Importance of Children Growing in Love

The most basic and central truth of the universe is that

God is the Father and we are His children.

—Sun Myung Moon

In order for a son or daughter to learn how to love, it involves the heart to develops which begins at a very young age and matures throughout the lifetime.

The toddler who clings to his or her parents' hand is decades apart from the weeping adult who must place his or her parents to rest in the grave and vow not to let their wishes go unfulfilled.

Even though the experience is different, the essence of the heart is the same: a heart of attachment, appreciation and love toward the parents that only deepens and becomes conscious and responsible over time.

A child's growth determines the person's relationship not only toward his or her parents, but also toward society in general, and ultimately God.

The East calls a child's devotion to his or her parents “filial piety” and is considered the root of all goodness and morality.

Confucius taught that a child's responsiveness to one's parents is the root for empathy. Mencius taught

that if a person loved his parents, he would be kind to people in general and caring toward everything in the world (7A45).

Jesus demonstrated how important a child's heart is when he instructed his disciples to not turn away children from him. 

“Such are the kingdom of heaven made of,” he said. Saint Paul said that a Christian’s right relationship to God was to cry out trustingly like a child, “Abba!” which means “Papa” or “Daddy.”

The child’s realm of heart is foundational to a life of true love.

The success within the children's realm of love places a person in a position to receive and respond to the love of parents and the love of the ultimate Parent, God.

On this strong foundation, a person is well-placed to learn to love others as oneself.

The Formation of a Loving Child

Before religious leaders were accepted to say so, Reverend Moon was pointing to the breakdown of the family as the main culprit in society's main problems.

Now, these assertions are widely accepted among social scientists.  Developmental psychologists widely agree

that having loving relationships with caregivers (usually a parent or parents) promote the development of empathy with others and impacts a person's relationship to the world at large over a lifetime.

Children who lack such loving relationships are left without maturing a proper heart of compassion toward others, which leaves the growing young person crippled morally. 

 Such children are prone to get involved in all sorts of risky and destructive behaviors.

When a mother plays with her child, the natural facial expressions prepares them to be able to 'read' other people's facial expressions then understand what the person must be feeling based on this. This is an example of training in empathy.

The ability to empathize: to recognize and feel another person’s pain, suffering or joy as one’s own. To have empathy is the basis of the capacity to give love, take responsibility, and have fulfilling relationships with others.

Those who develop early loving relationships are able to attain trust over mistrust. This is what Erick Erickson calls the first 'crisis' of life.

When a baby cries, someone comes to comfort. When the baby is hungry, someone brings food. When the baby needs warmth and dryness this is provided. 

When the baby needs to be held, someone's tender arms are there. When a child is lonely or frightened, someone's soft voice reassures the child.

A baby who grows up in this nurturing environment, sets the stage to grow up to be benevolent, helpful participator in the world.

A view of a larger universe and of God are imprinted firmly on the mind of a young person through these early interactions.

James M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, said, “The God to whom little boys say

their prayers has a face very much like their mother’s.”

If a mother had a smiling sympathetic face, the child will respond with a similar face to the world whenever they interact outside the family.

“We learn how valuable and worthy of love we are almost exclusively through interactions with attachment figures, especially parents,” observes Stephen Stosny, a psychologist.

A child who grew up in a loving home, assumes others are similarly lovable and worthy. He or she will behave in a manner that is just and kind toward them and treat others as he or she has been treated at home.

Operating from a core of being loved, the child is able to love others.

Studies have shown one common characteristic of rescuers of Jews under Nazism: The rescuers all have very warm relationships with one or both parents which caused them to have empathy for others in maximum proportions.

Since they were convinced of their own worthiness, it was easy for them to see others as similarly worthy and to take a stand for others' human rights.

History is laden with children who have been neglected or abandoned. They have moral impairment that can result from having a poor relationship with parents.

1940s psychologist William Goldfarb did a study of seventy children who have been raised for the first three years of their lives in institutions. He found that they were cruel to one another and also to animals.

They severely lacked an ability to control impulses, especially aggressive ones.

Researcher Selma H. Fraiberg studied children who were misplaced out of their homes. She studied abandoned babies, children raised in institutions, children shifted from foster home to foster home and children who had to be torn from their family during wartime.

She remarked, “These children who had never experienced love, who had never belonged to anyone, and were never bonded to anyone except on the most primitive basis . . . were unable in later years to bind themselves to other people, to love deeply, to feel deeply, to tenderness, grief, or shame.”

Since these children were denied the most pivotal relationship in the children's realm of heart and love, these children could never mature their heart to empathize and love others. They could not see other people as themselves.

Ambivalence in the Love Relationship between Parent and Child

In average families, there is enough ambivalence in the love relationships to produce ambivalence in a child.

Morally, this places children between great altruism and great cruelty.

The average person tends not to be cruel or or consciously try to hurt or oppress others. But the same person may have not developed empathy for instance for people in poverty and think that they are responsible for their own fate.

Freud explored the human psyche and uncovered the ambivalence of a child's relationship to the parents. He found child's relationship with their parent “contained not only impulses of an affectionate submissive nature, but also hostile and defiant ones.”

He explained that we all relate to the Father, God, with the same ambivalence we have toward our parents in general. This creates the idea in the evil Satan.

From the standpoint of cause and effect, it can be thought that a child's 'hostile and defiant' interactions toward the parent reflects a relationship with their false father Satan and evil even though they have a relationship with goodness and God.

Since the parents heart is divided between good and evil, they raise children who are similarly divided in heart.

This creates a great need for parents who have true love. These parents resemble the selfless love of God and are able to love their children in a healthy and a beneficial way.

Children raised in this ideal home, they can be true to their parents' good expectations and thus become brothers and sisters who are true to one another. These siblings can support one anther's growth and successful entry into the spouse's realm of love.

Marriages that come from adults raised in this type of environment will have peace and harmony which will become shelters for the new generation as they are guided by true parental love.

The more the parents' love reflects the love of God, the happier and healthier, and more productive the child will be.

The child will demonstrate empathy will have a more benevolent impact upon the larger world.

To have such Godly parents of true love is thus a very pressing social need to nurture and guide a child's heart.

Return for Tomorrow's Post: Children Need God, Too

This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook, "Educating for True Love" written by a team of writers to explain Reverend Sun Myung Moon's philosophy.

Childhood Relationships Needed to Mature the Heart

There is also an individual order by which individuals govern themselves, which is significant in how they relate to others.

The orderings of these relationships, affects the way the realms of heart function.

The love of a mother and child nurtures and harmonizes the developing relations between the child and his or her siblings and peers.

The harmony of the child's realm of love affects the sibling's or peer's realm of love.

For example, one Saturday afternoon, Erica's 8-year-old son, Tim, and his friend were playing with Lego blocks.

Usually Tim gets along with his friend, but this particular afternoon they were quarreling.  Tim did something out of his character.  When he and his friend disagreed over a Lego piece.  He tore apart his friend's Lego construction and threw the pieces all over the floor.

His mother recognized that this behavior came from the busy week's toll on his relationship week with her and his emotions were running on empty.

Because of her motherly instinct, she took him aside and spent time alone with him.  She spent time holding him on her lap, speaking gently to him, and getting him involved in funny little finger plays.

After only a short time, Tim became calm and happy again, and went back to apologize to his friend.  He even offered to help his friend rebuild his toy construction he destroyed.

Tim needed this vertical connection with his mother in order to relate smoothly with his peers on a horizontal plane.

Often, a family’s problems involving children can be remedied by improving and solidifying the marriage. 

Psychologist John Rosemond testifies that when he and his wife shifted the center of their family life from the children to their marriage, getting the vertical order right, their children were more obedient, more respectful, more compliant, and—importantly—happier.

Rosemond likened a happy, healthy family to the solar system:   “The marriage was the nucleus of the family, the children were satellites that revolved around the nucleus like planets to a sun.”



A Healthy Ecology of Love

Relationships between the vertical and horizontal create a greater ecological system that encompasses all four realms of heart (parent's, children, siblings, spouse).

This becomes a support system that surrounds the individual and stimulates him or her needs to internally grow.

When this ecology is imbalance, people feel vulnerable and often try to fill this need in a substitute way.

This explains why a child latches onto her cousin as her 'older sister', the widower joins a dance club, and the infertile couple adopts a son.

For example, 14-year-old Elena is in the children's and sibling's realm.

When her complementary partners of parents, grandparents, and brother and sisters and maybe cousins, she enjoys a wealth of possibilities in terms of giving and receiving love and thus develop her character.  These relationships are necessary for growth in Elena's stage in life.

Jon, on the other hand, who is 27 year old may have different relational needs than Elena who is still a teenager.  He may be more challenged and fulfilled to mature by being invested in the spouse's and parent's realms.

He thrives best by having a good friend and children as reciprocal partners to relate with.

But this is in addition to the parents and siblings with whom he continues to have a relationship.  Jon's ecology of love includes all the four realms of heart.  The absence of any of these aspects will make Jon feel an emptiness in his life.


Ecology of Love

In an ideal world, people would progress naturally from realm to realm, nurtured by their partners in the realm and nurturing them back in turn.

We would achieve the necessary level of heart that resembles God's heart.

The reality of course is that humanity is far from the ideal.  There are forces that seem to prevent people from attaining the growth of heart they need in each realm.

A daughter who is becoming an adolescent may need her father's reassurance and support more than ever before, but he is struggling with finances and turns to alcohol to cope.

A mother who just gave birth to twins, may not be able to stretch her love resources to her husband and her babies which causes the marital relationship to breakdown just when she needs her partner the most.

An older sibling may say something to a younger brother or sister that was biting and stay with the children for years affecting his or her self-image.

We see that people are imperfect in their ability to love.  Yet, the realms of heart march on.

The abilities of other-centered love or love others than yourself are still too underdeveloped to cope with the demands of the realms.

This causes many difficulties.

Because of this, divorce, domestic and child abuse may result.  This inability to love can emerge as more subtle problems such as a mother who rather be her daughter's best friend and live vicariously through her

Many people may feel that they lack the heart to have concern and compassion, and do not have the ability to be refreshed from naturally giving true love.

Then people find themselves depleted.  This pattern of people who are immature in relationships raising immature people has multiplied ever since the disastrous interruption of the love relationships of parents, spouses children and siblings in the Garden of Eden.

Reverend Moon has said, “The Fall was initiated when one person claimed self-centered love. 

The one who proclaims love centered on himself, they deny the value of all other relationships in his desire to make himself the center of the universe.

Such a person seeks to bring benefit only to himself, and the disease began when this desire entered ther ealm of love.

The first parents were thus cut off from God and from one another and started a negative pattern from their brokenness and immaturity.

We see these patterns continue and proliferate to this day.

People who are not able to fulfill the earlier realms of heart, they must perform the later realms of heart and do so badly.

Psychotherapist Arthur Janov writes, “The major reason I have found that children become neurotic is that their parents are busy struggling with unmet infantile needs of their own . . . In this way the sins of the parents are visited on the children in a seemingly never ending cycle.”

The family needs great infusions of God’s love in order to repair the brokenness and restore health. 

A society that had families who exhibited true love, this would be a world of peace and harmony – a true Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

Religious history has been one of God and humankind desperately seeking to repair and restore the original love relationships where individuals, families and societies from.  Thus, they can be healed and made whole.

Therefore, it is important to understand how the four realms of heart in the family work and need mending.



Return for Tomorrow's Post: Importance of Children Growing in Love


This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook “Educating for True Love” which was written by a team of writers to explain the philosophy of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

Advantages of Marriage

A man and woman will learn from each other through their union things about themselves, humanity and our Creator that can not be known in any other way.


“Man is born to meet woman and woman is born to meet man.  And man and woman together are born to combine with a higher level of love, God’s love. Neither man nor woman can touch God’s higher love by themselves.”

This means that when a man weds, his woman is a kind of savior in countless ways.  Just as a husband is like her personal messiah.  This is the where the foundation for spouses to have inexpressible gratitude for one another.

Oneness between a man and a woman is relative.  First, they have the deal with the inherited legacy of conflict between men and women.  Then there is the inherent contradiction between partner's words and their actual deeds that makes true love itself a great struggle.  This is why when masculine and feminine become one, it remains a grand challenge as uniting the mind and body.



The Rewards of Commitment

In a husband and wife relationship, research supports the power of having continual investment.  A study found that couples whose relationship was distressed that almost 8 out of 10 reported being content in their marriage after they persevered for five more years.

Those who gave up on their marriage and decided to divorce, they were not any happier the ones who stayed married in their peer group, or those who even remarried.

This information reveals the importance of sticking things through and staying commit meted.  If people remained through the ups and downs, this investment will surely yield fruit.

“One advantage of marriage,” notes author Judith Viorst, “is that when you fall out of love with each
other, it keeps you together until maybe you fall in again.”

The heartbreaks and hardships that accompany any long-term relationship can turn into an element of deep bonding.


“I did not even want to deal with all the difficulties in my marriage. It was easier just to put on a game face, have a few drinks and dive deeper into my job,” one man remembers. “But my pastor forced me to say some things to my wife that needed saying, and to face what I was doing wrong too. Now I look back at that time as a period that made us a lot closer.”

The Bible encourages couples to love each other in a proper way - as “joint heirs of the grace of life..in order that your prayers may not be hindered. (1 Peter 3.7 RSV)

The oneness between spouses is a lightning rod for divine blessing.

At the same time, when a man and woman unite in deep abiding love, the joy that is created and prosperity they share from the blessing will spread to their children, all who know them, the greater human community and the Creator Himself.


Identifying with their gender community


Societies used to have rites of initiation when a boy was transitioning into manhood aor girls into womanhood so that they youth could solidify their gender identity.

In modern society, boys and girls still participate in single-gender team sports, or clubs like the Boys and Girls Scouts, to give challenges and opportunities to win respect among their elders and peers.

The military still serves in this traditional way for young men.

Even after marriage, men and women both continue to receive empowerment and comfort when they are in the company of their same-sex friends.

When they are joking around together, this characterizes the banter of male buddies.  They give silent respect and honor one another which in turn renews them.

Likewise, the “girl talk’ between women is a reassuring reinforcement of a sense of connection and support in their lives.

This is why both sexes need to enjoy the company of same-sex company on a regular basis to ‘retreat and regroup’ to strengthen their ability to give to the opposite-sex individuals in their lives.



Unification through Marriage



The ultimate unification of masculine and feminine takes place in marriage and in making a family.


When a husband and wife hold each other, their children will understand and appreciate the opposite sex.

To the woman, her husband and sons represent masculinity in all phases of development.

Similarly, the man embraces all femininity through his love for his wife and daughters. Thus marriage and family life provide the fascinating ongoing adventure of bonding and integration between masculinity and femininity.

Marriage and family life thus makes men and women into a better mirror of the divine. 

“In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them,” the Bible reminds us; man and woman together echoes the Creator’s own “wedded” nature (Genesis
1.27).




Hindu scripture speaks of the original Self, the Creator, splitting in two to make man and woman. Thus each is “like half of a split pea” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.3).

Such a couple is a full mirror of the Godhead. Indeed, Reverend Moon characterizes the married couple as the smallest unit of humanity, in the sense of fulfilling the purpose of human creation as God’s complete reflection and love partner.

The love between a man and woman can be uniquely edifying because they are complementary in physique and psyche.  They can feel ‘as one’.  They can feel knit together in mind, heart and body the same way same-sex friends never can.

When man and woman give into marriage in heart and body, their “humanity is rejoined and fulfilled,” in the words of philosopher Michael Novak.


The result is a certain “distinctive honesty, realism, and wisdom taught by each sex to the other.”19 A man and woman learn through their union things about themselves, humanity and the Creator that can be known no other way.

“Man is born to meet woman and woman is born to meet man,” says Reverend Moon. “And man and woman together are born to combine with a higher level of love, God’s love.

Neither man nor woman can touch God’s higher love by themselves.

In this sense, a man’s wedded woman is a kind of savior in countless ways, just as a woman’s husband is like her personal messiah. This is the basis of the inexpressible gratitude spouses often feel towards each other.


Potential for oneness

Because men and women are indeed made for each other, given sufficient time and effort, the unity of heart between a man and woman is to be expected. The magnetism between masculinity and femininity can overcome differences. Since their Origin is an integrated whole, they too can integrate into wholeness.

Even though such an idea is hard to reconcile with popular notions of romance, it is the ordinary experience of the millions of couples over countless generations who were strangers when married and who grew to deeply love each other.

This is captured in the memorable lyrics of the song from “Fiddler on the Roof,” when Tevye reminisces about his arranged marriage to Golde, his wife, and says to her,

But my father and my mother said we’d learn to love each other

And now I’m asking, Golde, ‘Do you love me?’

After protesting that for “Twenty-five years my bed is his; If that’s not love, what is?,” she concedes that indeed she does.

And so between two people who may not have been attracted to each other at first.

Recalls Ann Meara, half of the long-married comedy team, Stiller and Meara, “Was it love at first sight? It wasn’t then—but it sure is now.”23 This may not be the self-conscious and passionate ardor of young lovers, but it is a deeply rooted, comfortable kind of caring and unity not unlike the attachment a person has to his or her own arm.


Continual Devotion

For this reason, a sixth principle for true love is Investing towards Oneness.

Ultimately the Creator represents the highest and original purpose. Those who center their relationship upon God invite Him to manifest Himself and His beauty, truth and goodness in the partnership and its fruits.

Examples are endless, since this is the dynamic behind all productive
relationships, even in the inanimate world.

Protons and electrons have opposite charges that attract each other. They interact
as subject and object partners, driven by atomic law that contains a higher purpose, and create a new existence, a hydrogen atom.

A professor as the subject partner engages in give and take with her students as object partners, based on the curriculum as their shared purpose, resulting in an enriching learning experience for all.

A band comes together to express their common vision of music, and the members interact with one another in lead and backup roles.

Their degree of unity is directly reflected in their music. A coffee shop manager in the leader position hires counter help in the supportive role.

The manager treats the workers well and the counter servers are diligent and loyal, resulting in a productive business that realizes the shared goal of profits and service to the community.

A pastor prays with his youth ministry staff as his helpers and together they craft a marriage preparation ministry that leads many young people through purity into matrimony and a deeper commitment to God.

Implicit in this observation is that whenever any relationship is unfruitful—or destructive, as is possible in the case of human relations—certainly there is a problem with the nature of the urpose or the interaction or both.

“My high school football team was undefeated in our state,” one young man recalls. “But sorry to say, the victories went to our heads.

We lost our focus on doing our best and got complacent.

At the same time, a lot of us starting worrying about showing off for the college scouts and we forgot about the team.

When we got to the regionals, we blew every game.”

In other words, the team lost its vertical purpose and the horizontal interactions also deteriorated.



Return for Tomorrow's Post:

This post was rewritten and derived from the religious textbook “Educating for True Love” written by a team of writers to explain the philosophy of Reverend Sun Myung Moon.