Honors College Art & Science of Emotions Fall 2017 (1:20 p.m.) Love Journal | Page 21

I was blessed to have two amazing loving parents who taught me to love myself and others, they taught me philia , and this song
reminds me of that. However, this got me thinking about how this song is about how loving parents have a positive impact on our lives, which
lead me to the idea of how the opposite happens. I know some people who struggle with philia and have neglectful parents. We learn how to
love from our parents, specifically philia which includes the love of family, friends, and self. However, in our society there is a major prob-
lem with self-love and self-esteem. Many people today struggle with being able to feel love for themselves. I believe a major component to
this issue is emotional neglect from parents.
It is possible for people to struggle with loving themselves and still have loving parents. This can be a result of other factors
such as bullying or other human caused situations that cause a person to have a lack of self-love. Additionally, there may be preexisting cir-
cumstances that can cause a person to struggle with self-love such as clinical depression or bipolar disorder in which there is a chemical imbal-
ance in the brain that causes people to feel this way. However, a lack of self-love can be caused by a situation like emotional neglect.
I believe that neglectful parents cause their children to struggle with self-love and the understanding of philia almost 100% of
the time. I do believe that it is possible for these people to learn self-love later in life or have a person who makes a positive influence on
these neglected children’s lives and teaches them philia so in this case they would be learning it from someone besides a parent. Scientifically
it makes sense why people who had emotionally neglecting parent(s) would struggle with learning philia . Philia goes hand in hand with the
stage of love that is known as attachment “which mediates friendship, parent-infant bonding, social cordiality, and many other intimacies.” (Wu
5) Attachment is the final stage of love and is the major factor in a long-term relationship (Wu 5). Oxytocin is released during the attach-
ment. It is released during sex, childbirth, and breastfeeding which all have to do with the emotional bonding of two people (Wu 5). So, if
attachment and oxytocin go hand in hand, then children who never experience bonding moments with their parents and therefore do not produce
oxytocin will not know the love of attachment for a family member. Loving of a family member is philia so if they don’t ever experience it they
will never be able to practice philia .
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