Do You Speak Your Child's 'Love Language?'

What’s Your Child’s Love Language?

Considering how different we all are, it makes sense that we also express our love to each other in different ways.

I found “The Five Love Languages of Children,” a book co-authored by Gary Chapman and Ross Cambell, to be extremely helpful, not only in identifying my children’s love language, but how it interacts with mine.

The five love languages are physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, gifts and acts of service. We know that in relationships, all five of these love languages exist, but for each individual comes a primary love language.  This is an effective way to “love” your family member if you can identify which one they respond to most.  The goal is for your child to know they are loved by ‘speaking’ to them in their love language. 

My daughter’s primary love language is words of affirmation followed by quality time. She doesn’t respond to hugs and kisses as she does to planning a family activity.  My son’s primary love language is physical touch followed by words of affirmation.  Even in his teens, my son loved to receive and give hugs.  He wasn’t at all embarrassed and thought it was odd that most teens avoided being hugged by an adult.  He also thrived when given words of affirmation.

My primary love language is words of affirmation followed by acts of service. I am thrilled when I’m told what a great mom I am and when my children help me clean the house.  My husband is physical touch and quality time.  He understands that our daughter prefers to go out on father daughter dates where they could spend quality time together.  While he would also love to hug her to death, he knows that speaking words of affirmation fulfils her need to know she’s loved by him.  Now, this doesn’t mean she can’t be hugged, it just affirms his love for her by speaking her love language.

I would say that acts of service is pretty low for my family but they know that’s my language so while it’s not how they would respond naturally, their efforts show me they are expressing love in a language I understand.  If all I did was clean their rooms, my love language, and did not put effort into spending time with my daughter or hugging my son, then I would have missed filling their love tank.

It takes time to identify this and it also can change as they get older, but it’s definitely worth the effort.