to say. And just maybe we can supplement the verbal assurance with acts of love! Sometimes actions really do speak louder than words!

“Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth.” — 1 John 3:18

Communication is essential to the expression of love and indeed to life itself. Where there is love, there must be communication, because love can never be passive and inactive. Love inevitably expresses itself and moves out toward others. When communication breaks down, love is blocked.

A brief story of 2 families.

In one, the parents helped their children work through their difficulties with each other, thus assuming a shared, two-way dialogue and responsibility for what happened between them. In late teenhood, each child in turn became a person in his own right who had achieved a relatively mature, congenial, and loving relation with every other member of the family.

In the second family, the parents could not face the conflicts inevitable to human nature in a growing family, and pretended a quality of relationship that did not exist between them. When their children became late teen-agers and older, a smoldering antagonism existed between them which occasionally broke out in venomous quarrels. The parents of this second family had not assumed any shared or 2-way responsibility for the content of their family life, with the result that the interaction between the growing person and his environment was not creative.

One objective of love is to provide a relationship of firmness and tolerance within which a child may become autonomous and acquire a sense of self-control, self-esteem, and relationship with others. Otherwise he may suffer loss of confidence in himself and become skeptical of others, a result which can be the fruit of either restrictive discipline or unstructured freedom.

One key outcome of a healthy love enables our children to emerge with such a power of being as a person that they shall be able to face the complexities, pressures, deprivations, and dangers of modern life. Our aim is to help the child become a responsible participant in the crucial issues of life, and to preserve his integrity as a deciding person. The answer to his questions, Who am I? and Who are you?, will then be: I am what I will, and you are what you will!