I love kids. My mother has known this fact since I was five, but I learnt of it later, when I discovered my fascination with babies. I have wanted a child of my own since I was in year three of campus. I do not have a reason for that yearning. All I know is that the wait has been long, really long. I still look forward to the day I will be a mom to a baby, or babies. I have a great deal of respect for mothers, my own taking the crown of it. She has done so much for us. Sometimes I sit and pray that I be granted graces to give a fraction of what she gave us, and achieving that, I will not have lived in vain.

Children are a blessing, so we always say. They are innocent, honest, harmless and inconsiderate. They have the capacity to draw a smile from the saddest of faces. By their being and the little comments they make. They have the capacity to give you a reason for living. When there is no other reason to wake up in the morning, the concern for their well being will definitely give u a reason to smile. Kids have the capacity to make you fight for what you believe is right, especially where their welfare is concerned. Kids cry with you, when for them they do not even understand. They are just being honestly empathetic. Kids love honestly and are very good judges of character. They say if you want to know a good person, see the reaction of a child when they are with them. If they cringe, be wary. If they smile, laugh, or fall asleep in their arms, then the person is trustworthy. Kids forgive in seconds. They get mad, they cry, they fight, but they always forget the wrongs done against them. Kids are just lovely. Let’s say somebody brings a baby into the room. Everybody wants to see it, touch it, and talk to it.  People might not like it, but no one is offended by it. No one takes anything a baby does personally. Kids draw out love from everyone. If anyone is ever in doubt of this then they ought to try mistreating a kid in public and the public’s wrath will be upon them. Being around kids is pressureless. When you are around them, you are just you and them and that moment. Tomorrow, worries of the second before or uncertain future are forgotten, for whatever time that one spends with the child. Kids laugh honestly, they laugh long and loud and carefree. Children draw our real selves out of ourselves. When we are around children or with children or on the company of children, the capacity to pretend is reduced to zero percent, maybe because they themselves are honest and their honesty reaches out to us. We are ourselves when we are with children, and we are not afraid of being judged, because they are incapable of it. We might experience rejection, temporarily or otherwise, but their acceptance is genuine. Kids are wondrous, enlightening, and magical. Until a child is told to “never talk to strangers!” they have no qualms about talking to random people. Children have no biases when it comes to love. If you smile at a child, he/she will beam a huge smile back at you for no reason other than your presence. According to Jane Kim, spontaneity, diligence, no worries, no criticisms, simplicity, encouragement, laughter, and fun is their constant character.

Among the stellar emotional needs of humanistic psychology are unconditional acceptance, unconditional self-regard, unconditional self-acceptance, and unconditional love. The meaning of the word unconditional is “without conditions or reservations; absolute. But, if there is any absolute when it comes to love, it is that human love is limited. It is not what it was originally created to be, it is not what we were commanded to live. Adler and Maslow considered these “unconditional” to be basic human needs, essential to a person’s sense of wellbeing. They taught that people need to be loved and accepted unconditionally—without any conditions of performance. The idea of people improving their life in an atmosphere of unconditional love is founded on the premise that people are born good and that their natural inclination to goodness is thwarted by their environment. This means that a baby is born human only. No baby is born a racist, or tribalist or rapist or thief, or any other viceful characters we live with today. All these are acquired. A child’s love is unconditional. They do not love people because they make them smile or they buy them stuff, or they play with them. They do not love you  because you are beautiful, or you speak good English, or are from one place with him. Honestly, I don’t even think the care where we are from, they just love because the other is lovable, period. If they love you they do, with or without you doing anything to them.

There is so much joy and peace derived from acceptance. It is a symbol of unconditional love. By unconditional love we are speaking of love on the basis of being rather than doing. One implication of this teaching is the place of grandeur that it gives to the human being. I am lovable just because I am human; therefore being human, in and of itself, regardless of what I do with my humanness, must have some sort of independent value or worth. It is by itself a sufficient claim to respect and esteem (Paul Brownback, The Danger of Self-Love). Children do not love with expectation of something better in return, they just love. The love of a child thus becomes something we can learn from among other things we can learn from children. According to Angelina Pandian, in a poem, Love is acceptance, she highlights that Love is acceptance, not a half-hearted one at that, accepting only the positive, accepting that which benefits you, accepting only the comfortable things and blanking out the rest of the world. All this, is not, true acceptance. To accept completely means to be able to totally accept the thoughts, the feelings, the motives, the reactions, the complete person – along with, the difference of opinions, the habits you disapprove, the problems and the pains, everything literally about that person.

Children teach us this essence of love. They draw it out of us too. In them we love, in them we are loved. How I wish we would love one another too, truly, honestly and purely, as children do.