Am I Making My Kids Feel Important?

By Crystal Virgin

"Children deserve to be adored. Not just loved in the background — adored. Made to feel that they are the most important people in the room."

I've been making my way through a book lately by a Christian author named Kathy Koch called No More Perfect Kids. I picked it up during a hard season, the way you sometimes reach for something without fully knowing why, and it has been quietly rearranging some things in me.

One chapter stopped me completely. It's called Am I Important to You?

The question sounds simple. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized it wasn't simple at all. Because the honest answer — if I'm really being honest — is that I don't always know what my daughters would say.

The Perfection Infection

Before I get to importance, I want to share the concept that anchors the whole book, because it reframed something I didn't realize I was doing.

Kathy Koch calls it the "perfection infection." The idea that long before our children are born — and long after — we carry pictures in our minds of who they will be. What they'll be good at. What they'll love. How they'll behave. The kind of people we're quietly hoping they'll become.

And then we meet them. Our actual children, with their actual personalities and actual interests and actual limitations. And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — there's a gap between the child we pictured and the one standing in front of us. And without meaning to, we communicate that gap to them.

Not cruelly. Not intentionally. Just in the small, accumulated ways that children are very good at noticing.

I thought about the mom I imagined I'd be — crafts and cooking together, organized and patient and present. I thought about the ways I'm still growing into that version of myself. And I thought about whether my daughters, in the middle of all that growing, feel like the most important people in my world.

What Importance Actually Looks Like

Kathy Koch asks parents to examine a simple but uncomfortable question: when does your child get your full attention?

Is it when they're in trouble? When they've done something impressive? Or do they receive it freely, regularly, simply because they are yours and they matter?

Children are perceptive in ways we underestimate. They notice when we're half-present. They notice when the phone wins. They notice when dinner, or a work task, or whatever else is pulling at us gets more of our eyes than they do. And over time, what they notice becomes what they believe about themselves — about whether they are worth being seen.

That landed hard for me.

Because I love my daughters more than I know how to say. But love that lives only in my heart and doesn't consistently make it into my presence, my eye contact, my willingness to stop what I'm doing — does it reach them the way I intend it to?

I'm not sure it always does.

Children Deserve to Be Adored

Here is what I believe, underneath all of it: children deserve to be adored. Not just loved in the background, not just provided for and kept safe — adored. Made to feel, regularly and specifically, that they are the most important people in the room.

More important than the phone. More important than the project. More important than getting dinner on the table on time.

This doesn't mean dropping everything every moment of every day. It means that when my daughter comes to find me, she should be able to tell — from how I turn toward her, from whether I put the phone down, from the look on my face when she walks in — that her arrival matters. That she is not interrupting something more important than she is.

Because she isn't. Nothing is.

Identity Controls Behavior

One more thing from this book that has stayed with me: Kathy Koch writes that identity controls behavior. What our children believe about who they are will shape everything they do.

If they believe they are important — to us, to God, to the world — they will act from that place. If they believe they are an interruption, a problem to manage, a gap between the child we wanted and the one we got — they will act from that place too.

This is why Koch urges parents not to give children labels, even well-meaning ones — the athletic one, the difficult one, the shy one. Labels narrow. And instead, she points toward something I believe deeply: anchor your child's identity in eternal truth. Not in what they're good at or what phase they're in, but in who God says they are.

A daughter of God. Known. Loved. Important — not because of what she does, but because of who she is.

The Question I'm Still Sitting With

Am I important to you?

I want my girls to never have to wonder. I want the answer to be so woven into the fabric of their daily lives — in how I greet them in the morning, how I respond when they interrupt me, how I stop what I'm doing to actually look at them — that the question never has to be asked out loud.

I'm not there yet. But I'm asking myself the question now. And I think that's where it starts.