Teaching children to love
Teaching children to love
By Peggy J. LeVrier
The September 11th tragedy encourages me to remind parents the importance of teaching love to their children. Love is essential to balance the complexities of an ever-changing world. Children need love to feel positive and hopeful about their future.
IQ, or intelligent quotient, is a person's level of intellect. Parents do all they can to increase their child's intellect, which is a good thing for them to do. We must also remember the child's EQ, or their emotional quotient. The level of a child's IQ is directly affected by his EQ.
EQ, or our emotions, are the "spices" in our personalities. Without these emotions, our lives would be insensible; going through life with no feelings about ourselves, or our environment. Based on the premises that our emotions are founded on our beliefs and purposes, we can deduce that both appropriate and inappropriate behavior serves a purpose. A human's innate responses or reactions to the environment reflect their needs to be accepted as a valued individual regardless of our belief. For example, when we feel accepted, we can trust others. If we do not feel accepted, we feel unworthy of expressing what we truly feel.
All adults and especially parents must understand that the heart is vital to effective learning. The heart is the essential balancing organ that produces a hormone called the "balancing hormone." The balancing hormone has receptors in the brain. When these electrical rhythms produced by the brain are in harmony and balanced then the perceptual faculties (creative thinking) in the brain perform best.
Appreciation, compassion, the assurance of being valued, loved, and understood promote harmony in the heart's rhythms. People feel love in the area of the heart. That love produces the highest form of learning. The very opposite is also true. When a person is worried, fearful, stressed, frustrated, or angry then the heart rhythms no longer are balanced or harmonious. These stresses cause a closing down of the cognitive thinking in the brain, therefore minimizing the function of the brain to do its most creative thinking.
Creative learning happens through feelings of acceptance and love, which allow the heart rhythms to become harmonious again. Adults take much longer to regain creative thinking after having gone through stress. Children can go from stress or anger back to love and acceptance quite quickly. However; when stress, rejection, anger, worry or fear is unresolved in children, this stressful situation becomes a part of them, and inhibits the heart rhythm to become harmonious again, therefore causing the child's natural productiveness to be reduced. When this situation occurs, a child often feels a sense of hopelessness and depression.
The Japanese, like some other cultures understand that the heart is much more than a physical organ. The Japanese word, kokoro means intelligence of the heart. The intelligence of the heart is the key to learning. Intelligence then, is activated by love. Our children's capacity to learn is contingent on their self-esteem or the love they feel for themselves.
Adults can admire the world around them by remembering and thinking about its features. Unlike adults, children absorb their environment, they do not just see and remember it. Children's environment becomes a part of their soul. The things in the environment that produce no changes in adults transform the child as he absorbs images into his very life.
Parents, educators, and child mentors must help today's children have a deep love for life, to remain wholesome and balanced so they can make wise decisions, care for themselves and others, and pass the understanding of how to love onto their children.
Peggy LeVrier has served as an early childhood educator for 35 years and is the
owner and facilitator of Peggy's Positive Parenting in La Porte. For more
parenting information, you can contact her at (281) 748-9176 or pjlevrier@houston.rr.com