Well, I agree that love is necessary to growth, so for the example of the children, I fully agree that a loving upbringing redounds to the child’s best benefit. I would also agree with Lao Tzu, who said “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” But there is some nuance in all of this: Feeling loved can give you confidence and a sort of mental resilience, just as loving someone else can be the inspiration for bravery. When I was speaking of love, I was speaking of the inclinations it inspires in regards to the object of the affection, in that we want to make things easy for those we love, or at least this is the most visceral desire. A parent can rationally recognize that it’s in their child’s best interest to learn a hard lesson for themselves, but the child’s pain still hurts the parent, and so emotionally they want to protect and provide for the child. We can see that our lover will benefit from a lack of support, from being made to stand on their own two feet, but it should be hard for us to allow this because it is against the sensitivity we have towards them. So, in a word, love is fundamentally an emotional occurrence and those emotions push us towards behaviors that would enfeeble the subject of our adoration, but that same love motivates us to realize the advantages conferable by going against the instincts of that very love. I agree love should seek to strengthen its object, and often does, but it goes against its natural inclinations to do so.

I imagine a parent watching their child go off to college. They know rationally that it is in the child’s best interest, and they want what’s best for them, but they are emotionally saddened at letting them go. I think this sadness is love on the most basic level, an emotional response, and that the rational response is something layered on, which extends the effectiveness of it, but is not love in the purest sense, simply motivated by it. So that the rationality is working to restrain the emotionality, though that emotionality is what initially created the parent’s urge to seek out rationally what was best for the child (if that makes any sense). The fundamental inclination of love, then, being not to let the child go, and that impulse having to be restrained.