Love, Llamas, Children, and COVID

Is love an innate emotion, or must it be taught to our children? And what about friendship? These are essential questions for many of us homeschooling our children during COVID-19. When children are isolated from their peers, how do they learn the crucial life-skills of love and friendship necessary for the rest of their personal and working lives? Who will teach them these skills? These important questions are discussed in depth during the VIDEO interview with children’s books authors Monica Talbot-Kerkes and Sharla Charpentier, cousins, soul-sisters, and mothers themselves, and posted below for your watching pleasure. The Llove Llama may have the answer.

Research(1)states that love might be one of the most quintessential human conditioning capacities. And according to author Leo Buscaglia, love is learned. Buscaglia says, “We remain gobsmackingly naive about the practice of love, approaching it instead with the magical-thinking expectation that we’re born excellent at it.” (2)

Just as we “learn” to be human, we also learn to love.

Love and friendship are self-made and, therefore, avoidable through our choices. We control how much of ourselves to invest in learning love and creating lasting friendships.

Love is an emotion. But it is also a “response” to feeling and, therefore, an “active” expression of what is felt. Love is not learned by osmosis. It is acted out and acted upon. Romantic ideology defines love as an enthusiasm rather than a skill that must be taught and learned.

The process begins in childhood. We absorb the picture of the world we are fed and emulate the psychoemotional tools we observe. Psychiatric trio Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon explore this concept in their book, A General Theory of Love (3)which focuses on the scientific research complexities of love and its role in human well-being, self-esteem, and self-worth.

From earliest childhood, our brains link with people close to us in a silent rhythm that alters our brains’ structure and establishes life-long emotional patterns like love. It makes us who we are. Parents shape their child’s developing self. What we read to our children as a teaching tool is important because our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws.