Me big, you little. Me important, you dinky. You can do that, but you are missing a crucial ingredient in loving someone-love makes the other person feel important and respected, not insignificant and run over. If children are going to feel loved, they also need to feel respected by their parents. It involves two-legged friends, too.
Children feel loved or unloved by the way their parents treat their friends.
Parents can respond in one of three ways to their children's friends-put them down, pretend they're not there, or treat them special. Unless your children are too wonderful for words, they will probably not bat .1000 on friend-choices. They will choose some you want to give your stamp and others you want to give your stomp. The older children get, the more their friends are almost literally a part of them. So how a parent treats a son or daughter's friend becomes a very delicate issue.