Love Is a Practice: Why Every Child Deserves to Be Seen Before They Are Judged

To this day, I do not know whether my mother spoke with my teacher before I arrived or whether Ms. Piciano simply recognized the fear written across my face. Whatever the reason, she saw me. She quietly checked on me throughout the day, offered reassurance without drawing attention to me, and let me know I could visit the nurse whenever I needed. She protected my dignity without asking me to explain what I was experiencing. More than forty years later, I cannot remember the lesson she taught that week, but I vividly remember how she made me feel safe, feel valued, and reminded me that I mattered. 

Looking back as a professional school counselor, I now recognize what she gave me. She demonstrated that education is not only about teaching academic content; it is also about recognizing humanity in every child. At the time, I did not have the language to describe what I experienced. Today, I understand it as professional love expressed through care, presence, respect, dignity, and unwavering belief in a child. It is the kind of love every student deserves to encounter each day they walk into school. 

Reclaiming the Language of Love 

The word love often makes educators uncomfortable. Too often, it is associated only with romance, causing us to avoid using it in professional settings. Yet the kind of love children need in schools has nothing to do with romance. It has everything to do with humanity. Love in school counseling is the intentional practice of seeing the dignity, strengths, and potential of every child and responding with care, respect, accountability, and hope. School counselors already practice this every day. We simply use different vocabulary.

We talk about empathy, belonging, advocacy, trust, compassion, and unconditional positive regard. Carl Rogers (1957) described unconditional positive regard as an essential condition for helping relationships, while bell hooks (2000) remind us that love is an intentional combination of care, commitment, trust, responsibility, knowledge, and respect. Viewed through this lens, love becomes an ethical practice rather than an emotion. When counselors greet students by name, advocate for equitable opportunities, listen without judgment, and create spaces where students feel safe enough to be themselves, they are practicing love. Rather than avoiding the word, perhaps it is time to reclaim it.

What Love Looks Like in a Counseling Office

Love is not another counseling strategy. It is the posture from which every effective strategy begins. Before interventions, assessments, or treatment plans, there must be a relationship. Before students trust our guidance, they must first trust us. Love looks like greeting students before asking why they have been sent to the office. It looks like learning to pronounce their names correctly because names communicate identity, family, and belonging. It notices when a student seems different and asks, “How are you really doing?” Instead of assuming, everything is fine.

Love listens to understand rather than listening for the next intervention. It honors culture instead of asking students to leave parts of themselves at the classroom door. Every student’s experiences, traditions, and identity deserve to be recognized as strengths rather than obstacles. It also changes the questions we ask. Instead of, “What’s wrong with this student?” we begin asking, “What happened to this student?” or “What is this behavior communicating?”

Behavior is communication. Behind withdrawal, defiance, anxiety, silence, or even declining grades is often a story waiting to be understood. When counselors replace judgment with curiosity, students begin to experience school differently. They discover that someone is interested in understanding them—not simply managing their behavior.

Love also establishes healthy boundaries. It does not lower expectations or excuse harmful choices. Instead, it communicates, I believe you are capable of growth, and I will walk alongside you as you get there. Love recognizes potential before performance.

Love Creates Belonging

One student continues to remind me of why this work matters. I’ll call him Geo. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Geo returned to school profoundly changed. He refused to speak—not to teachers, classmates, or even me. Many adults focused on finding ways to get him to talk again. I chose a different approach. For weeks, we sat together in silence. Sometimes he typed messages on his phone for me to read. Other times, we shared the same space without words. There was no pressure, no expectation, and no timeline for healing. Week after week, I greeted him with the same warmth, patience, and consistency. Slowly, the silence became shorter. Typed messages became whispered responses.

Eventually, whispers became conversations. Geo’s transformation did not occur because of a groundbreaking intervention. It happened because he experienced unconditional acceptance. He learned that he did not have to earn care by speaking, performing, or meeting anyone else’s expectations. He was worthy of respect simply because he was human. His story reminded me that healing cannot be rushed. Trust grows at the speed of relationship, not at the pace of school calendars or intervention plans. Sometimes our greatest intervention is not something we do for students but the way we choose to be with them until they are ready to believe in themselves again. Every student enters our office carrying a story. Some stories are spoken aloud. Others remain hidden beneath silence, anxiety, behavior, absenteeism, or declining grades.

Our responsibility is not to rewrite those stories but to create the safety that allows students to tell them. Belonging is one of the greatest gifts a school can offer. When students experience belonging, they develop trust. Trust creates psychological safety. Safety allows vulnerability, and vulnerability opens the door to healing, learning, and growth. Academic success is often viewed as the destination, but belonging is frequently the pathway that makes achievement possible.

This is especially true for students whose identities or experiences have too often been misunderstood or marginalized. When students know they are valued for who they are they begin to engage differently with school, with adults, and with themselves. Relationships are not an “extra” in education. They are the foundation upon which meaningful learning is built. Before students can believe in algebra, literature, or science, they often need someone to believe in them.

A Lasting Legacy

I still think about Halloween in my fifth-grade year. I cannot remember the assignment we completed, or the lesson Ms. Piciano taught. Time has erased those details. What remains is how she made me feel. She saw a frightened little girl and chose compassion over convenience. She protected my dignity, honored my humanity, and reminded me—without ever saying the words—that I mattered.

Decades later, I realized she was doing far more than teaching. She was modeling the kind of counselor I would one day become. Every child deserves at least one adult who chooses to see them before judging them, to listen before correcting them, and to believe in them before they believe in themselves. As school counselors, we often search for the next evidence-based practice, innovative curriculum, or effective intervention.

Love, Identity, and the Whole Child

Love is not separate from school counseling. Although the word love may not often appear in professional frameworks, its principles are woven throughout both the ASCA National Model and the ISCA International Model for School Counseling Programs (2022).

The ISCA framework is particularly relevant in international schools because it recognizes the global and culturally diverse context in which school counselors work. The ISCA Student Standards (2022) identify four interconnected domains of student development: Social/Emotional, Global Perspective & Identity Development, Academic, and Career.

These are not separate from love—they are professional expressions of it.

These domains remind us that students are more than their grades, behavior, or future plans. They are developing human beings whose social and emotional well-being, identities, cultural perspectives, academic experiences, and aspirations are interwoven to create a whole child.

When school counselors intentionally cultivate belonging, honor students’ identities and experiences, protect their dignity, support their academic and personal growth, and help them develop the skills to navigate an increasingly interconnected world, they are practicing an ethical form of love grounded in the values and responsibilities of the profession.

And love must also invite us to examine power.

If we are committed to seeing the whole child, we must consider how race, culture, language, identity, ability, socioeconomic circumstances, and other lived experiences can influence how a student is perceived and treated within a school.

The question is not simply, “How do we help this student?”

Sometimes we must also ask, “What does this student need from us—and what might our system need to change?”

Love without reflection can become paternalism. Love without equity can become selective. Love without accountability can become permissiveness.

But love grounded in cultural humility, justice, relationship, and professional responsibility becomes something more powerful.

It becomes practice.