Can your child be who God made him to be and still be loved by you? Unconditional acceptance of your child is a major ingredient in his healthy view of himself. But to accept your child unconditionally isn’t as easy as it may seem on the surface.
What does unconditional acceptance mean? It basically means you accept the totality of who he is. He or she has a physical body which means you must care for him and nourish that body until he can adequately care for himself.
For example, some folks”love” babies at a distance; they are repulsed by dirty diapers and other messes they make. Accepting your child unconditionally also means you must accept and adapt to their emotional, social and intellectual immaturity.
Another critical part of unconditional love is to accept your child’s gender. You may have “ordered” a girl and got a boy. What do you do with that? The healthy and loving thing to do is to be happy and celebrate what God gave you.
You do yourself and your child a great disservice by denying reality and secretly wishing for a different result or, even worse, openly stating your displeasure with the child’s gender. Do not allow your child’s gender to affect the way you treat your him/her. It’s amazing how little children can pick up on the feelings of their parents. So, be careful.
Your unconditional love accepts your child as a work in progress. He needs to grow physically and in all other aspects of his life. While you accept him for where he is now, you also accept him for what he can become. That love creates an environment which challenges and encourages him to grow.
He is acceptable but his bad behavior and attitude are not. As your child grows, incorporate loving discipline which will guide him to a more mature handling of his feeling and actions.
Unconditional acceptance will create in you a healthy tension between accepting him for where he is and his need to continually grow toward maturity.
