Teaching children about first love

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Teaching children about first love

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Parents always wonder about your kids and your first romantic relationships. Usually this can be traumatic because it's your first, you don't know anything about love. Often, they're based on infatuation; infatuation means strong attraction to one trait. It might be typically physical or a status thing, not based on the whole person, so those tend not to last very long. One thing you can teach your child is first relationships may not work out, and that's okay, it doesn't mean there's anything bad about you but try to learn as you start dating to evaluate the whole person. Not just one or two traits which means their actions, their personalities, their looks, their taste, their intelligence, their integrity, whether you feel in-sync in things you talk about. Try to think more and more in terms of the whole person. It's not going to happen with a 16 year old, but as they learn, you can encourage them to look for that, say, "Who do you feel most in-sync with and see what happens?" You might get really, really lucky and the first love is the one for life but that's rare. So usually you have to try things; many people find the one and still gets divorced, but if you get divorced, learn form that. What did you miss, before you didn't know. So think of it as a learning process.

See Edwin A. Locke, PhD's video on Teaching children about first love...

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Edwin A. Locke, PhD

Psychologist & Author

Edwin A. Locke, PhD, is Dean's Professor (Emeritus) of Leadership and Motivation at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his BA from Harvard in 1960 and his PhD in Industrial Psychology from Cornell University in 1964.He has published over 300 chapters, notes and articles in professional journals, on such subjects as work motivation, job satisfaction, incentives, and the philosophy of science. He is also the author or editor of 12 books, including The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason, Study Methods and Study Motivation, Goal Setting: A Motivational Technique That Works, A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance, Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior, The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators  and Postmodernism and Management: Pros, Cons and the Alternative. He is internationally known for his research on goal setting. A recent survey found that Locke's goal setting theory (developed with G. Latham) was ranked #1 in importance among 73 management theories. His work has been supported by numerous research grants, and he has served as consultant to research firms and private businesses.Dr. Locke has been elected a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Academy of Management, and has been a consulting editor for leading journals. He was a winner of the Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award at the University of Maryland, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the Career Contribution Award from the Academy of Management (Human Resource Division), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management (Organizational Behavior Division), and the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. He has been a writer and lecturer for the Ayn Rand Institute and is interested in the application of the philosophy of Objectivism to behavioral sciences.

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