Loving Children

There is nothing wrong with loving a child. Children deserve love because they exist, from anyone willing to give it, and they deserve to be allowed to show love to anyone who will receive it. It is only wrong to deny them love and attention, and only right to give it to them. It is wrong to spurn their attempts to show love, and only right to receive them warmly. Society is wrong when it works to separate adults and children on a pretense of fear, and only right when it allows them to coexist in peace and harmony, guided by pure love and care. Children deserve love even when their parents are unwilling or unable to give it, just as those who give it are deserving of receiving it. Their love is human love, and humans need love like they need air, water, and food. Children are no different from human.

Love doesn't have to be unrealistically selfless and overly simplistic, for discipline, when authoritatively enforced, is a function of love (whether adults are disciplining children or children disciplining adults), it just needs to be felt that way. To deprive someone discipline is to be depriving them of love, just as to neglect is to deprive, and to abuse is to keep depraved--none of these are expressions of love. Children deserve to be loved by society as much as they need to be cared for by it. When a child is loved by an adult, and it is purely expressed, the child will love back. To gain the child's love in return for love: this is the only legitimately hallowed co-relation between adult and child that can exist, and the most noble arrangement a man, woman, boy, or girl can be blessed with. The truth is often plain and usually simple.

There's nothing wrong with a child loving an adult. Adult-to-child love and child-to-adult love is human love, and human love expressed tenderly in private and charitably in public is an expression of God's love. Children are not only capable of receiving their parents' love or solely capable of showing love toward their parents, but are capable of accepting kindness from anyone, young and old, who is willing to give it, and giving it to whoever is willing, young and old, to accept it. This is the meaning of "good will toward all."

The parental responsibility over their children is only there to be the gatekeeper deciding who may enter and who can not, as is their right to keep their child safe, but children deserve love even from their gatekeepers, and even from those incapable of keeping the gate and are still tasked to do so. If they are unable to receive it from their primary gatekeepers (their parents), then they both need someone else to fill that responsibility and extend to them the warm embrace of love and guidance. Parents love their children because they have to, by nature. Childlovers love children because they want to, by choice. True childlovers are never out to replace parents, but to supplement them. They are not there to strip a child off their family, but to be an extension of child's family. They are not there to further suppress the child, or to spoil them into subservience, but to act as role models working through legitimate channels of outreach acceptable to all capable of accepting love.

Childlovers love children as an adult lover might for their own lover, but the love of the childlover is purer, because it is felt almost exclusively out of interpersonal connection, selflessness, and devotion to allowing the child complete freedom. Adult love relationships, by contrast, are often compounded with expectations of monogamy and sex, but such things would be unthinkably selfish, and potentally hazardous, in a childlove relationship. The childlover never seeks to gain the child solely for themselves for "all eternity" as the primarily self-motivated adult relationships often do as an institution (marriage). The childlover instead only seeks to impart to a child the kindness and charity they are deserving of as human beings, and lets the child alone to live their own lives and pay that love forward to whoever they wish. That is the difference that makes all the difference!

The adult should only be someone the child knows personally for one reason or another, someone his or her parents know and trust, and someone from whom the relationship develops naturally and gradually out of friendship and trust. And because true love is never forced, coerced, or manipulated out of someone, whether adult or child, that which is isn't love and doesn't have any legitimate reason for existing. This is as much true for a child's non-parental lovers as it is for their legal guardians. Anyone who can not love a child genuinely (selflessly, harmlessly, charitably) has no business around them. Those who can will prove themselves worthy if their heart is pure. Psalms were written to celebrate such a love as that!