6 Year Old Boy & Valentines Day Question

[T1Catholic]

The teacher at my 6 year old son’s school has asked that all kids in the class prepare a Valentine’s Day card for everyone in the class. No biggie right? Well, my son has a really good friend in the class, another boy and he wants to write in the card “I love you”. Now I reacted very calmly and said somethin like it’s wonderful that you have a such a good friend that you like so much, but when boys are friends with each other, they usually say “I like you instead of I love you”. Well my son got very upset and I’m wondering if I over-reacted. My dh wasn’t in the room and said he would have just came out and said, boys don’t say I love you to boys who are not family. This is my oldest child so it’s the first time I’ve gone through this. How do you suggest I handle this?

 

[Brenda_V]

You did not overreact . Your poor little guy has to learn that there are people out there who have changed the usage of our language so much that saying “I love you” to someone of the same gender doesn’t mean what he wants it to mean! I know this is awful but it is a fact of life today.

Perhaps you can help your guy qualify his desire to say “I love you” to his guy friend by saying “I love you like you were my brother”. This will make the statement of love correctly understood by anyone else who will see it which is where your reaction probably came from.

This is just awful that we have to do this but this kind of use of language has been out there since I was a child and I will soon be 49!

Brenda V.

 

[carol_marie]

Although I totally understand why you said what you did, I would’ve let my son write “I love you” to his friend - just as I would let my daughter write I love you to her friend. He’s only 6 - it’s how he feels about his friend - totally harmless & I wouldn’t let our very screwed up society make it into something more than an innocent child expressing his sweet little heart.

By the time he’s 8 or 9 he will know that he doesn’t say that to a friend (even if he loves his friend) because sadly by that time, kids totally know what “gay” means & they want to avoid that. My 2nd grader daughter will no longer hold her best friend’s hand because she said, “Mommy that’s gay!” That is just so sad.

 

[Potato1]

I think that you were correct. I don’t feel like it is appropriate for boys to write that to other boys no matter what the age or culture in which we live. I don’t feel that has ever been appropriate. I like the “like a brother” idea it envokes friendship and Christian love. Girls tentd to say I love you to eachother because feelings and the expression of them are prevelant.

 

[ReginaNova]

I too think you handled that well. Unfortunately, he could be subjected to merciless teasing from other kids if he wrote “I love you” to another boy.

I think we as parents need to be particularly attuned to our oldest child who does not have the benefit of older siblings to alert them to the ways of the world. I found that children who have older siblings tend to be “street smart” in ways that an oldest child does not. Kids who have older siblings know all sorts of things and delight in telling other kids those things–birds and bees and similar. I would rather my kid learned enough from me that she wasn’t upset by the twisted “information” the other kids told her. So I try to anticipate such things and guide her (and protect her).

 

[deb1]

You did the correct thing and protected him from some possible teasing. Perhaps you could explain to him that although he understands that there are different kinds of love(the love between spouses is different then the love between siblings), not everyone is mature enough to understand this.

 

[OutinChgoburbs]

I don’t discount what you did or why you did it.

HOWEVER- Addressing twenty-some-odd valentine cards makes more work for the teacher, who has ot ensure that the cards are delivered to the right people, taking more time from the school day. Instead, at our school, the children only write “from” and their name on the back of the card, with nothing on the envelope. Nobody gets a special valentine, but nobody’s left out, and the delivery is much faster.