Parents need to learn the “language of love.”
Written by: Dr. Tik Chi-yuen, Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Family Education In a study conducted earlier, it was found that nearly sixty percent of children felt that their parents did not communicate with them using the language of love, and nearly half of the parents tended to use authoritarian and indifferent approaches when disciplining their children. In fact, the mode of parent-child communication is crucial for establishing a strong parent-child relationship. In this article, I would like to share the results and recommendations related to this survey. According to research in well-known psychology studies in the United States, parents’ disciplinary styles can be categorized into the enlightened type, which utilizes the “language of love,” and the authoritarian, permissive, and indifferent types, which fall under the category of “non-loving languages.” Based on the responses from children, only forty percent of parents were considered as the enlightened type in the eyes of their children, while one percent fell into the permissive type. The remaining nearly half of the parents were classified as either authoritarian or indifferent types, with the proportions being twenty-seven percent and twenty-two percent, respectively. The survey also revealed significant discrepancies between parents and children’s ideals and realities in three different situations, with academic performance being particularly severe. Sixty-two percent of children expected their parents to adopt an enlightened approach in handling academic performance, but in reality, only thirty-seven percent of parents fell into this category. Similarly, there was a significant gap between parents’ ideals and realities.