A good general rule is that one should seek to be loved by one’s peers—one’s spouse and one’s friends are the best examples—but beyond that, one should first seek to be respected. Seeking to be loved is almost always destructive to non-peer relationships. Teachers, for example, should seek to be respected by their students, not loved. Likewise parents, when raising their children, should not seek to be loved; they need to do too much that may not elicit love in order to raise good and, ironically, loving children. In the liberal world in America, the roles of parents and teachers shifted from authority figures to peers. The results have not been good for children or for society. When one seeks to be loved by those over whom one must exercise authority, one compromises the values necessary to do a proper job.
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