Conditional love, have you already familiarized with this term? Why you, as parents, should avoid it?
Conditional love, have you already familiarized with this term? Why you, as parents, should avoid it? Parents who apply conditional love will only give and show their affection if their children become obedient ones, have high achievement or have given pride to their family. Otherwise, these kinds of parents will only give much reduced affection or the worst, the child will be neglected.
It may not mention straightly, but in their daily life, in attitude or words expression, these parents will show their disappointment if their child can’t fulfill the parents’ expectation. For example, the child failed to enter the favorite school or the child didn’t include in top ten ranks at class.
An expert said: if these parents ask to their child is translated into question form, it will become:
“How can you make us proud?”
NOT
“How can you be happy?”
Can you see the big differences here?
One of the reasons why there are still parents that raise their child with conditional love is the strong influence of society values that always connect meaning of success with an academic achievement (in form of academic titles, certificates), an occupation and material achievement (the ownership of luxury cars, big houses, etc).
With such material orientation; people around us tend to respect more to someone who physically appears in various achievements, occupations or wealth assets. It’s the fact that truly happens in our society: the materialism! Moreover, it’s still dominant until now. In order to reach all those material attributes, consciously or unconsciously, parents will push their child to enter the best school, to be the best student, etc.
So, you may want to know, what will possibly happen with the child that raised in a family with conditional love?
· The child won’t be given a chance to choose.
· The child happiness isn’t emphasized here; in fact, the child becomes a tool to fill the parents’ need of self pride.
· The child won’t be whole accepted, because the parents use terms on almost everything.
· The child is raised to meet a society demand in order to get society acknowledgement as a person with wealth, academic achievement and occupation.
· Being pushed to meet the demand, the child will not be able to recognize her/his personal needs, in other words, the child is not used to recognize her/his feeling and emotion.
· The child may suffer unbalance in intelligence development and emotional intelligence. This poor emotional intelligence may encourage the child to have an extreme and rebel attitude.
· The child feel heavily burdened by the parents’ demands. He or she will try to let go of the burden; it may also encourage the child to be a problematic child one day.
You can see now, how destructive conditional love is. Children happiness must be parents’ most priority. Don’t demand our children too much, parents should give their children secure and freedom to develop their talents and abilities (of course, as parents, you still direct properly your children).
