“Unconditional love” is a term that means to love someone regardless of the loved one’s qualities or actions. The paradigm of unconditional love is a mother’s love for her newborn.
Unconditional love is often used to describe the love in an idealized romantic relationship. It may sometimes also be used to describe love between family members, comrades in arms and between others in highly committed relationships.”
We all have a fair understanding of what unconditional love means. As we see in the definition above, the best description is of a mothers love for her newborn child. Nothing prepares you for the deep love you feel immediately after your baby is born. Which does not mean that you are equipped to care for it, but this is where natural instincts kick in. It is similar to what we see in wild animals. A mother will do anything to protect her young in the wild and so too in humans we find such behaviour.
A wise woman recently highlighted a very important fact to me, that although we may feel this unconditional love, how often do we show it? As a parent of an older child I must admit that the closer my daughter gets to being a teenager the more difficult our relationship has become or should I say complicated! I have found that even though you feel the love you do not feel like showing the love. This is however the most important time to show unconditional love!
One thing I have to keep reminding myself is that I am, after all, the adult in this relationship, even though I may feel hurt or unloved by certain actions or words. I have to look beyond this and show that regardless of my feelings I can still love unconditionally – which at times is very hard to do. God said we are to love each other and if we stand by this it will strengthen our child – parent relationships over the long term. I am not saying that discipline is not important when parenting, but above all we need to remember to still love our children no matter what!
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