‘They Must Know that They Are Loved’

Quotes Worth Contemplating for the Feast of St. John Bosco

A Look at Saint John Bosco and the “Love Languages”

“It is not enough to love the young,” St. John Bosco famously said; “they must know that they are loved.” Potential-Catholic Dr. Gary Chapman would certainly agree with this, adding, no doubt, that in order to know they are loved, our children need the adults in their lives to communicate that love in a language they understand. Dr. Chapman, meet St. John Bosco.

There are two absolutely critical principles at play here. First, children need love.

Child psychologists affirm that every child has certain basic emotional needs that must be met if he is to be emotionally stable. Among those emotional needs, none is more basic than the need for love and affection, the need to sense that he or she belongs and is wanted. With an adequate supply of affection, the child will likely develop into a responsible adult. Without that love, he or she will be emotionally and socially challenged.

I liked the metaphor the first time I heard it: “Inside every child is an ‘emotional tank’ waiting to be filled with love. When a child really feels loved, he will develop normally, but when the love tank is empty, the child will misbehave….”

As I listened, I thought of the hundred of parents who had paraded the misdeeds of their children through my office. I had never visualized an empty love tank inside those children, but I had certainly seen the results of it. Their misbehavior was a misguided search for the love they did not feel. They were seeking love in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways. (The 5 Love Languages, 20–21)

Yes, the verbiage has a modern feel to it. But, arguably, St. John Bosco advocated nothing less when he stipulated that “The educator must strive to make himself loved by his pupils if he wishes to obtain their respect.” Since a child cannot give love that he has not first received, it follows that the educator must show love if he is to be loved in return.

The second principle, then, is Dr. Chapman’s profound observation that different individuals give and receive love differently; just because a parent or a teacher is trying to communicate love does not mean the child is receiving that communication. In fact, the disconnect can be as radical as someone speaking Chinese to a little American boy (cf. ibid., 15).

Dr. Chapman enumerates five “love languages”: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Physical Touch, Acts of Service, and Gift-Giving.

Though to prove it conclusively would call for a far more substantial array of anecdotes than I am able to marshal myself, I am nevertheless convinced that our saint intuited in the nineteenth century all that Dr. Chapman has articulated in the twenty-first by way of the existence and importance of “love languages.” I propose, moreover, Don Bosco “spoke” these languages with flawless accuracy to the thousands of boys he worked with in Turin throughout the forty-seven years of his active apostolate there. A few examples will suffice for this introductory study:

Words of Affirmation. Our saint trained his educators to each day address “a few kind words” to the students, giving advice concerning what ought to be done or avoided. While these miniature exhortations were never to occupy more than two or three minutes, he called them, “the key to a moral life, to good conduct, and to success in education.”

Quality Time. It was important to the Saint of Turin that his boys had “full liberty to run, skip, and play as much as they please” since gymnastics, music, reciting, acting, and hiking were “most efficacious means of promoting discipline and improving good conduct and health.” But it was equally important to him that the grown-ups take part in these activities. He himself made a point of playing with — not merely supervising — the boys and insisted also that his Salesians did so.

Physical Touch. Appropriate physical touch being a normal means of healthy human interaction, it does not surprise us to hear of the saint’s putting his hand on the head of a child when he gave a blessing and spoke of the child’s future (cf. Biographical Memoirs, Vol. XVIII, 92–93). Nor would we expect to see him depicted in art as other than he is: surrounded by little ones, his hands resting on them gently.

Acts of Service. Who could count all the ways St. John Bosco put himself at the service of his boys — teaching them trades, personally seeking out employment for them, writing textbooks for them, entertaining them? This is to say nothing of feeding, clothing, and sheltering them!

Gift-Giving. Blessed with a photographic memory, nearly super-human physical strength, the ability to prophesy, work miracles, and read hearts and consciences, can we possibly think that he on whom God had lavished such amazing gifts would not in turn appreciate what it was to give gifts to others? Perhaps the greatest gift this Italian wonder-worker gave to his children was — like Our Lord — his own mother!

Himself a master of child psychology (or so he would be termed in today’s lingo), St. John Bosco could not have summarized his educational philosophy more powerfully than in these words: “It is not enough to love the young — they must know that they are loved.” May he who seemingly spoke the “love languages” of all his children with such fluency, help us to communicate love to the children in our lives in a way they will actually understand. As Don Bosco himself told his boys,

I urge you to take every opportunity to study languages. Every language that we learn removes a barrier between ourselves and millions of our fellow human beings…and enables us to help a few and sometimes very many of them. (BM, Vol. II, 217)

We cannot afford to fail in this. Their lives depend on it.