The Five Love Languages of Children

The Five Love Languages of Children Book Review

Title: The Five Love Languages of Children

Author: Gary Chapman & Ross Campbell

Publisher: Moody Publishers

Published: 2012

ISBN: 978-0-8024-0347-6

Genre: Relationships/Parenting

Pages: 240

Price: $14.99

About the Book

Does your child speak a different language? Sometimes they wager for your attention, and other times they ignore you completely. Sometimes they are filled with gratitude and affection, and other times they seem totally indifferent. Attitude. Behavior. Development. Everything depends on the love relationship between you and your child. When children feel loved, they do their best. But how can you make sure your child feels loved?

Since 1992, Dr. Gary Chapman’s best-selling book The 5 Love Languages has helped millions of  couples develop stronger, more fulfilling relationships by teaching them to speak each others’ love language. Each child, too, expresses and receives love through one of five different communication styles. And your love language may be totally different from that of your child. While you are doing all you can to show your child love, he may be hearing it as something completely opposite. Discover your child’s primary language and learn what you can do to effectively convey unconditional feelings of respect, affection, and commitment that will resonate in your child’s emotions and behavior.

My thoughts

I’ve heard a lot about the 5 Love Languages book but I have never read it before.  I was super excited about reading this book geared towards children.  As a mother of three I am well aware that each child responds to situations differently.  Since they all have different personalities each of them respond to my actions or discipline in different ways.  The book is broken down tweleve chapters, the first is about the foundation (LOVE) and then the next five chapters is focused on each of the love languages..

• Physical Touch
• Words of Affirmations
• Quality Time
• Gifts
• Acts of Service

Chapter seven helps you discover your child’s primary love language and last five are other chapters to help you better understand the languages based on certain situations.  If you’ve read any of Chapman’s books you are probably already very familiar with all the love languages.  I was very eager to learn more and so was my husband.  We both knew off the bat that our children’s primary love language seems to be “Physical Touch”, since we’ve discussed it with family members about how the kids all like to touch people as a way to soothe them.  We started with our oldest and ended with the youngest going over the chapters together (my husband and I) to see which ones applies to our children.  Reading this book helped me learn that at their ages now my children could speak one language and then switch to another as they get older.  Words of Affirmations are something we already do naturally with our children.  We remind them daily they are – Beautiful/Handsome, Intelligent, A leader, and a Princess/Prince. We show and tell them they are loved and we do our best to care for them in a way that they know and feel loved.

Learning to apply these languages will take some time and we are slowly trying to offer our children options between different languages.  The book does warn about over use of one language and how it may affect children.  One example was with acts of service.  This language focuses on helping your children with certain tasks but Chapman warns that our desire to help can also start to cripple our children if we over do it.  Perfect example my mother would do laundry for out entire house, however when we got older she didn’t make it do it ourselves.  I didn’t do my own laundry until I moved into the dorms for college.  While I appreciate her for doing it for me when I finally had to do it on my own I ruined a few pieces of clothes because I didn’t know how to properly do it.  The same would apply with gifts, if all you do is buy your children gifts all the time you are missing out on offering them some of the other languages and also run the risk of making them spoiled.  There is also a section dedicated towards single parents and married couples.  Overall its a great book and you will pick it up constantly after reading it the first time.  You’ll probably start recommending it to other parents as well once you get the hang of it and start practicing its principles as well.

You can buy the book in bookstores and online at Amazon (the current price is $10.20 for the book and $7.99 for the Kindle edition).

Disclosure: I was provided a copy of this book for review from Moody Publishers.  Any and all opinions expressed are my own and have not been influenced.