The 5 Love Languages...The Kid Edition

The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman should be required reading.  Everyone has a primary love language that they use to express love for others and, in turn, feel loved by others. The book explains the concepts in more detail and, when I first read the book a decade ago, it was fun and interesting trying to figure out the love languages of friends and family.

The Five Love Languages are:

- Words of Affirmation

- Quality Time

- Physical Touch

- Receiving Gifts

- Acts of Service

Before reading the book, I naturally assumed my love language was "gifts."  I loved finding the perfect gift for someone and I loved getting gifts.  Birthdays and Christmas were huge in our family...growing up, we opened our presents for, what seemed like, hours.

But as I read the book, I realized that my love language wasn't gifts at all.  It's actually my grandmother's love language and she passed down a tradition of over-buying on special occasions to my mom and her sisters, creating more of a family expectation than anything else.

My actual love language is acts of service.  What was misleading is that, throughout my life, I've always found ways to make gifts for people, showing love through the act of making the item, not necessarily the gift itself.  I love making people cards, scrapbooks, I used to cross stitch gifts and more recently, I bake and give away care packages all the time.

Now that I have kids, I decided to try to dig to figure out their love language.  Obviously, all kids need a balance of all five: lots of praise and encouragement, plenty of quality time with mom and dad, tons of hugs and affection, fun gifts, and things done for them that they can't do for themselves.  But I wanted to learn which one stood out above all the rest.

Before diving into The Five Love Languages for Children, I wanted to see if I could discover the answers on my own.  I know for the adult version, there's a multi-question test in the back of the book (you can take the test online here), but there had to be an easier way to pull that information out of my kids.

So at dinner this weekend, I just asked them simple questions:

Me: "Would you rather have everyone at the table each say something nice about you, or get lots of hugs and kisses?"

Ryan: "Hugs and kisses!"

Kaylin: (blushing) "Have everyone say something nice to me."

Me: "Would you rather get lots of hugs and kisses or presents?"

Ryan: "PRESENTS!"

Kaylin: "PRESENTS!!!"

Me: "Okay, would you rather get a present or have someone surprise you by cleaning up your..."

Both kids: "PRESENTS!"

(this was suddenly a game of "who can yell 'presents' the loudest without laughing")

Me: "Would you rather have lots of compliments or a family movie night?"

Both kids: "PRESENTS!!!"

Me: "Um, I didn't say anything about presents that time.  Presents is OFF the table."

Ryan: "Could you ask if we want Mario Kart for the Wii?"

Me: "No.  We're not talking about presents anymore..."

Clearly, my kids are excited about Christmas and thought that they would get whatever they picked from the list. 

But after going through the questions without the possibility of presents, it was clear that Kaylin's love language is "words of affirmation" and Ryan's is "quality time." 

At this age, I think the best way to discover your child's love language is to ask how they prefer to receive it rather than give it.  Though, knowing Ryan and Kaylin's answers now, it's so obvious: Kaylin has a meltdown when Ryan calls her names, she often asks Mike if he thinks she's pretty and she is constantly giving compliments, often hoping for them in return (Ex: "Mommy, you're so pretty," answered with, "Thank you, Kaylin - so are you!") and Ryan has a hard time spending time alone, he hates being sent to his room and he loves, loves, loves Family Day on Sundays.

I hope that knowing their love languages will help me to meet their needs better.  Clearly, I need to give Kaylin lots of praise and find opportunities to spend one-on-one time with Ryan.  Now if I can just get them to realize that it's not all about the presents...or is it?