I love you just the way you are!

The demand for unconditional parental love can quickly lead to heated discussions. Some parents take the view that this would mean a loss of all guidance and that the children would develop into unspeakable tyrants. This often sounds like this: «All well and good - but am I supposed to approve of everything my child does? What if it steals, bullies others or becomes a Nazi?»

For other parents, unconditional love is the panacea par excellence, the path to a better and more peaceful humanity and a basic prerequisite for children to develop positively at all.

Enable children to recognise their own needs

Conversely, however, all problems in a family are quickly attributed to the apparent lack of love or mothers and fathers are condemned if they find parenting stressful, struggle with certain characteristics of their child or use certain parenting practices such as punishments, rewards or praise.

But what is unconditional love? The concept goes back to the American psychotherapist Carl Rogers. He founded counselling psychotherapy and formulated three conditions that should be present in relationships in order for people to develop well: unconditional warmth and appreciation, authenticity and empathy.

As a humanist, Rogers assumed that people are autonomous and free, that they want to grow, develop and evolve. To achieve this, we need other people who empathise with us, perceive the world from our perspective, treat us with warmth and understanding and remain authentic in the process. As children, we can learn in this way to recognise our own needs, to accept ourselves even with difficult feelings and to discover who we are and what is important to us.

If love is tied to conditions, this can lead to the feeling of not being right or good enough.

The opposite of unconditional love would be love that is tied to conditions: I only love you if you are and behave the way I want you to.

We have to earn the affection of the other person by adapting to their ideas and, if necessary, suppressing certain parts of our personality. This can lead to the feeling of not being right or not good enough and having to constantly work on ourselves in order to be accepted by others.

The withdrawal of love by the parents is internalised over time: The child can no longer accept itself when it recognises certain feelings or needs in itself.

Most modern parents want to give their children unconditional love. However, this is difficult in close relationships and we will never fully succeed. Carl Rogers defined his concept for the therapeutic relationship. There it is easier to remain unconditionally appreciative because the client's needs and behaviour do not affect the therapist's life. To put it vividly: The sentence «I cheated» has a completely different effect depending on whether it is uttered by the client or their own partner.

All parents have wishes, hopes and expectations of and for their children. We are all happy when our child is helpful to others, is affectionate towards their little sibling, is absorbed in play and can also play on their own, enjoys going to school and is interested in many things. And many of us would struggle if we saw our own child behaving aggressively and meanly, laughing at others, secretly tormenting their little sibling out of jealousy, appearing disinterested and passive and not knowing what to do with themselves.

Unconditional love does not mean that we have to suppress every feeling within us, that we should never be disappointed, angry or ashamed of the child's behaviour. Nor does it mean letting them get away with everything. Rather, unconditional love shows itself in the fact that I remain interested and attentive even in such situations and want to know why my child is feeling and behaving this way.

If, as a mum or dad, I see my older child reacting jealously and disapprovingly to their younger sibling and nipping them when they think I'm not looking, this can trigger a range of unpleasant feelings and thoughts. Perhaps I would then prefer to show the older child what it's like to be rejected by demonstratively taking the younger one in my arms, engaging with it and wilfully ignoring the older one while it cries and begs for attention.

How do we manage to remain attentive in such moments? The key to unconditional love is empathy, which allows us to reconnect with the child. Not because we approve of everything the child does, but because we want to know what needs and feelings are behind this difficult behaviour.

Start with yourself

If we do not succeed in accepting our child, if we have scolded, pushed, criticised, punished or at least threatened them with consequences despite good intentions, a guilty conscience is not far away.

So that the demand for unconditional love does not put us under pressure, we can see it as a gift that we give our children.

In these situations, we can start with ourselves and learn to treat ourselves with empathy and unconditional appreciation. Instead of blaming ourselves and condemning ourselves as bad mothers or incapable fathers, we can treat ourselves with more understanding:

• «When I'm under time pressure and stressed, I get very annoyed when my child takes so long to get dressed. Sometimes I get carried away and make statements that I regret afterwards.»
• «I imagined it would be so nice and harmonious when the second child arrived, and I was so hoping that Alina would be looking forward to her sibling, and now she's so jealous. I'm really disappointed.»
• «Now I was so angry today and ranting so much. I feel so overwhelmed and left alone at the moment.»
• «When Tobias showed me this bad mark, I got really scared! I was immediately worried about his future. That's why I reacted so strongly.»

Over time, we realise more and more quickly which of our own feelings, worries and sometimes even childhood injuries are behind our reactions. We realise more and more often where we are overreacting and where it would be more helpful to question our own expectations instead of demanding that the child adapts to our wishes.

So that the demand for unconditional love does not put us under pressure, we can see it as a gift that we give our children again and again. Some days we do this better, others less well. The important thing is that our children realise that we are always making an effort.