Child Psych Podcast Episode #107

[Tania Johnson] Hello and welcome to the Child Psych podcast. I’m Tanya Johnson, registered psychologist, registered play therapist, co-founder of the Institutes of Child Psychology. Today, we could not be more thrilled to be telling you that we are interviewing Dr. Gary Chapman. Dr. Chapman is the co-author of The Five Love languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively. This wonderful, wonderful book that I have here in front of me. Dr. Gary Chapman is an author, speaker, pastor, and counselor. He has a passion for people and for helping them form lasting relationships. Chapman is a well-known marriage counselor and director of marriage seminars. The Five Love Languages is one of Chapman’s most popular titles, topping various base seller charts for years, selling over 20 million copies, and has been translated into 50 different languages. Dr. Chapman has been directly involved in real life family counselling for more than 30 years and is nationally syndicated radio programs, air on the Moody Radio Network and affiliate stations. Today, we’re going to be talking about The Five Love Languages of Children: The Secret to Loving Children Effectively, welcome Dr. Chapman.

[Dr. Chapman] Well, thank you. It’s great to be with you.

[Tania Johnson] Oh, you know Dr. Chapman, I just mentioned to you before we hit record that I was away on vacation and your book was my holiday reading and I devoured it. It was absolutely beautiful.

[Dr. Chapman] Well, thank you. I’m glad to hear that.

[Tania Johnson] So, Dr. Chapman, what we’re going to do today is, I have a question that has been sent in by a dad in Calgary about children’s love languages and how to connect. What I would love to do is play his question for you and then together have a look at what the love languages are and how we help discover for ourselves what our children’s love language is.

[Dr. Chapman] Okay, sounds good.

[Tania Johnson] Okay, let’s do it.

Parent Question: How Can I Connect with My Child? 

[Dad] “I have a question about connecting with my children. My first daughter is very affectionate, and it’s been very straightforward to develop a connected bond with her, but my second child is less affectionate. Can you provide me with some strategies on how to connect with her more meaningfully? Thanks.”

[Tania Johnson] So, Dr. Chapman, as you hear that, what comes up for you with that question?

[Dr. Chapman] Well, I often say to parents the question is not “do you love your children?” Obviously, this father loves his children. The question is, “do the children feel loved?” And that’s why this book on the five love languages of children is so important. Because each child has what I call a primary love language, and if you don’t learn that child’s primary love language and you don’t speak it, they will not make that emotional connection with you. So apparently one of these children he’s identifying well, she’s identifying well with him. I don’t know what language he’s speaking to her. But the other one, he doesn’t feel that connection and seems like she doesn’t feel that connection. I think if he understands what we’re going to talk about today, the five love languages and how to determine a child’s primary love language, I think he’ll find an answer that he’s searching for.

[Tania Johnson] Oh, so beautiful. Okay, so let’s start right there. Can we walk through the five love languages together?

The Five Love Languages: Words of Affirmation

[Dr. Chapman] Okay. These are in no particular order of importance, but one would be words of affirmation, giving the child words of affirmation. In each of these languages, there are various dialects. For example, just as in spoken language, I speak English with the southern US accent. It’s a dialect. There are different dialects in words of affirmation. For example: Words of praise, where you’re praising them for something they did; Words of encouragement, where you’re saying “that’s right, you can do it. Come on, you’re doing good.” You know, so there’s different dialects. But words of affirmation for some people, this is their language, and we can come back and discuss more deeply on that later on, if you like. 

The Five Love Languages: Acts of Service

[Dr. Chapman] Another love language is acts of service, doing something for the child that needs to be done. We actually have to speak this language when they’re born, because they can do nothing for themselves. We put the food in, we take the food out. We do the whole thing. But as they get older, this language is also spoken, not only in doing things for them, but teaching them how to do things for themselves. For example, a six-year-old can make their own bed. It will probably take more time to teach them how to do that than it will take to do it yourself for them. But both of those are important for those children. 

The Five Love Languages: Quality Time

[Dr. Chapman] Number 3 is quality time, giving the child your undivided attention. It can be playing a game with them, reading a story to them, taking a walk with them, but they have your undivided attention. 

The Five Love Languages: Gifts

[Dr. Chapman] Number 4 is gifts. It’s universal to give gifts as an expression of love, the gift says, “they were thinking about me,” you know, you’re saying “I was at the store today and I remembered you really like this candy bar. So, I got you a little one,” okay. And then 

The Five Love Languages: Physical Touch

[Dr. Chapman] The last is physical touch and we’ve long known the emotional power of physical touch. That’s why we pick up babies, hold them, kiss them and cuddle them. Long before the baby understands the meaning of the word love, the baby feels love by physical touch. The basic idea is out of those five, each child has a primary love language, one of these speaks more deeply to them emotionally than the other four. If they don’t receive love in their primary language, they will not feel loved, even though the parent is loving them. It’s really a key insight to help parents effectively meet the child’s emotional need for love.

[Tania Johnson] It’s so interesting, Dr. Chapman, because when I think about everything that you’ve just said and I think about my kids, I know that there’s different ways that they feel love. But I think until your book had come along, nobody had created it into different ways that parents could really understand “how do I connect differently and why do I connect differently with my children?”

Discovering Your Child’s Primary Love Language

[Dr. Chapman] Yeah, I think so. Sometimes parents say, “how do you discover the child’s love language?” Well, let me suggest that by the age of 4, you can discover a child’s primary love language.

#1. The best way is simply observing how they respond to you. For example, my son’s love language is physical touch. When he was that age, I would come home from work in the afternoon, he had run to the door, grabbed my legs and climbed on me. Maybe it’s because he wants to be touched. Our daughter never did that at that age. She would say “daddy come into my room I want to show you something.” She wanted quality time. She wanted my undivided attention. If you simply observed their behavior, you could probably figure it out by the time they’re four years old. Before that, I suggest you speak all five languages to them. I also say this to parents “please don’t hear me saying that you only speak their primary love language.” No, no, no, no heavy doses of the primary are important. But you also speak the other four because we would like for them to learn how to receive love and later give love in all 5 languages. Those are the healthiest adults. Most of us did not receive all five growing up, so we come to adulthood, and we don’t feel comfortable with some of these. We don’t know exactly how you do that. If we didn’t receive words of affirmation, for example, we don’t know how to say words of affirmation. For older children there’s two other ways you can determine their primary love language. 

#2. What do they request of you most often? For example, our daughter, when she got a little older, the most common request, “dad, can we take a walk after dinner?” She’s asking me for quality time. My son would never walk with me, he said “walking is dumb. You’re not going anywhere. Going somewhere dry.” His most common request was “dad, can we play basketball in the backyard? And the way we play basketball, it’s physical touch. We ran into each other.

#3. Listen to what they complain about because the complaint reveals the love language. For example, I had her mother say to me just recently “my 6-year-old son said to me, we don’t ever go to the park anymore since the baby came.” He used to have his mother’s full attention, quality time, the two of them at the park. She was totally into him. Now since the baby’s here. He’s not getting it. He’s telling her “This is my primary language and I’m missing it.” So, you put those three things together, you can figure out a child’s primary love language.

[Tania Johnson] Which is so beautiful, because then if you do have a teen or a child who saying something like, “hey, dad, I never see you, mom I never see you.” It offers some beautiful clues and how we start to repair and restore relationships when we are struggling.

[Dr. Chapman] Absolutely. When a child complains, sometimes parents get irritated, particularly when teenagers complains. They’re giving you valuable information when they complain. I had a 13-year-old young man, who ran away from home. He ended up in my office and he said to me “my parents don’t love me, they love my brother, but they don’t love me.” I knew his parents. I knew they loved him. The problem is they had never discovered his primary love language, and they weren’t speaking love in a language that was meaningful to him. So, I think the reason it’s so helpful to parents is that it helps them do what they what they really want to do. They want that child to fill up and this helps them do it in an effective manner.

[Tania Johnson] What I loved Dr. Chapman, in your book you say, if you’ve done everything, you’ve listened to the complaints, you’ve looked at how they asked for time from you, and you’re still not sure, you can do little periods of tests. For example, we’re going to do a certain number of days with lots of physical touch and then draw back and see how they respond. So, you can test out your hypothesis and see which one your child is responding to and not responding to. 

[Dr. Chapman] Yeah. If you do that, maybe 3-4 days in a row, you do physical touch then you draw back and then you give one of the others. When you hit their primary love language, you will see a difference in their behavior. You will know that’s the one. Another way, of course, is to give them choices between two things. You can say, “I have some free time this afternoon. We could go to the store and buy those shoes that you’ve been wanting, or we could take a walk in the woods. Which would you prefer to do?” One of them is gifts. One of them is quality time. You give them a few choices like that again, you’ll begin to see one of these begins to stand out above the others.

[Tania Johnson] I love it. I also love that you say and now don’t say to them, “this is your primary love language.” This is not something you tell your child. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Dr. Chapman] Yeah, I think what we do, and again it depends on the child’s age obviously. But we just speak that primary love language. As they begin to get a little older, we also explain to them “one of the ways we love people is we give them high fives, or we pat them on the back, or we give them a hug. That’s why I’m hugging you. I love you. Another way that we express love is through words. So, when you tell me ‘Mommy, I really appreciate what you did.’ Or ‘mommy, I really liked the oatmeal this morning’ you’re loving me when you give me words like that.” We’re trying to teach them how we love them, but also how they can love each other. We want that child to grow up knowing how to speak all these languages. I wish every child had that kind of parenting so that when they come to adulthood, they’re familiar with these languages. They know how to speak all of them and eventually know that one of them is more important for individual people.

[Tania Johnson] And in terms they become multilingual, really. Dr. Chapman, as you say that too, I think about how parents maybe sometimes make the misstep of loving their child in the parent’s primary language, and I’m sure that happens often.

[Dr. Chapman] Yeah, that’s most natural. It’s natural that whatever makes me feel love is the way I express my love to other people, whether it’s my children or somebody else. I didn’t know anything about love languages when I first got married. In fact, I didn’t know it for a long time. But I gave my wife, in the early stages when I still had those euphoric feelings for her, words of affirmation. I told her how nice she looked and how much I appreciated what she did. 

I probably told her a dozen times a day, “I love you, honey. I am so glad I married you.” 

Well, one night she said to me “you keep on saying ‘I love you’. If you love me, why don’t you help me?” 

I asked, “what do you mean?” 

She said “Well, you don’t ever offer to wash the dishes or vacuum the floors or clean the toilet. You don’t offer to do anything.” 

I didn’t say this, but I was thinking, “what are you talking about? My mother did those things.” 

We bring our history with us. If Mama did it, we expect our wife to do it. What I like to say to guys “you’re not married to your Mama, you know.” But looking back on that, Steve was telling me her love language, acts of service. I was giving her words of affirmation; in my mind I was loving her. In her mind, if I loved her, I’d be helping her. So, with children, if you listen to those complaints, you’re going to pick up on their primary love language.

[Tania Johnson] I love it, and it really does bring in a wave of reflective parenting where we go “okay, so this is what my love language is. What is my partner’s love language?” If I have a partner at home, and then “what is my child’s love language?” And if I have multiple children, “what is each of their Love languages?” It really does slow down the parenting stuff from being more reactive to reflective.

Emphasizing Dialect in Love Languages

[Dr. Chapman] Absolutely. And then parents can emphasize dialect. Like in words of affirmation, one dialect is giving them words of praise. But praise them for their effort, not for perfection. I remember I was visiting a young man in the hospital. He was thirteen years old and had stomach ulcers. 

During our conversation, I asked him “how do you and your father get along?” 

he said, “I don’t ever please my father.” 

I said, “can you give me an example?” 

He said, “well, if I make a B on my report card, my father will say you should have made an A. You’re smarter than this.” And he went on later and he said “if I’m playing baseball and I get a double, my father will say you should have made a triple out of that. You got to learn how to run.” And later, he said, “if I mow the grass, my father will say you didn’t get under the bushes. I don’t ever remember pleasing my father.” Guess what that father was trying to do. He was trying to motivate his son to do his best. But you understand what the son was hearing “I don’t ever please my father.” 

What I say is this, the time to help a child bring an ‘A’ up to an ‘B’ is not the day they bring the report card home. That’s the day you praise them for the ‘B’ and say “Yay! You got a B!” It’s next week that you say, “it was really good you got a ‘B’ in that course. I wonder what we could do to bring it up to an A-” And the time to correct them for not getting under the bushes when they mow, it’s not the day they mowed the grass. Praise them for the grass they mowed “Woo. Look at this man. That’s great!” It’s next week you say “now when you mow today. It’s really hard to get under the bushes. You kind of have to go in and out, but I know you can do it.” You bet they will do it. That’s really important for parents to do, but especially those that want to really motivate their kids to do their best. They push them in the wrong direction by not praising their efforts and then the child starts to think “I‘m not quite good enough.” but this is a really important insight for parents.

[Tania Johnson] Yeah, I love that. Really, words of affirmation are praising the amount of effort your child puts into something because that’s something they can control. It’s “I see you. I see where you’re at” and not necessarily in product.

[Dr. Chapman] We do this well when the child is learning to walk. They are holding onto the side of the couch. We move two feet away and say “come on. You can walk. You can walk.” They take half a step and fall. We don’t say “you dumb, kid. Can’t you walk?” What do we say? “Yay!” We praise them for their effort. They get up and try again. That’s the key insight.

[Tania Johnson] Absolutely. We lose it somewhere along the line, our children don’t. As it feels like the stakes get higher, I think parents become more restricted in actually seeing that journey.

[Dr. Chapman] Yeah, you’re exactly right. 

[Tania Johnson] Dr. Chapman, I think the other ones, I love the words of affirmation and how to deliver them. The other one that I think people get confused with are acts of service. In your book, I love how you speak about how we initially may do things for and with our children, but really our role is to teach them how to be in the service of others, particularly if that is their love language. Can we talk a little bit about that?

[Dr. Chapman] Yeah, I like to say to parents, “In our culture, you have about 18 years to teach your children the skills to live as an adult. Because by 18, typically, they’re going to go off to university, or they’re going to join the military, or they’re going to go get a job.” We hope. So, where are they going to learn? There are a lot of things they don’t teach you in college. They don’t teach you how to wash dishes, they don’t teach you how to wash clothes, they don’t teach you how to wash a car, on and on. I suggest to Parents, why don’t you sit down and make a list of all the things you would like your child to know how to do by the time they’re 18, if they’re teenagers, let them help you with the list. Maybe you’ve got a young man that 14 or 15, he’d like to learn how to change a tire on a car, okay, put that on the list, you know, and then at age-appropriate stages, you can teach them how to do these things. As I said earlier, it takes more time to teach them how to do it than to do it for them, but if you do everything for them, when they get to 18, they won’t know how to do anything. So, it’s really good for parents to understand in the early stages. We’re speaking this language by doing things for them. Things they cannot do for themselves, even feeding them. What do we do when they’re learning to eat? We put the spoon in there and we fly like an airplane to their lips. Well, you don’t do that when they’re four or five or six. We teach them how to feed themselves. When kids get to be older and look back that they’ve learned all these things, they’re so happy about their parents. My granddaughter always wanted to learn new things; her father taught her how to paint, and paint walls. So, one summer during high school, she got a summer job working at the school. They showed up in the room, there were four boys and her, she was the only one that knew how to paint. So, she taught all those guys how to paint. She felt good about herself. I get excited trying to help parents learn these simple skills that make a huge difference in terms of the success of their children as they get older.

[Tania Johnson] Yes, absolutely love it. One other thing that I love in your book, at the end of each one of the love languages you give a list of different ideas on how to actually demonstrate that love to your child. You were saying the physical touch is not necessarily that we’re sitting right next to each other, it can be that we’re playing basketball together in this rough and tumble play and in that there is physical touch, but there’s so many different nuances to being able to express these gifts to our children.

[Dr. Chapman] Absolutely. And I think that list is just trying to help parents stimulate their mind that there are different ways to do this, and obviously even within that language, some of those dialects are going to be more important than some of the others to that particular child. As I said previously, my son did not want to take a walk with me. I like walking and I love walking with my daughter. But if it’s not going to be meaningful to him, then I don’t need to walk with him. I’ll do whatever he wants, and physical touch is important to him.

[Tania Johnson] Absolutely. I think that the other one that we sometimes get a little bit stuck on is gifts, parents are something to do with kids and gifts and entitlements. But I love to that you talk about. The fact that gifts really are just an expression of “I was thinking of you.” It doesn’t necessarily have to be something that we purchased. It can be a little sticky note in the lunch box that says “I’m thinking of you” that is the purpose of that language for that child, “I was thinking of you when I was away from you. I’m thinking right now.”

[Dr. Chapman] You can pick up a stone in a city parking lot, take it home and give it to an 8-year-old boy, if gifts are his language and say, “hey man, I saw it today and I thought about you. Look at the colors in this stone, man. I wanted you to have it.” If gifts are his love language, you’ll find that stone in his dresser drawer when he’s 23, and he will remember the day you gave it to him. Gifts don’t have to be expensive. It’s just like what we’ve always said, it’s the thought that counts. But I remind parents it’s not the thought left in your head that counts, it’s the gift that came out of the thought in your head. The other thing with children, sometimes we don’t get credit for the gifts we give them because we don’t present them as a gift. I’ll tell you the most common time I see this. In the fall, when school starts back. Parents will go out and buy school supplies, sometimes buy new clothes, what do they do? They bring them home, they cut off the tags, they wash the clothes, they put them in their drawer, take out the school supplies, put them in the little backpack and whatever. But there was no presentation as a gift. The kid just gets the idea that’s what parents do, this is just the way it is. And I said, “why not get credit for it? Wrap them up like you do on birthdays and at Christmas and present them in front of the whole family as gifts” It’s much more meaningful to that child, especially if gifts are their language. When they realize, “oh, you found this for me? You did this for me?” Let’s get credit for it. The other thing I’d like to say about the parents on gifting is remember the word gift means unmerited favor. You’re not giving it to them to try to convince them to do something. For example, I’ll buy you those shoes you want if you clean your room. Well, the shoes are not a gift. It’s payment for services rendered, the little kid next door will come and clean up the rooms if you buy him shoes.

[Tania Johnson] Great solution.

[Dr. Chapman] Never try to manipulate them to do something for you by giving them a gift. Where I find this often is when there has been a divorce. And the parents are living separately, so the kid is at one parent and then the other parent. But the custodial parent, which may be a little more than the other, sometimes the non-custodial parent will try to buy the child’s love by giving them gifts. So, when they go to see that parent, they give them all kinds of gifts, sometimes expensive gifts, gifts that the custodial parent would never be able to afford. And I’m not condemning them, I think they’re trying to express love to that child. But, perhaps unconsciously, what they’re trying to do is just to make sure that child knows that they love them more than their other parent because they give them stuff. We just need to be sensitive to that.

When We Need to Discipline

[Tania Johnson] Beautiful. Dr. Chapman, the last area that I want to cover with you is on discipline. In your book, you say that in order to discipline children effectively, we need to ask ourselves two questions: 

1. How does my child love? 
2. What does my child need when he must behave?

I wonder if you could just talk about that a little bit.

[Dr. Chapman] Yeah, I’d like to say to parents, whenever you lay down a rule or a guideline for a child, also tell them what the consequences are if they disobey. For example, if we have a rule, we don’t throw the ball inside the house, we play ball in the backyard but not in the house. If you throw the ball in the house, you will lose privileges for two days. The ball has to go in the trunk of the car for two days and if you break something, you’ll have to pay for it out of your allowance. Now you know, and the child knows what the consequences will be if they break the rule. So, you’re not nearly as likely to, if they throw the ball in the house, to say “I told you not to throw that ball in the house and you know better than this.” But if you already know, and they already know what the consequence is, then you can do it in a loving manner. And I sometimes say, for example, if the child’s language is words of affirmation, you can say something like “You know Johnny or Mary, I am so proud of you because most of the time you keep the rules. But you know, this time you broke the rule, and you threw the ball at the house” and they lower their head, and you say “now you know what we have to do, right? The ball has to go in the trunk of the car,” and they’re nodding their head and probably crying and say, “okay, honey, let’s walk out and put it in the car.” And you do. And you say, “you know you broke the vase, And I don’t know how much it costs, we’ll have to find out how much and we’ll take a little bit out of your allowance every week to let you pay for it. But listen, I love you so much and I’m so proud of you because you usually keep the rules.” And you can even give them a big hug. They’re going to receive the discipline in a far more positive way because you wrapped the discipline in love and when we do that, we’re making life easier for ourselves because we’re less likely to lose it. We’re helping our child understand there’s always consequences when you break the rules and they need to learn that. Otherwise, when they’re 16, they’re going to be out there driving under the influence, and they’re going to get in a wreck and end up with all the consequences that come from that. If they understand that there’s always consequences when you break the rules, we’re setting them up for adulthood in a positive way.

[Tania Johnson] So powerful. And I think when we add in being able to recognize and know what the child’s love language is, we are able to wrap them in that love while we guide them through life.

[Dr. Chapman] Yes, absolutely. It makes all the rest of parenting much easier when that child feels love. What I call their love tank, when the love tank is full, everything else is going to be easier. The child is going to be more likely to want to do what you ask them to do, to be motivated when they have the sense you love them. And I don’t mean they’ll always just naturally do everything you want them to do. I don’t mean that, but it we create an emotional climate that’s healthy in raising children and what if every family in the country had that? I mean, it’s amazing what would happen.

[Tania Johnson] Dr. Chapman, I think we can leave it on the final beautiful thought of what a different world we would have if we had children whose emotional tanks were all full. And as we shift in your work, as I understand, as means to help shift family by family, one family at a time to go, “how did these children experience and express love?”

[Dr. Chapman] Absolutely. We have an addition now. It’s called Discovering The 5 Love Languages At School. It’s for teachers, grades 1-6 and is written by a school counselor. The idea is that the that the teacher takes one hour a week for five weeks and explains each love language. By the end of that time, the teacher knows the primary love language of every child in the room. And every child has that concept, we have a letter we send home to the parents to tell them what’s happening. It’s just the way that teachers can help children get this idea, and the parents get the idea from the children if they’re not familiar with it. So, we’re really excited about that book as well.

[Tania Johnson] That is so beautiful. It gives me goosebumps. 

[Dr. Chapman] In whatever way, wherever children are, if we can work with them in this context and make sure they feel loved by whomever it is, a teacher or a parent, we are enriching their lives, consequently, are helping enrich the world.

[Tania Johnson] Beautiful. Thank you so much, Dr. Chapman. For all our listeners, we will link Dr. Chapman’s website, books, all in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. Absolutely beautiful.

[Dr. Chapman] Well, thank you and keep up the good work you’re doing.

[Tania Johnson] Thank you, Dr. Chapman.