Yet it’s Gift-love, and not Need-love, that parents spoke about with more passion. Need-love comes from children. Gift-love is something parents give away. It’s a far less cozy arrangement. Gift-love can be difficult to muster too, contrary to what so many cheerful books about new parenthood contend. It does not come instantaneously to all parents the moment they’re handed their new baby in the nursery. Rather, it blooms with time. Alison Gopnik makes this distinction with a perfect aphorism in The Philosophical Baby: “It’s not so much that we care for children because we love them,” she
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