The child who knows unconditional love has the greatest gift the world can offer.

Amongst the Christmas chaos, the bustling preparations and the hectic advent calendar, it’s likely that your child has missed off their wish list the most important gift of all.  Unconditional love.  It doesn’t come in shiny wrapping paper, dressed up with a giant bow, it doesn’t come with an expensive price tag.  Oh no not this gift, but it’s the biggest of them all.  It won’t fit in your child’s stocking, it never risks being broken and with this gift your child will never be bored.  True unconditional love lasts a lifetime and fills your child’s heart for free.

It’s easy to love our children when they are good as gold, pleasant and helpful, quiet as mice.  Not so much when they’re banished to the ‘naughty step’ and challenging us with boisterous behaviour.  Particularly at this time of year ‘good’ behaviour is rewarded and ‘bad’ is punished.  The threat of nothing but a lump of coal at the bottom of the stocking, representative of a child’s disappointing end of year performance. 

The power of communicating to our children that “I love you when you are good and when you are bad” is incredibly powerful.  It allows them to feel safe to make mistakes and that they won’t be rejected for making a wrong choice.  By giving your child unconditional love they in turn feel comfortable exploring and expressing a full range of human emotions.  They feel accepted and supported in revealing their authentic selves with those closest to them and eventually out in the world too. 

Conditional love says “I love you only when your act like this or do that” which is an extremely damaging message to communicate to children. This is a belief that they will carry throughout their lives until they question this notion and begin to reveal their true authentic selves. 

Unconditional love releases the need for control and perfection in parenting.  In gifting our children with unconditional love we in turn gift it to ourselves and free ourselves from the burden of high and often unattainable expectations.

Children by nature have the capacity to be both naughty and nice, the same goes for adults.   So whilst you’re singing along to “Santa Claus is coming to town” this festive season check up on those Bing Crosby lyrics.  “He knows if you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake”.  This sounds like the old familiar lure of conditional love to me.  Take it with a pinch of nutmeg and indulge your children in the gift that keeps on giving this Christmas.  Unconditional love with lashings of magic and fairy tale fun!

Merry Christmas to you and your beautiful families!

With love

Great British Nannies 

As always we LOVE to hear from you and see your tagged pictures on Instagram stories! @greatbritishnannies

Please share with us the festive fun you’ve been getting up to with your precious little ones during the holiday season

Why not read about the five benefits of play with children here?