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The Family Hymn of Love and Joy by Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.
Love is patient; Love is kind Parenting is a path of love, a path of dedicated service to human life and growth. Most parents feel joy and hope as they care for, guide and support their children and adolescents. Parents who are patient and kind with each other give their children the gifts of safety and security, which are important for the heart and mind of a child to flourish. Patient parents who create an environment of generosity and compassion within the home, allow their children to grow in self-reliance. Children raised in an atmosphere of love and kindness express a will to health and they can sense a strong inner push toward wholeness and self-mastery. Parents of joy have a deep interest in their children that makes the young person feel important and self-assured. These lucky children enjoy a vitality that fuels their zest for learning and participating in their family and school. They have a sense that they can influence their environment and they develop intrinsic motives to help their family and peers. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude Children or adolescents in families of love, kindness, and justice learn naturally to practice altruism, a form of social love, toward their peers and teachers. The capacity for altruism does not grow when one is envious of others or boastful about one's own merits. Young people can learn to be selfless lovers when their parents demonstrate selflessness by putting the children first. Children demonstrate that the lesson was learned when they are able to return that love by practicing kindness and selfless behavior toward their parents and others. In this way, parents get positive feedback and reinforcement for being compassionate toward their children. These children can fall in love with their parents and feel good with their brothers and sisters in a daily renewal of family warmth and attachment. Altruistic families teach self-respect by being kind, generous and patient. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude in families with parents who practice catching their children doing what is right. This is preferable to punishment that restricts and restrains a child or adolescent's sense of exploring and learning. Families that practice generosity and kindness participate in a non-punitive, co-creation process between parents and children to create the family of love and joy. Love does not insist on its own way; Parents who practice love and justice use their joy to influence and encourage their children's motivation to learn, to explore new ideas and values beyond the boundaries of the home, and to set realistic goals for themselves. Teaching selflessness and altruism increases the child's capacity for thinking and expressing emotions, which helps them learn to self-monitor and self-evaluate their own behavior. Feeling competent and self-assured, they are often able to interact comfortably and competently with their teachers and peers. They have learned that love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful. Experiences of social competence make it easier for such motivated children to treat their teachers with love and kindness. Children learn the power of love and of effecting their own environment when they can take the family love and joy and transfer those feelings to the relationships with their friends. Altruistic children can teach other children true friendship. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the Truth Communications in healthy families help maintain good boundaries between family members by allowing open dialogue and mutual problem solving. The boundaries in interdependent families keep family members from being enmeshed or disengaged. Families that have enmeshment issues are co-dependent, and they have poor or missing boundaries. When one family member hurts, pain reverberates through the family. The parents merge with their children and they lack the ego strength to handle childhood problems. Dysfunctional disengaged families have poor boundaries or walls that create a cold, irritable and resentful atmosphere. Family members are not able to remain present and available to help and support each other. They might retreat into their own habits of reacting to pain, such as restricted silence or overwhelming rage and criticism. Coercion and force are often used in both enmeshed and disengaged dysfunctional families. Healthy boundaries permit interdependent family members to maintain the right amount of distance so that they can process family conflicts or problems with a loving degree of distance and objectivity. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the Truth. A child in pain needs a parent who is involved so she can be heard and feel loved, yet not overwhelmed by advice and sermonizing. Interdependent family systems with healthy boundaries encourage self-assertiveness and self-expression. The parents and children feel secure and are free to show love and truth in their communications. Effective communication practices are the essential tools, along with family warmth and bonding that keep the family healthy. Love and Truth demonstrate the will of God or Goddess on earth. Love is God, Truth is God. When Love and Truth are practiced in the family, the transpersonal/spiritual healing power is available to all the family members. Interdependent families use Love and Truth to melt the wave of conflict into ripples. Family life based on the compassion and tolerance of love does not permit any of its members to be dehumanized by the corruption of coercion or force. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things Healthy families encourage the real self by demonstrating respect for individual differences. Open family systems endure all things and bear all things because they have a family ego-consciousness that is strong and guided by Love and Truth. One of the main tools these families use to maintain and create warmth, attachment and healthy communications is the weekly family meeting. The development of open and dependable family communications depends on repeated experiences of being fully listened to and compassionately witnessed. For example, parents in open family systems try to listen to the sometimes scary tales their teenagers tell about mistakes they have made or risks they have taken, without rushing to judgment. Lecturing is kept to a minimum. Brainstorming and problem solving processes are played with and used to solve family and individual behavioral problems. Skillful and talented problem solving in the families of joy does not encourage wrongdoing; it teaches self-responsibility and self-mastery, helping the children and adolescents learn how to be good choosers. Love never ends The Love-force or Truth-force at the center of the universe is the force that guides and persuades altruistic parents to teach their children to be kind and to care for each person, even the stranger. To love our enemies and to love the stranger are choices parents owe to their ancestors and to the futures of their children and grandchildren. Love and Truth demand us to create and teach our children a species wide, global caring and identification-a great respect for life that includes the two-legged people, the four-legged people, the winged people, the fish people, the insect people and all the life of Divine Mother Nature. The everyday practice of Love and Truth is the Soul-force that aims parents to enfold caring, selflessness and altruism into the family transpersonal unconscious and to teach optimism to their children. Love and Truth are uncreated energies that guide the evolution process in the everyday life of the family. These uncreated energies can never end or be destroyed. Our mandate from the Center and Sustainer as parents is to enfold Love and Truth into the universe by demonstrating generosity, kindness, optimism and creativity for our children. Love can never end. Without it, life itself would end.
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