What is love and how do we teach it to our kids?

We don't all start with a healthy concept of love. We often enter relationships with strong feelings and confidence, but we may not truly understand what love looks like and requires. Even when we have excellent examples of love from our parents, from God, and our childhood experiences, we still may not transfer that awareness into marriage or significant relationships.

Robert and Kimberley both share that despite opportunities to know what love looked like growing up, they still entered marriage with few actual skills to develop, maintain, and grow in healthy love with their spouses. Robert said he only started to understand what genuine love was about when the "bottom dropped out" for him and his marriage fell apart. Kimberley questions if she had a genuine grasp on God's deep love for her or how that could translate to loving anyone else. Sometimes it takes a crossroads or significant event to wake us up and help us realize that we really don't know how to love well – whether ourselves or another person. Becoming parents and adding kids to the mix makes it even more complex and more important.

How do we teach our kids what love really is, and how to love themselves and others well, when we may be wrestling with that as parents?
Paul Colman, single dad, former teacher, and Grammy-nominated artist joins Robert and Kimberley to talk about this further. We can't teach what we don't know. We may have head knowledge about love but until we have an experiential understanding of love, it will be very difficult to pass that lesson on to our kids. To really experience love, we must get to the end of ourselves and admit our needs. This requires us to pause, to make time to connect with that place inside of us that desperately needs the light to be switched on.

How do we pass along this experience to our kids?

We can only give from our own experience. Paul shares that as he began to accept God's love for him, bit by bit, he began to be a better conduit of that with his kids. When God reached out to him and showed him how much He loved him, Paul had nowhere else to go. Robert shared that this moment for him came when he became exhausted and when he had exhausted his pretense. He had run out of any ability to prop himself up or figure things out and this led him to surrender. Paul faced a similar moment and ever since he's been "trending in the right direction".

Transparency and humility makes the difference

For the complete show notes click - https://soloparentsociety.com/blog/2021/02/15/what-is-love-teaching-our-kids