Can We Love Our Kids Better?

What love is and isn’t, why bad definitions of kindness often hurt our kids, and how you can shape your child’s character without trying to change their personality.

Hello Bar-Setters! 

We all love our kids. We all love our families. But we, also, often fall short of loving them in the way that we want to love them. 

This is inevitable, to some degree. As Mitch Albom explains:

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers.

We can’t expect perfection, but we can all improve our ability to make the impact that we want to. With a little intentionality, we can all love better. 

What is Love?

With abstract concepts like love, it can be helpful to start by defining terms. 

Jay Shetty, the author of 8 Rules of Love, defines love as three things:

1. When you like someone’s personality.

2. When you respect their values.

3. When you want to commit to helping them achieve their goals.

As he says: “That is love in action… in practice… in reality.”

Shetty is talking about romantic love, which is different from how you love your kids. Still, this definition is helpful for a few reasons:

1. According to Dr. Robert Waldinger Jr., your relationships influence your happiness more than any other factor. Which means….

2. Put your marriage first, because having a better relationship with your spouse will make you happier and help you love your kids better. 

3. But, also… you want to help our kids become loveable! Sure, you love them unconditionally. But wouldn’t you like to love and respect your kids for who they are too? That means…

4. The best gift you can give your kids is to help them become the type of person who you like, respect, and can support in achieving their goals.

Implicit in Shetty’s definition is that when you love someone, you are committed to helping them develop. As he says:

“When you like a flower, you simply pluck it. When you love a flower, you water it and do all you can to help it grow and thrive.”

To recap:

• If you like something you pluck it. You take from it. You use it in order to get something (maybe just a positive feeling) in return. You’re transactional.

• If you love something, you are invested in its development. Warm and fuzzy feelings are a wonderful byproduct, but they are not the point of your relationship.

Kindness 2.0

A focus on development is missing from the bulldozer youth development paradigm that dominates today. In this paradigm, parents and grandparents put the child’s immediate gratification over his or her long term development. As I wrote in chapter 2 of Setting the Bar:

More than anything, our failed youth development paradigm results from a perversion of kindness. It often appears kind to give people what they want, whether that is a grade they didn’t earn, “kids food” for dinner, unlimited video games, or the absence of expectations. On occasion, this might not be such a big deal. But as a pattern, following the overprovide and overprotect youth development paradigm is one of the least kind things we can do.

Which brings me to another wonderful definition of love. Author and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks says: 

“Love is willing the good for another.”

How to Will the Good for Your Kids

To love our kids—to will the good for them—we must start by answering:

• What is “the good?”

Sounds ominous. Perhaps we can make this question a bit more accessible. It may be more useful to ask yourself:

• What does it mean to live a good life?

• What values, pursuits, and projects matter most?

• How do we help our children value these things?

In short, you have to determine:

• What kind of people do you want your children to become?

It sounds really progressive for parents to talk about how they don’t try to influence their children or to create any specific qualities in their children—that they just want to support each child and allow their personality to naturally unfold. But whether we like it or not, we all influence our kids. 

Do you watch the NFL or tennis, or both? Do you go to bookstores or the arcade, or both? Do you spend more time and money on exercise or video games? Do you prioritize family dinner or select sports? If you have $5000 for vacation do you go to Disney or to Kauai?

Life requires us to make choices. Those choices, inevitably, influence our kids’ values. So, since we’re influencing them anyway, it makes sense to be intentional about how we influence them. It makes sense to decide what virtues and values you want to instill in your kids and to parent accordingly.

Engineering Your Kids vs. Gardening Your Kids

But I’m not saying you should try to influence everything about your kids. You can respect your kid’s individual personality while still cultivating the qualities that matter most. 

For example, I will proudly support my son, Ace, whether he decides to pursue basketball or piano; Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or improv; law or small-time entrepreneurship. I’ll be happy whether Ace is a reserved introvert or someone who comes alive in social situations. 

But I’m also quite determined to cultivate certain values, skills, and inclinations. I want Ace to be:

• Polite, honest, and tough

• Confident, resilient, and purpose-driven

• Grateful, passionate, and connected

• Disciplined, kind, and wisdom-oriented

• Active and committed to maintaining his health and wellbeing

• A reader and a lifelong learner

• Fun-loving with a good sense of humor

• Capable of leading a group

• Capable of giving a speech at a wedding

• Capable of living alone, moving, and adapting to novel circumstances

Most of all I want Ace to commit to becoming the best version of himself. I wish him “success,” but I’m more concerned that he develops a clear sense of right and wrong and that he has the courage to do what is right. 

I’d much prefer for Ace to face frequent adversity in pursuit of worthy causes than to be a lottery winner who is content with a life of ease.

For me to love Ace best, I need to clarify what it means to live a good life. I need to have an idea of what matters most. I need to help him become a certain kind of person.

But I need to balance these goals with a respect for Ace's authentic personality.

I want to parent like a gardener. Rather than try to engineer who Ace will be, I want to provide the right “soil” for him to thrive. The soil is complex. Ace needs to be loved for who he is. But he also needs clear ideas about what it means to live a good life.

Loving Ace means willing the good for him. And to do that, I have to have an idea of what is good. I won’t have it exactly right, but my kids will be better off for my efforts, as will yours.

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Thank you very much for reading and sharing with any kindred spirits!

For more on love and Kindness 2.0, check out chapter 2 of my book and What Subcultures Raise the Best Kids.

Carry the fire!

Shane