Join Christine Martinello and Cindy Levi, former CEO of Avita Community Partners, for a heartfelt conversation about strengthening family relationships and creating a sense of belonging in your family, school, or community. Through her work with people living with mental illness and disabilities, Cindy helped people feel welcomed, included, and connected. Together, Christine and Cindy explore how to bring that same spirit of acceptance into everyday relationships.

Whether you’re a mom, therapist, teacher, or caregiver, you’ll discover practical ways to:

• Help children feel loved and accepted for who they are, beyond grades and achievements.
• Strengthen family connection while respecting different personalities, abilities, and needs.
• Stay connected through disagreements and difficult seasons.
• Practice unconditional love alongside healthy boundaries.
• Build family traditions that nurture closeness and belonging.
• Learn the simple WILL framework:
  • W — Welcome warmly.
  • I — Include intentionally.
  • L — Listen with curiosity.
  • L — Love through action.

This week’s Love Practice: Ask your child, “When do you feel most loved and accepted?” Listen with curiosity. Then write a love note celebrating what makes their presence in your family special.

Creating a loving family or community starts with small, intentional, everyday actions. Try one love practice this week and share this episode with someone who wants to build closer connections.

Find more love practices and resources for your family, school, or community at:  https://originallovebox.com or  https://LoveBoxFoundation.org.

Follow Love Agents: Where Love Meets Wellness for stories, science backed insights, and simple love practices to strengthen relationships and nurture well-being.

Keep on loving!

In this heartfelt episode of Love Agents: Where Love Meets Wellness, Christine Martinello shares treasured love notes from her own family and explores how expressing love can help children feel seen, valued, and connected.

Joining her are Darcy, a therapist, and her 25-year-old daughter, Maddie, whose family has practiced the Love Box tradition for more than a decade. Through laughter and tender memories, they share how their notes became a “family diary”—and reminded Maddie during a deeply painful season: I am still loved. I still belong.

You’ll discover:

• Why telling someone why you love them adds meaning beyond “I love you.”
• How writing love notes and reading them aloud can nurture appreciation, empathy, and connection while preserving your family’s love story.
• A simple Love Practice to try this week , even if it feels awkward at first.

You don’t need perfect words or a perfect family. The note you write today may become something your child treasures years from now.

Don’t just feel the love. Make it visible.

Explore the Original Love Box at OriginalLoveBox.com.

Discover how to navigate big feelings, respond with greater calm, and raise children who feel seen, heard, valued, and loved. In this episode of Love Agents: Where Love Meets Wellness, Christine Martinello explores emotional intelligence, emotional regulation, and her concept of Love Intelligence—turning emotional awareness into loving words and intentional actions your family can experience.

Whether you’re facing tantrums, school worries, or your own parenting overwhelm, you’ll learn practical ways to understand what’s beneath a reaction, recognize feelings and needs, and protect connection while setting clear limits.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The LOVE Framework: A practical way to communicate feelings and needs while protecting connection.
• Pause, Guide, Repair: Three steps for difficult moments—steady yourself, guide your child with compassion and clear boundaries, and reconnect after conflict.
• “All feelings are welcome. All behaviors are not.” How to validate emotions without accepting hurtful behavior.
• Emotional intelligence for parents and kids: Tools to notice, name, express, and manage big emotions.
• How love grows: Why everyday moments of attention, empathy, affection, trust, and repair matter for healthy relationships.
• Resources and a weekly Love Practice: Simple ways to build emotional awareness and family connection, including making love visible through handwritten notes with the Original Love Box. 

Anger doesn’t cancel love. Mistakes don’t cancel belonging. And you don’t have to parent perfectly to build a connected family.

For parents, caregivers, therapists, and educators, this episode offers practical tools for emotional regulation, compassionate parenting, and stronger relationships.

Christine Martinello is an author, mental health advocate, and CEO of Training Solutions International Inc. She is also the creator of the Original Love Box and founder of the Love Box Foundation.

Thank you for listening and please share this episode with a parent who needs encouragement. You can explore more at OriginalLoveBox.com.

In this episode of Love Agents: Where Love Meets Wellness, Christine Martinello explores the difference between healthy and unhealthy love and why the way we love shapes our children, families, friendships, classrooms, and communities.

You’ll learn how healthy love creates emotional safety, connection, belonging, trust, and stronger relationships—and how unhealthy patterns like criticism, control, fear, and emotional disconnection can slowly erode them.

Christine also shares research on how positive, loving relationships can help us become more creative, confident, resilient, and more fully ourselves. You’ll hear how the people closest to us can actually help bring out the best in us—and why healthy love can sometimes feel like 1 + 1 equals 10.

This episode is especially for moms, parents, caregivers, therapists, teachers, counselors, and social-emotional learning professionals who want to build emotionally healthy families and stronger relationships.

In this episode:

• What healthy love looks, feels, and acts like
• How to recognize unhealthy love
• Why emotional safety and belonging matter
• How children learn love by watching the relationships around them
• The science behind how positive relationships help us grow
• Why real human connection matters in an AI-driven world
• One simple Love Practice you can use right away
• A Love Note written just for you

Healthy love doesn’t make us smaller. It helps us become more of who we were created to be.

The Love Agents Podcast explores healthy relationships, emotional wellness, parenting, family connection, belonging, mental health, emotional intelligence, social-emotional learning, and practical ways to help love flow and grow.

Christine explains what it means to become a "Love Agent" — someone who puts love into action through words and everyday practices — and outlines the benefits: stronger relationships, better emotional wellness, and a more connected family. The episode closes with a simple love practice listeners can try this week, plus a heartfelt love note for every mom listening.

Hosted by author, mental health advocate, and Original Love Box creator Christine Martinello, each episode blends practical relationship tools, emotional intelligence, research, real-life stories, and simple acts of love you can use right away.

We explore healthy love, mental health, parent-child connection, communication, attachment, boundaries, belonging, friendship, emotional wellness, and how to stay deeply human in the age of AI.

Because the love children experience today becomes part of the blueprint they carry into relationships for decades to come.

One conversation. One connection. One simple act of love at a time.