Saturday 28 September 2013

Love Languages

If you've never heard of Author Gary Chapman's books on Love Languages, then I can definitely recommend it! In a nutshell, he explains that every person, in this case, a child, feels and expresses love in different ways.  We all have a 'love' tank that needs to be kept full and when it's not, this is emotionally expressed as bad behaviour.  
 
The 5 love languages are, in no particular order are; quality time, touch, expressions of love in words, gifts and finally, acts of service . Unfortunately, trying to decipher which is your child's dominant language can sometimes be hard to do, so I suggest that to ensure a balanced, happy child, you need to make sure all of them are expressed equally and regularly!  
 
To further explain what I mean by bad behaviour, let me share an incident with you. Before I fully appreciated the importance of expressing all the love languages, my daughter had been going through a particularly clingy, whiny phase. I was extremely pre-occupied at the time in setting up my own business, but when I realised how her behaviour had suddenly changed, I decided to have a heart to heart with her about it. When she shared how I had been neglecting her by not spending time with her, I resolved to change that. I quickly discovered that by just spending a half hour of quality one-on-one time with her daily, her original good behaviour quickly returned!

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