More Than A Feeling

By Tamsin Grimmer

I often tell people I have the best job in the world! I not only get to meet so many amazing children and their professional carers, I also get to talk about love, or more specifically, a loving pedagogy¹!

Let’s start by talking about why love is important and how we can embed love and nurture into our professional practice and, for a bit of fun, I will throw in a few titles of love songs to keep you on your toes!

So, what’s love got to do with it? I want to know what love is – what do we mean when we say we love someone?

What is Love?

Love can be thought of as a feeling or an emotion – we talk about loving our partner or our families, we even talk about loving chocolate – well I do anyway! But the greatest love is much more than a feeling and takes more than words – when we love someone it involves actions too. We do things for them to demonstrate our love, we might buy gifts or share ideas about a book to read or a programme to watch, or tell them we would walk a thousand miles for them! We want the best for our loved one. We seek to make them happy and we want to spend time with them. Sometimes these different ways of demonstrating love are called love languages² and I’ll share a little more about them later.

We have one word meaning love in the English language and it covers a multitude of types of love – from the parental love we might feel as an educator or parent, to the attraction we might feel for a partner. We don’t talk about love within our schools and settings – it sometimes feels out of bounds, but I do think we love the children we work with and using words that could be synonymous with love, like warmth or care, do not always describe the intensity of feeling or the practical way we nurture our children.

I use the term loving pedagogy to combine the caring aspects of our role with a child-centred approach to working with children that can underpin everything we do to lead and teach our children.

Common Language

Everyone has a preferred way of giving and receiving love from others, their own love languages if you like. For example, if a child whose primary love language is ‘quality time’ is constantly told by their parent, ‘I love you’ but the parent rarely spends time with them, they are unlikely to feel loved. Likewise a parent may prefer not to kiss and cuddle their child, despite spending lots of time with them, if that child’s preferred way to receive love is through kisses and cuddles, they may feel unloved.

There are five love languages identified in research², but you might recognise even more. Let’s think about how we can listen for these languages when we’re with our children:

Using words: when children say things like, “You’re beautiful”, “I like your top” or “I love you” they are using words to demonstrate their love. We can reciprocate and use words back.
Spending quality time together: Have you ever said “me and my shadow” about a child – children sometimes wanna be with you everywhere, and we can speak this language of quality time and choose to sit next to this child, or respond positively to their attachment-seeking behaviours.
Giving and receiving gifts: when children bring us flowers or a special pebble they are giving us a love token! We can give them something in return, e.g. find them the biggest conker we can or save a beautiful feather for them.
Doing things for people we love: “Everything I do, I do it for you!” Some children regularly ask for our help or want to help us, this love language is about doing a service for others, so in practice we can ask the child to be our special helper.
Using positive touch: Some children say, “I wanna hold your hand” or regularly climb onto our laps for a story. We can respond positively, knowing that using consented touch with children gives them a DOSE³of feel-good chemicals in their brain (Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Endorphins).

The Power of Love

Our children are growing up in a world where they have very little power – their lives are very controlled by adults and through adopting a loving pedagogy, we are able to hand over a little bit of this control to them and help them feel a little less powerless! Viewing children as active, competent and powerful, with their own views, opinions, preferences and interests, will help us to take these views and opinions into account as much as possible. An example of this is when educators bring themselves physically down to the children’s level or lower, by kneeling or crouching down. This levels the power dynamic between the taller adult and the smaller child and helps children to feel valued and listened to.

We also need to empower children in relation to their emotional development. Young children are still learning what these big emotions are and have not yet mastered how to deal with them. We need to be a co-regulator and role-model how to cope with emotions ourselves, ensuring that the message that children receive loud and clear is to express yourself because all emotions are acceptable.

So if you’re still making your mind up and want me to convince you a little further of the power of love within our schools and settings, when a child feels loved, they will feel safe, seen, soothed and secure⁴ and ultimately learn more effectively – so in loving our children we are telling them the following super important messages:

· I’m never gonna give you up
· I’ll stand by you
· I respect you
· Nothing compares to you
· You’re simply the best
· You’re amazing, just the way you are!

Let’s talk about love and create a love story with our children at the centre, helping them know that all you need is love.

So how many love song titles did you find? A million love songs? (Sorry, couldn’t resist!) Why not challenge a colleague to find more titles than you did and get in touch to let me know how you got on!

Tamsin Grimmer.

Tamsin’s Links:

Tamsin’s Website:
https://www.tamsingrimmer.com/loving-pedagogy

Tamsin’s publications:
https://www.tamsingrimmer.com/more-about-me

The Love and Nurture rating scale:
https://www.lulu.com/search?sortBy=RELEVANCE&page=1&q=love+and+nurture+rating+scale+Bradbury+and+Grimmer&pageSize=10&adult_audience_rating=00

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References and further reading:

1. Grimmer, T. (2021) Developing a Loving Pedagogy in the Early Years: How Love Fits with Professional Practice. London: Routledge.

2. Chapman, G. and Campbell, R. (2012) The 5 Love Languages of Children. Chicago, IL: Northfield Publishing.

3. Watson, S. (2021) Feel-good hormones: How they affect your mind, mood and body. Available at: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/feel-good-hormones-how-they-affect-your-mind-mood-and-body

4. Siegel, D. & Payne-Bryson, T. (2020) The power of showing up . London: Scribe.

More Than A Feeling - Guest Article by Tamsin Grimmer

Embedding love and nurture into professional practice Embedding love and nurture into professional practice by Tamsin Grimmer

Happy Saturday PLAY People,