Most parents don’t just want their children to be nice, or smart, or happy, or accomplished. They want them to be good humans with empathy: people who know how to stay connected, even when things are uncomfortable. People who can care deeply without losing themselves.
At its core, that’s what it means to love well.
Writer and cultural critic bell hooks reminds us that love is not a feeling we fall into. Love is a verb. It is not about what we feel for someone, but about how we show up for them, again and again.
When we think about raising children through that lens, the goal shifts. We are not trying to raise kids who feel loving all the time. We are raising kids who practice love through empathy, boundaries, and repair.
Empathy: Choosing curiosity over judgment
Empathy, in this context, means being willing to pause and wonder what someone else might be experiencing.
For children, empathy develops slowly. Because empathy requires brain skills that are still under construction, especially the ability to take another person’s perspective, little kids often struggle to show empathy, and even teenagers may have their lapses. That’s ok!
Research consistently shows that empathy grows best when children feel deeply understood themselves. When we respond to our kids’ emotions with presence and attunement, we teach them what it feels like to be seen. That lived experience becomes the foundation for offering empathy to others.
Boundaries: Loving without self-abandonment
Many of us were taught that being loving means being accommodating, agreeable, and self-sacrificing. But love that requires the loss of self is not sustainable, and it is not what we want to pass on. Healthy love includes the acknowledgement that, as Nedra Tawwab says, you don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep others warm. It includes the knowledge that you are valuable enough to consider yourself in a dynamic.
Teaching boundaries means helping children learn that their needs matter and that other people’s needs matter, too. It means showing them that saying “no” does not make them unkind, and hearing “no” does not mean they are unloved.
We teach this most powerfully by how we live it.
“You don’t have to hug anyone if you don’t want to.”
“I want to help, and I need a few minutes first.”
“I can see you’re upset, and I’m still going to hold this limit.”
Living out this idea of consideration of both yourself and others shows children that love and respect go hand in hand.
Repair: Where love becomes action
If love is a verb, repair may be its most important expression.
No family gets this right all the time. We snap. We misread. We get overwhelmed. What matters is not avoiding rupture, but being willing to repair it.
Repair teaches children that relationships are resilient, that accountability does not require shame, and that love does not disappear when things get hard.
Repair sounds like:
“I’m sorry I raised my voice. That wasn’t okay.”
“I was feeling overwhelmed, and I should have taken a break.”
“What do you need from me right now?”
“How can we make this right together?”
When adults model repair, we teach children that in healthy relationships, rupture (which is inevitable) shows up together with repair.
Practicing love and empathy over a lifetime
Empathy, boundaries, and repair are not skills like a times table that kids master once and carry effortlessly into adulthood. A better way to think of them is as practices — things we work on again and again and again, and keep practicing for all of our lives.
Your child will not learn how to love well from a single conversation. They will learn it by living inside relationships where people keep showing up, keep trying again, and keep choosing connection, even when it feels vulnerable.
If you are parenting with intention, humility, and a willingness to repair, you are already practicing love as a verb and modeling empathy.
And that may be one of the most powerful lessons your child will ever learn.
