Preparing Kids for Love

Eliminating (some of) the confusion

This post was first sent as a newsletter on Valentine’s Day. It mainly targets heterosexual girls because of the tenacious fairytale that society has created for them, but much of it is applicable to kids of all genders.

Valentine's Day, commercial as it may be, is important to kids. It starts with giving paper hearts in preschool and morphs into offering a tender human heart in adolescence and young adulthood, or painfully wishing someone else would would offer theirs.

As our kids develop their first crushes, start to date, and fall in love, we watch with hope, excitement, and trepidation. Will they get hurt? Will they choose someone good to them or pine for someone unkind or unavailable? How can we set them up to understand love when we don't half the time?

We've created a rich fantasy for girls that says a man’s love (after sufficient tests of her own love and patience) will transform her from invisible peasant into princess beloved by all the kingdom (and her relationship will magically look very different from her parents’.) 

Romance and inequality are deeply entwined so how can we shatter the glass slipper without belittling the fun of romance and the importance of deeply loving relationships?

Choosing to nurture love is a very different message than the fairytale premise that we love instinctually. It’s far more difficult to choose love—to compromise, to listen, to tolerate foibles and farts—after the heart-thumping stops. Many of my adult female patients have told me they walked away from solid, healthy relationships with partners they loved because their experience didn't match the cultural ideology. Or conversely, they stayed too long because they thought love meant you should never give up on it, even if it means you are shamed and demeaned.

Teens are unprepared for love.

Too often my teen and young adult patients are unprepared for the focused, tender, subtle, generous work of learning how to love and be loved and developing a mature romantic relationship. The good news is, they want to hear from us. 70% of high school and college students reported wishing they had received more information from their parents about some emotional aspect of a romantic relationship including starting relationships, dealing with breakups, avoiding being hurt, and how to have a more mature relationship. Kids want to know about how to love and be loved.

Defining love

In my forthcoming book, I have a whole section on this but for now, perhaps the best way to explain love to our daughters—to all our children—is to invoke the renown author bell hooks’ words, “Love is a verb.” hooks argues that “our confusion about what we mean when we use the word 'love' is the source of our difficulty in loving.” 

We do our children no favors by having them enter adolescence believing romantic love is an indefinable and mystical thing. They don’t know what to look for or how to know whether their intense feelings for someone else are likely to lead to healthy or unhealthy romantic relationships. When we help them understand that love is an action (which sometimes means inaction, restraint, and self-control); that love must be demonstrated and used to guide how people interact with each other—not just something someone says they feel—they will be better able to assess their romantic relationships, rather than be swept away by big feelings.

We can tell our kids that the butterflies, fireworks, and grand gestures are lovely, but that it’s their sweetheart's day-to-day actions that will tell them how he really feels. Ask them if he’s paying attention to what matters. Tell them what matter to you—when he gets my humor, when she memorizes how much milk I take in my coffee, when they put their phone aside to listen to what’s upsetting me, when it's clear my personal growth is important to him. Then explore what matters to them.

Although it may seem obvious, they need to be reminded often that a marker of a healthy relationship is when they feel more hopeful, caring, generous and self-respecting, not chronically desperate and self-doubting.

A destructive dynamic...and how to deal with it

Over and over (and over), I see girls in therapy who are frustrated because they sense a boy has feelings for them but is afraid of getting close or won't commit. Of course, people of all genders, not just boys/men, can have intimacy issues. But in straight relationships this is the dynamic I see most often.

As a culture we've created a massive power differential in heterosexual couples by making relationships disproportionately important for girls, and making any whiff of their own dependency humiliating for boys. Girls' ability to empathize with boys' fears can make it harder for them to get angry and walk away. Instead, they’re spurred to want to prove their love in order to help him feel safer so they can finally have the love story they’re meant to.

Girls should hear from us that they should never have to grovel for love. Love is a verb comes in handy here. We can tell them, whether we're talking about it in the abstract with little kids or in a particular situation with a teenager, that it doesn’t matter if someone feels love, if he can’t show it most of the time. Tell them it doesn’t matter, even if they understand his trauma. You can’t teach intimacy, no matter how beautiful, smart or caring you are; people must learn to tolerate it for themselves. 

You might be thinking that no matter how well we educate our children to assess a love interest, love cares little for our left-brain logic. I agree. AND I have to believe that the seeds we plant will sprout before our children establish dysfunctional patterns that are difficult to break.