Wednesday, November 26, 2003

First Love

By GREGORY K. MOFFATT, PH. D
Child's Play

When you were infatuated with someone during your childhood, someone probably told you that the immature love that you felt was not real love. Even though love that children feel is immature love, it is very real. The feelings are real and the power of those feelings is real.

While it is true that infatuation is shallow, short-lived, and is based on appearance, sexual arousal, or selfish desire, to suppose that the child is not experiencing "real" love is to diminish the thoughts, hurts, and excitement that the child is experiencing. If you want to ensure that your child won't talk to you about her secrets, tell her that she isn't "really in love."

Even in early childhood, a child is capable of loving another person, but that love is based on the need for comfort and attention. Prior to age three, children love those who meet their needs or who give them things. Their feelings of love are based on what they receive and the focus of their love is usually a parent.

As they mature, many children experience their first love interest outside the family as early as four or five years of age. That person may be a teacher, babysitter, or other older person, but this love is based on the person's appearance (she is pretty or he is handsome), an undefined raw emotion from within, and the attention that the child gets from the person.

During the later grade school years, children are less interested in the opposite sex than they will be during puberty, but they certainly are interested in members of the opposite sex. They will have girl and boy friends, they will talk to one another about who loves whom, and they will develop infatuations possibly with many people prior to puberty. Children will develop these emotional relationships with children, teens, and even adults.

Freud's observation that children tend to focus their attentions on their own gender group is due to the fact that they lack the social skills to pursue relationships. They do not know how to express their feelings in general, but it is especially difficult when they are infatuated with someone of the opposite sex. Instead, they will pursue their romantic relationships from a distance. They might talk about their love interests, but they will not risk teasing and embarrassment from their same-sex peers and they will not risk rejection by their love interest. Part of a parent's job during these years is to recognize these relationships, help the child identify feelings that are associated with their interests, and find appropriate ways for him or her to express those feelings.

By adolescence, the depth of infatuation changes. Teens are capable of thinking about the future, marriage, children, and their love for another person can be very deep and potentially long-term. It is difficult for teens and adults alike to distinguish between erotic infatuation and mature love. Therefore, if an adolescent is sexually involved with another person, the emotional bond to that person can be very powerful. The emotional power of passionate love can easily be mistaken for mature love. They have yet to learn that mature love is based on empathy, compassion and commitment rather than sexual attraction alone.

As they struggle to find their place in the world of relationships, broken romances are very painful for children and teens alike. Not only do they have difficulty identifying and coping with their feelings, but their inexperience and egocentric world-view makes them feel as though their hurt will never go away, no one will ever love them again, and they will be alone the rest of their lives.

Even though adults experience these same feelings when their romances dissolve, they usually have the ability to cope much better than children because they have experienced broken relationships and they have learned ways to cope with their pain. A child's experience is very limited; therefore, broken relationships can be extremely hurtful. Take seriously the pain that your child feels when rejected by a girl or boyfriend.

Love is a confusing thing. We learn to identify our emotions by context and experience. Something in the environment arouses our affect, we search our experience for context and prior similar situations, and then we label the emotion. As we get older, we recognize that we rarely feel a single emotion. More often, we have many emotions operating at any one time - happiness, nervousness, apprehension, excitement, etc. Sorting out these emotions and learning how to handle them is a skill that takes years to refine. You can help your child through love's ups and downs by helping him or her label emotions and find ways to cope with all of the complex feelings that make up the power of our intimate relationships.