The love you show your children is the love they will know. But what are we actually *teaching* them about what love looks like? For most of us, if we’re brutally honest, we aren’t teaching them love. We’re teaching them our own unhealed wounds. We’re teaching them our own brand of conditional affection, our own anxieties, our own transactional way of relating to the world. We’re teaching them that love is something you earn. That it’s something that can be taken away. That it’s something that requires you to be smaller, quieter, less of who you truly are. Not a fairytale. Not a Hallmark card. The real, messy, often painful truth of what gets passed down from generation to generation under the banner of "love." This isn’t about blame. This isn’t about pointing fingers at our parents, or their parents before them. This is about taking radical responsibility for the legacy of love we are creating in our own homes, with our own children. It’s about having the courage to look at the ways we might be perpetuating patterns of conditional love, of love that is really about control, of love that is more about our own comfort than our