Affects Of Early Childhood Love On Adult Life
- What type of love did your parents give you?
- Some types of love are bad!
- Find out how childhood love affects your confidence, self esteem and happiness.
Did your parents ever tell you they loved you? There’s a good chance they did, and it probably came from your mother. Typically, men are less prone to show emotions.
Why? Because their fathers didn’t show emotion! In England this was extremely typical for the now older generation, when emotions were encouraged to be keep inside and not displayed publicly.Â
Unconditional Love
Whilst most people did receive love from their parents, we each received it in different ways. For example, some people were shown love simply for being who they were, regardless of the right or wrong they did.
This is often called unconditional love. It means I love you for you, regardless of anything else.
Conditional Love
The opposite of unconditional love, is conditional love. This kind of love is usually tied to performance. So you are only shown signs of love if you live up to your parents expectations. If you don’t live up to their expectations, then this love is withdrawn.
So unlike unconditional love, conditional love is expressed as “I love you, but only if you do this. If you don’t do it, I don’t love you”.
Of course your parents probably didn’t phrase it like this, but instead expressed it in their actions. So for example, if you got good grades at school your parents showed love towards you. But if you got poor grades, this love was withheld.
Dangers And Benefits Of Conditional Love
One of the reasons conditional love is used so often by parents, is that it is usually seen as the best way to encourage a child to do something.
The affect of conditional love on children usually results in a highly productive and motivated adult later on.
This is because as children they were always trying their hardest to achieve something. Driven by the anticipation of praise, once they had accomplished it.
Whilst this certainly can be a good characteristic to have, the danger lies in the fact that their self esteem is tied to external factors outside of them.
So if they do not do something well, they are often left with low self confidence and self esteem. And as I have discussed before, true self esteem comes from within you, rather than from external factors.
Conditional Vs Unconditional Love
Depending on the type of love you received, this will greatly influence how you later viewed yourself as a teenager and adult.
If you were given unconditional love, then most likely you learnt to accept yourself for who you are, and are happy just being you. You will have a high levels of internally generated self acceptance, self esteem and confidence.
However, if you were given conditional love (the most common type of love given by parents) you are more likely to develop into an adult with lower self worth, feelings of inadequacy and insecurity which then lead to suspicion and jealously.
This is because the underlying message conditional love sends, is that you are not really good enough being who you are.
Interestingly, people who received predominantly conditional love as children, are the most likely to feel uncomfortable about their body and seek plastic surgery to correct any “flaws” they may have.
This feeling of inadequacy is often reinforced by rich and beautiful people they see in films and magazines, who they then compare themselves against.
Although publicly they will still usually display high levels of confidence and self esteem. Especially if they are doing well in their careers or relationships.
Their self confidence and self esteem is therefore externally generated, and as a result become extremely susceptible and fragile people should circumstances in their life suddenly change. In a previous article I called this “fake self esteem“.
If conditional love is what you mainly received as a child, then you would strongly benefit from developing internally generated self esteem. This is done through learning to accept yourself for who you are, rather than what you do or what you possess.
it is needed simply more frequent to talk about it! maybe world become kinder ?
I feel like I have deffinately recieved unconditional love. No matter what I do or go through, my parents still respect me even enough to let me make my own mistakes and allow me to learn from them. I have learned some hard lessons, but through it all, I realize that this is just life and I have to get over it and move on. I can use what I have learned to make myself a better person inside and not care what people think about me. I enjoy being who I am, even with my own flaws that I have come to accept. I have some friends who’s parents show conditional love, and they are constantly reaching out for people to love them, and pay more attention to them.
I believe that a child growing up with unconditional love is very important. It gives them the chance to learn things on their own and know that they will always have someone to back them up no matter what the outcome might be. Which in turn would help with self confidence, and help them be less timid. They will be less likely to be afraid of trying new things.
I feel that unconditional love is really important. My parents have been there for me no matter what all of my life. I couldn’t imagine having a parent that didn’t show unconditional love. One of my friends basicly looks to my mom for unconditional love because her mom doesn’t show it.
I have a daughter and the love I have for her is unconditional. No matter what she does in life, I will always love her.
What if I didn’t receive any love at all?
If you didn’t recieve any love at all then you may have developed low levels of self esteem and self acceptance as a result. I would recommend working on these 2 areas first, which you can do by reading the following article series:
http://www.eruptingmind.com/how-to-improve-low-self-esteem/
http://www.eruptingmind.com/define-self-acceptance/
A person who never recieved love may also have developed a personality where they try to please others in order to recieve acceptance/love from them. which may then cause a person to neglect their own wants and needs. If this is the case they need to focus on satisfying themselves first before others.
Overall not recieving any love during childhood can be very difficult on a person, because they are brought up with the belief that others do not accept them for who they are, which causes feelings of low self worth.
Like they are not good enough to be noticed by others, or cared for by others. This may make future relationships for that person difficult, because in a relationship they may feel insecure that the other person does not love them or want to be with them, and may become paranoid or controlling as a result.
So it is very important to develop a strong level of self acceptance and self esteem, to override any of these negative beliefs that may have been formed during childhood. By doing so love should be generated internally as self love, and not dependent upon external factors.
There is an article series about beliefs here:
http://www.eruptingmind.com/personal-values-beliefs/
This is a really interesting article. I beleive what you write to be totally true. I also found that low-self esteem can be ‘mimmicked’ from parents as a child, and also genetically inherited, lot’s of factors involved. Which would explain why so many people suffer from some form of low self esteem.
hi
i want know what happen in my erelier birth? it is possible.
This is so true. especially the part about most parents loving their children conditionally. while most people love pretending otherwise (although I’m sure there must be parents who really do love their children completely), it creates problems for the children. I know because I’m one of them. But on the bright side, having had a difficult childhood (while the rest of the world thinks my parents are wonderful), I have seen exactly what I won’t do to my kids when I have them and I’m lucky to start an internal discussion about this stuff early in my life.
Having a difficult childhood is not all bad. I’ve had the opportunity to learn about my strengths in hard times, my weaknesses at my most vulnerable moments. Who else gets so lucky so young?