All You Need Is Love

When all is said and done, and we all shuffle off this mortal coil into the next stage of our existence, we will all only be remembered by the love of others for us. In their memory of us, locked deep inside their minds, we can all gain a measure of immortality.

What would the world be like without love? A cold, dark, and dreary place to be sure, yet love is one of the most misunderstood emotions of all. “All You Need is Love, Love Is All You Need. ”

This is a Beatles song, from the Magical Mystery Tour album and was first broadcast via satellite. It was watched by over 400 million people live in 25 different countries, in June of 1967, just weeks after their release of the wildly popular Sergeant Pepper album.

The primary love, the first love, and perhaps the most long-lasting and influential impression on our psyches is that of a mother’s love for her child. The love of a mother is the single most important bond in the life of a newborn baby and all through the developmental stages of growing up.

Almost every mother knows intuitively that their love and emotional availability are vitally important to their children. Besides the obvious feeding and caring responsibilities, babies grow dependent on their mothers for virtually everything.

The level of this early care has a lifelong effect on the baby’s well-being throughout their lives. The give and take between mother and child form the basis for the development of the baby’s personality. Babies turn to their mothers for guidance at every step of the way.

It works both ways. If a mother neglects or abuses her baby or child, there can be lifelong negative fallout in the proper growth and development of a child’s mind. It’s really pretty simple. Babies need their mothers, and mothers need their babies.

Babies deprived of a mother’s basic care, and children who grow up being abused or neglected often end up in foster homes or jail. It is a pattern that has been repeated over and over and spans centuries.

Scientific studies have demonstrated without a doubt that love is more than just a word, it is essential for the proper development and growth pattern of a child. Today, more and more fathers are also getting involved in raising their children. Paternity leave is becoming more and more widespread as fathers who realize this often prefer to work for companies that grant it.

There are many other types of love, between brothers and sisters within the family, for example. Love also often develops between friends, also very important to us as human beings.

Friendships and crushes are all part of the concept of romantic love, and the ability to feel and manifest and share these and other types of love are all extremely important to developing a well-rounded, well-grounded individual.

Unfortunately in our increasingly fragmented, divorce-prone society, two-parent families have become the minority, and the children have had to suffer because of it.

Because without a solid foundation of parental love, these children often grow up feeling love-starved, or love-deprived. When they do become adults they are often, (but not always) incapable of expressing and reciprocating any other kinds of love.

It just makes sense that like anything else, a good foundation is essential to the development of the child into a loving, caring adult.

There are always exceptions and exceptional individuals who overcome really traumatic childhoods and become stand-up, positive, and loving adults. Often these people do so in a defiant response to their own lack of love when growing up, but these are the rare and happy exceptions to the rule.

We would have a lot less crime and violence in the world if everybody realized how precious and impressionable a baby or a young child’s mind really is, and devoted as much of their time as possible to the proper upbringing of their children.

I have heard references in the Bible, growing up in Catholic school, to “bad seeds,” born to no good. It seems more likely to me that children who grow up to be bad people, evil adults, suffered from a lack of love in their own early crucial developmental years. It is not an inborn trait, but a failure of proper childhood nurturing.

Some say that we are all simply the products of our environment, the old nature vs nurture, genetics vs environment argument. But the emotional environment a child is raised up in is also becoming more and more understood to be the most crucial phase of human development.

If you never received love as a child, how difficult must it be to express love to others as an adult? If all you have been taught by your family growing up is how to be negative and hateful, that you are worthless, and that you are made to feel that you have low or no self-esteem, how hard is it to flip the switch and become a loving adult? It is nearly impossible.

Since I started out this blog with a reference to a Beatles song, “ All You Need Is Love,” I will end it with a quote from another Beatles song: “The End” from the Abbey Roads album. It includes these prophetic and oh so true lyrics:

“And In The End, The Love You Take Is Equal To The Love You Make.”