Most of us are loved with conditions on it. Do well in school. Behave. Be good, and you are loved. Somewhere along the way love turns into a transaction, and once love is a transaction, I don't think it is really love anymore. This gets passed down, generation to generation. I am not saying this to blame anyone. It was simply the limitation our parents were handed, and their parents before them. They received love this way, so they gave it this way, and I received it too. Which means, without noticing, I was set up to hand the very same thing to my children.

The three of us were lucky. We noticed it happening among us. And we agreed we wanted to practice love the way love is actually supposed to be. So we give each other love with no conditions and no limits. Not love you earn. Not love you can lose. You are allowed to make mistakes. You are allowed to be whoever you are. I embrace both sides of you, the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, even when you are angry, even when you are annoying me. All of it is still loved.

This does not mean there is no work and no standards. We are not a house where anything goes. If I do not like a certain behavior, I will still call it out. But I say both things in the same breath. I do not like this and this about you, and I love you anyway. The love never goes on the table. Only the behavior does. And it goes every direction. We are all working on ourselves, and on this relationship, at the same time. All three of us have our limitations, we know it about each other, and we are improving together. The love holds precisely because nobody is pretending to be perfect.

And here is the part that surprised me most. When you are given conditional love your whole life, that becomes how you love yourself. With conditions. With limits. You only approve of yourself when you perform, when you get it right. So this is not only about how the three of us love each other. We are learning to give this new love to ourselves too. No conditions. No limits.

What it looks like in practice

If you want to try this with your own children, here is what it looks like day to day.

Separate the child from the behaviour. I love you, and lying to me is not okay. The love stays constant, the limit stays firm.

Repair quickly. If I snap, I go back and name it. I was frustrated and I was tired. At my best I would have handled that differently, and here is how. I will work on it, and next time I will do better. Repair is how they learn that love survives conflict.

Normalise mistakes. Forgetting, spilling, doing the same thing for the tenth time. We name it out loud, the way you name an animal at the zoo. Look, there it is again. Then we talk about what to do when you meet that animal in the wild. If you keep forgetting things, try saying out loud what you are taking with you before you leave the house.

Be disciplined about quality time. Protect it like any other commitment, and do not make it depend on how they behaved that day. Full presence, no phone, no correcting. For us that is the morning, and nothing moves it. It tells them they matter just for existing.

Praise who they are, not only what they achieve. Kindness, effort, curiosity. Not only grades and wins.

Let them see you love yourself. When I speak kindly about my own mistakes in front of them, I am showing them how to treat themselves.

The three of us agree on one thing. This is a practice. It is not something you get good at in a few months, and we will always be learning it, trying it, getting it wrong. It is okay to not know how. It is okay to make a mistake, or to forget. What we are committed to is being lifelong practitioners of loving with no conditions.