The biggest idea in the book is what I just shared – that people develop best when they know they’re loved, and that they know they’re loved when they hear it in language they understand.
Way back when I was a Youth Minister in Tulsa, OK, I was part of a team of youth guys who went to central Mexico with an organization called Christ In Youth, to be resource people for presentations at a Christian youth conference. Before I left, I asked a girl in my youth group who was in Spanish III what would be a couple of Spanish phrases that I should know. She gave me a couple, but the one I most remember was “¿Dónde está el baño,” which I’m sure you recognize as Spanish for “where is the bathroom?”
We got to the Mexico City Airport, and nature began to call. Not shouting, just calling. I thought, “Hey, this is a great time for me to try out my Spanish.” So I went to a kiosk where an attractive young woman in an American Airlines uniform stood, waiting to help. I stepped up and said, “¿Dónde está el baño?” But you’d have to hear me say it in my thick Oklahoma accent to know why the American Airlines representative nearly fell down laughing before she spouted a clean and crisp Spanish reply to my question. But her reply made no sense at all to me. It was just a lot of rolled r’s and other staccato consonants that I couldn’t make any sense of.
For some mysterious reason, the stress of this moment moved the simple call of nature up the scale to the urgent shout of nature. “Oh, no,” I thought. “I’m going to wet my pants in the Mexico City Airport…”
But the kind lady at the kiosk read the panic in my eyes and said in perfectly clear English, “Sir, the Men’s Room is just down the corridor and to your right.” She was like an angel speaking in that moment.
If she had kept speaking in Spanish, I was toast (soggy toast). She could have said it louder, or slower, or used more gestures. She could have even chosen different words to communicate the location of the Men’s Room. But as long as she said it in Spanish, it wouldn’t have mattered. I was going to have my own personal international incident at the American Airlines kiosk as long as she kept telling me the Men’s Room location in Spanish.
It wasn’t an intelligence issue, really. She was obviously an intelligent enough young lady. I’m a smart enough guy. But as long as she spoke Spanish, I was going to wet my britches. When she spoke a language I understood, I was bright enough to find the Men’s Room.
Now, I hope you see the correlation between my experience at the Mexico City Airport and your attempts to communicate your love to your kids. You can have all the love in your heart that a parent can have for their kid, but if your love language isn’t the same as your kid’s, and you keep speaking your own language, all they’re likely to hear is, “Blah, blah, blah.” If that’s what they’re hearing, they won’t feel as loved as you want them to feel. And when that happens, they won’t thrive. People only thrive when they feel loved. That’s just a rule of life.
The problem is that most parents assume their kids have the same love language they have. So they keep speaking in a love language that makes sense to them, but probably doesn’t connect with the kid(s). The more they communicate in this love language, the less the kid seems to get it. Frustration sets in for both the parent and the kid. The result is anything but love growing. In fact, it’s usually some kind of alienation.
But the other side of this coin is that when you know your kids’ love language, you can communicate your love to them in terms that they understand. And when that happens, a host of good things will come out of it, including feelings of security and confidence (for both you and your kid), a more consistent sense of happiness, less conflict, and generally movement toward health and maturity in your relationship with them.
So every parent ought to be very interested in getting some kind of help figuring out what their kids’ love languages are. And, by the way, if you go to work on this, in the process, you’ll learn what your spouse’s and your own love language is, too, which will produce some really powerful and positive results in your marriage.
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