TRUE LOVE FOR OUR CHILDREN!!!

True Love for Our Children

Love for our children is doubtless, the purest and unconditional one. It doesn´t matter the risk or the sacrifice that it implies, we are always willing and listening to their hearts and needs. This feeling knows no limits, or malice, the best reward we get from it is to see them happy and fulfilled. We love them to the marrow.

We live a great deal of our lives for them, and it´s not a voluntary decision, it´s genetical affection. Society despise bad parents rather than bad children. The problem is that sometimes too much love can lead us to make mistakes. Excessively and uncontrolable love may become harmful, to the one who gives and to the one who receives it. Eg. The lady who sponsors drugs for her son, because she "loves him" and doesn´t want to see him suffer. An older father who still supports his 50 year old son (who never has worked because of laziness). A couple who spend their life savings so that their little girl could travel to Europe for her 15th year celebration.

I´m not saying that we have to lessen our affections, what we have to do is understand that sometimes the labor of being a parent takes courage, and wisdom, and sometimes, we have to overcome our feelings and focus on the fact that our feelings won´t harm our children. When we as parents, fail to apply our discipline or rules, with the excuse: "I can´t stand it to see him suffer" we become accomplices, and selfish, because we are thinking more in our benefit than in their well being.

We have to learn how to moderate this love, which shakes us every day, and makes us doubt and frightens us. There are negative feelings associated to us, specially to those parents who "love too much". One of those is fear to failure: "If I fail, I can create a trauma". When we think with our heart and not with our racional mind, we are most problably to make mistakes (thinking with the heart is highly risky).

The heart is deceitful above all things...
(Jeremiah 17:9 )

To educate is to have balance. Another negative feeling is pity, or sorrow: "I´m not capable to make him suffer" Nonetheless, even if it causes sorrow there is no other option. The teaching-learning process requires setting limits and if it generates some frustration in us, it´s a healthy sign. If the kid, becomes "sad" because he doesn´t have the last sneakers, let him be sad. And maybe, it would be the best time to evaluate if our family values scale is right.

And least but not last, there is another feeling: guilty. When we think "I shouldn´t have punished him" It is when regret doesn´t let us sleep and we began to re-evaluate how we behave with our child.

Excessive love make us lost the way and fail constantly in regret, even when we have proceeded right to correct the way of our children. Loving with responsability is to have the courage to educate, even when we feel the deepest pain in our soul. God is never wrong when he says: "The father who love his son, will discipline him..." It is the red thin line between serving our loved ones and to be pleasant with them. It's knowing when to embrace, and when to say "no". It´s the application of discipline, and the essencial kiss.

Love for our children always leads us to an implicit combination of pain and pleasure. It´s not a calvary, or despair, but a strange feeling of an "acomplished duty". We enjoy it and suffer at the same time. It´s the cycle. And when we get used to the loving hurrican that it raises, we have to go back to our senses, and real life. There won´t be ever a softer or a painless way to love them. To educate our children it´s a responsability before God:

Sons are a heritage from the Lord.
( Psalms 127: 3 ).

Train a child in the way
he should go,
and when he is old
he will not turn from it

(Proverbs 22: 6.)

by Henry Leguizamo