When looking at your child’s behavior, have you ever considered their emotional health? Certainly, there are many factors that influence emotional health, but over the years we have seen many situations were focusing on your child’s love language can greatly improve their overall disposition and behavior.
You’ve probably heard of The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, by Gary Chapman. Or perhaps you took the test as a part of a pre-marital class. According to Dr. Chapman, Love is expressed in 5 universal emotional languages and each of us has a primary love language:
1. Encouraging Words – building others up through verbal encouragement.
2. Acts of Service – doing something special for another person that you know they will appreciate.
3. Gift Giving – This is often a simple gesture that says “I love you” and “I was thinking of you when we were apart.”
4. Quality Time – Spending meaningful time with another, free of distraction, doing
something they enjoy doing.
5. Physical Touch and Closeness – Touch can be expressing love through holding hands, an embrace, just standing close to each other or next to one another on the couch.
“Speaking” a love language is how we express love and affirmation to another in their emotional language. Your own primary love language is the one you express to others most often and the one that makes you feel the most loved when you receive it. Many times when couples feel like they are missing each other on an emotional level, it can be the result of expressing love in their own primary love language and not their spouse’s love language. As a result, the love message, while nice, it’s not fully appreciated as it was intended.
And while we may tend to think of primary love languages being for only for adults, our children (typically emerging about 5 years of age) have a primary love language too. Children need mom and dad to emotionally connect with them through all the love languages, but as they get older you can see one or two love languages begin to emerge as being primary. We like to think of each love language as a cup that needs to be filled. In order for them to feel fully loved and affirmed unconditionally, we to make sure we keep all those cups full! But over time you’ll begin to see one “cup” that needs filling more often than the others – their primary love language.
Fingernails, Behavior and Love Languages
Sometimes when a child’s primary love language cup is unintentionally not getting filled as often as it should, children can manifest poor behavior and attitudes. Case in point, we had a couple in our parenting class who shared with us that they were having a very difficult time with their five year old daughter. She would have out of control emotional outbursts throughout the day and they were becoming more frequent. The parents were at a loss to figure out why this behavior emerged all of a sudden. They could not figure out why this good natured, mostly compliant little girl had become so difficult. It wasn’t until they had us over for dinner that we were able to see exactly what was happening.
Within a few minutes of our arrival, this sweet little girl began to show us her painted fingernails and telling us about the special time with her mom painting her nails. We had a wonderful time at their home and could see the loving home environment they had created. But it also became clear to us that this little girl’s primary love language was quality time!
The next day we shared with the parents that this little girl needed more quality time… especially with mom. Even though mom was homeschooling and with the children all day, the three other children were boys and they tended to do more “boy activities.” So this little girl’s quality time cup was not getting filled. She knew mom and dad loved her, but needed to feel cherished and loved when her mom spent that special time with her alone and painted her nails.
We’re happy to say, that the mom and dad each started to spend more intentional quality time with their daughter, doing the things that she loved to do. Within a few days, the mom called us and reported how their daughter’s behavior and attitude drastically improved as if the unwanted behavior/attitude faucet was turned off!
Love Languages may not seem like a big deal, but thinking of them in terms of how we may be taking them for granted is worth revisiting. Yes, our spouse and children may know that we love them, but are we choosing to love them intentionally in their own love language. Doing so can head off unwanted behaviors in our children and create more harmony within the home!
Over the years we’ve discovered that our Love Languages can change depending upon the season of life we are living. For example, prior to Covid, we may have been Quality Time, but now it might be Acts of Service. That’s why we retake the love languages test a couple times a year as a family. Then we go around the dinner table discussing ways we would like to see our love languages demonstrated. This kept everyone mindful of each family member’s Love Language. We even posted them on our refrigerator! We have the Love Language tests (adults & kids) available on our resource page. Depending upon your kids ages, you may need to add, adjust, or modify the questions to make them more applicable.
“The Object of love is not getting something you want, but doing something for the well-being of the one you love.” -Gary Champman, PhD
Blessings and Love to Your Family,
Shelly & Rich