Why Your Child Needs Love & Character
The shield of love & character is the greatest protection we can give
Love is a shield.
But not every parent loves their children.
Children who grow up without feeling loved adapt every circuit in their body to survival.
The four year old who doesn’t feel love from his father asks himself, “what’s so wrong with me that I’m unlovable?”
It is safer to a helpless to child to turn the pain inwards than to, more appropriately, ask, “what is so wrong with my father that he feels the need to humiliate and crush the spirit of a curious four year old?”
What begins as survival becomes habit and the 40 year old accomplished Managing Director wonders why he still feels so useless.
Is the world friendly or hostile?
Albert Einstein said:
“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or a hostile universe.”
Unknowingly, children answer that question based on the love they receive.
How can a child who feels threat and fear at every turn find the confidence to move forward?
J.K.Rowling understood this question when she set the premise for Harry Potter as the Boy Who Lived.
Love received isn’t just a feeling. It is the keystone of the arch that protects a boy as he moves through the world.
He feels the world is working for him or against him.
And this attitude is a seed that grows an oak tree of hemlock all the same.
Character
We’ve seen what’s love got to do, got to do, got to do with it.
But what about character?
If love is the emotional keystone, character is every other stone in the building.
Aristotle defines character (ethos) as a stable disposition or habit (hexis) of the soul, formed through habituation, that determines our voluntary choices and actions.
Love gives us the emotional foundation to move through the world, character defines how we move through it.
If you know your Aristotle, you know that a person of good character finds the golden mean between the vices of deficiency and excess.
It means that, when a parent is gone, the child knows how to find the right action forward in any circumstance.
Never too cowardly, never too reckless.
Never too lazy, never too greedy.
Never too ashamed, never too arrogant.
The child of character finds the golden mean, habitually, which means it forms part of who they are for life.
When we are gone, the love and character we give their children is all that remains.