Love, like a cordial affection, arises throughout life to different people. But it is believed that there is nothing stronger than a maternal feeling for your baby. This is not true. There is more infallible - the love of a child. Trustful adoration and faith in the perfection of parents, represented by demigods who warm, feed, help overcome difficulties. How is this feeling formed, and what transformations is it subject to throughout life?
Mother in the life of a child
A woman's maternal instinct wakes up immediately after the birth of the baby. But fatherly love is formed gradually. It becomes most powerful when it becomes possible to transfer skills, teach something. A mother spends more time with her baby from an early age, breastfeeds him, takes care and affection. Therefore, from the first days, the child’s love for the mother grows out of a relationship of dependence and inextricable connection. Communication with her newborn is so important for its development that deprivation of contact for up to three months can lead to irreversible disturbances in mental development.
The attitude to the father as the person who gave life is formed by the mother. It is she who broadcasts how to relate to him, what is his role in the life of the baby, what is he like. In fact, a woman becomes an intermediary between a child and a father. The feelings of the baby to the parent largely depend on her efforts and desire to give a full-fledged upbringing to the newborn.
A child’s love is a desire to imitate
By the beginning of the formation of consciousness (3 years), children are asserting that the best people on earth are mom and dad. True tenderness awakens from their parents. It manifests itself in countless compliments, upholding in the yard the position that they are the most kind, beautiful, caring, and also in the desire to become the same. At two years old, the child grabs the brush, but does it for the sake of interest in an unusual object. Already at three, the girl is trying to sweep to be like her mother. She puts on her dress, spins in it in front of a mirror, repeats her habits.
The boy seeks to be like a father, realizing his gender. Admiring him, he duplicates manners, behavior, even appearance. Demanding the same haircut, comparing hair color, jealously listening to the conversations of adults about how much his son looks like a father. It represents a future profession approved by the parent. With pleasure he takes over the skills, observes his attitude to other people, women, mother.
Romantic affection
At the same age, the boy begins to experience the romantic adoration of his mother, and the girl - of his father. Children’s love for parents resembles adult relationships. If before they were dependent on them, now mom and dad have become a model of femininity and masculinity. The kid does not represent another woman next to him. After all, his mother is the most beautiful and kind. To his main woman in four years, he is even able to make an offer of marriage. Poorly imagining the purpose of marriage, he may be jealous of his father, who is robbing his mother of his attention. Such an erotic attitude by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is described as the Oedipus complex.
At an unconscious level in later life, the boy will choose a woman resembling a mother. And the girl is the father to whom possessive feelings begin. The desire to care for him is so strong that she is able to advise her mother to go somewhere for a while in order to be able to surround him with attention. A similar relationship is described as the Electra complex. Children’s romantic love of parents passes over the years, preparing for the formation of new feelings for future wives and husbands.
Equally divided
The baby always perceives the mother and father as an inseparable whole. The child's love for parents is the same, regardless of what kind of behavior in reality they show. Conflicting with each other, spouses often try to prove that the baby’s affection for them is stronger, putting their son or daughter in a difficult position of choice, which they often can’t do. If they were not exposed to explicit violence by one of the parents, experiencing fear and rejection, then the demand for preference forms a feeling of guilt either towards the father or the mother.
This proves that the love of the child is more perfect than the parent. At an early stage, he does not need any benefits and advantages. He does not evaluate the time given by this or that parent - it does not matter to him who played with him more and who less. He perceives his mother and father as part of himself, therefore he fulfills the mission of their reconciliation at any cost, sometimes quite ill.
Love contrary
Child attachment to parents is strong at a subconscious level. And due to the fact that mother and father gave life. This feeling is disinterested. It is freed from desires, and therefore the purest and the present. But a good picture of the world for children exists only as long as there is harmony in their relations with parents. Its destruction is neglect of parental responsibilities by adults. But even such a shock (beatings, alcoholism, self-removal from parenting) is not able to kill the child’s love.
There are many examples when children run away from orphanages to disagreeable parents to take care of them, convince them to be treated, and earn money for their needs. They believe to the last in their drunken tears, without judging whatever they do. This is correct according to God's laws, which says: "Honor your father and mother." Condemnation of parents is a sin correlated with renunciation of God.
Parent Boomerang
As they grow older, the unconditional trust of children in the adult world is lost. Faced with a lie, injustice, misunderstanding on the part of the parents, the child begins to doubt the sincerity of feelings for himself. He seeks confirmation of the manifestation of love in the actions of adults. While they get used to focus more on words. A child’s love for parents in his teens is a reflection of the feelings he receives from them. In psychology, this is called the boomerang effect.
The school conflict in which the parents supported the teacher, not understanding the situation to the end, rejection of friends, interests, opinions of the child - everything can cause uncertainty in their love. The teenager begins to provoke situations to obtain confirmation of the need for his own father and mother: from simulating a disease to escaping from home.
Elderly parents
Some in old age are surrounded by attention and care, becoming the center of a large multi-generational family. Others in life are abandoned and forgotten, forced to spend time alone. A different attitude of children towards elderly parents lies in the plane of education. A child’s love for mom and dad, a bright and pure feeling given from birth, is lost over the years for many reasons, the main of which are:
- lack of a positive example of the attitude of the parents towards the older generation;
- boomerang effect;
- hyper-custody throughout life.
No matter what happens, communication with elderly parents is necessary not only in gratitude for the granted life, but also as an example for their own children, in respect of which everyone will need old age.