We need to make sure our kids feel our love for them
When we feel love, we feel “home,” in the all-is-well zone. Love is our birthright, a compass guiding our search for connection to Hashem, to other people, and to ourselves. When love is missing, we know in our heart of hearts that something is “off” or possibly terribly wrong. The need to access this feeling of love — in wholeness and perfection — drives our daily behavior and large life goals. We love to love and be loved and, in fact, we’re not healthy unless we can do both.
Many of us grow up feeling unloved or insufficiently loved. We leave our childhood homes aching, undernourished from lack of love. In many cases, this isn’t because our parents didn’t love us. Rather, it happens because parents fail to convey their love.
But how does a parent perform this task? How would a child know just how loved he or she actually is?
“My mother didn’t get me,” says Goldie. “She’d take me to the hairdresser to get my hair trimmed and tell the hairdresser to chop it really short. I was desperate to have long hair, but she insisted it needed to be short because my thick curls were too hard to manage. She never seemed to care about how I felt, and so I felt she never really loved me.”
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