Do you love your child? Or..

Actually in fact, are you mostly concerned about your child?

Say you took your child to the park. Or maybe your child was already there and you went to visit.

And you see your child is standing alone looking at children. What do you feel?

Do you feel concern for our child?

Questions like why is my child standing alone, why is no one playing with my child? Do they start coming to your head? Maybe some of us will go and ask: ‘Beta Kya Hua? Kuch problem hai’ or maybe without even asking we will say: 'What happened? Is no one playing with you?'

This is a concern.

This is not love.

I was thinking the other day about what is the difference between love and concern.

It is an important difference because when we are with our children with concern, they can sense that we feel that something is not ok with them. And they can start to believe that.

Some of us believe that concern is born out of love for the other person. But is it? Isn’t the root cause of concern, our own worry? Our own insecurities rather than the child’s?

Like when we see our child failing in something, when we see our child doing something which is not socially acceptable or when we think our child is experiencing an emotion we consider negative (like hate, loneliness etc.) we feel concerned.

Concern always arises when we want things to be different from the way they are in the moment.

And when do we feel love towards our child?

If you can close your eyes and look back at all the moments you felt love you will see they are moments when you were ok with the way the child is. Ok with the way things were. When you don’t think any change is required in the child. That is when you feel love.

Concern and love are not the same.

But I am concerned my child is hitting another child, a mother could say.

Why is he hitting?

What is wrong with him?

Isn’t that a cause for concern for my child?

It is cause for observation. To understand why the child is hitting. And to correct the environment so that the hitting might stop. But if we become concerned we will pass it on to the child that we think something is wrong with him which needs to be corrected.

The concern could be for the environment. That what kind of environment is causing my child to do this. And actually fixing that. When a flower doesn’t bloom we don’t fix the flower, we fix the environment.

So when our child is standing alone in the garden, rather than feeling concerned, we can consider that maybe the child took a break, maybe he is happy to observe how others are playing, or maybe no one is playing with him that day because he hit somebody or maybe your original thought is correct: that no one wants to play with him.

But in all these cases, rather than being worried about the child, we can just be there. We can stand, we can watch. And if our child looks at us, we can smile so that he knows that there is nothing wrong with him. That to me is love.

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