Tips to master your communication style as parents.
As parents one of the many challenges we face is how to best communicate with our children. This becomes even more complicated when you have more than one child and they’re different ages and/or genders. As a mother of a 16 year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter I’ve discovered that learning my children’s communication styles is an ongoing lesson, and while I’m beginning to master it, it’s a skill that I continue to work on. Here are some communication tools I’ve picked up along the way that works for both of my children.
Check in on them
One thing I like to do is regular check-ins with my children, separately. Many people reserve family dinner time to check-in with their children, but having private conversations with your children is equally as important, and helps you to be more receptive to each individual child’s life in a more intimate way. Taking some time to sit with them and listen to what happened in their day lets your child know that you’re genuinely interested in what’s going on in their lives and that you’re available to them if they need to get something off of their mind. Far too often, as busy parents we have a million things going on in our day, and we neglect taking time out for those precious conversations with our children because we’re busy. But, taking the time to parent our children by giving them our undivided attention lets them know that they’re always your priority.
Converse, don’t chastise
Every child faces challenges in their life, but helping them to successfully navigate those challenges can be key to their ability to overcome them. Let’s face it, our children will mess up. However, our jobs as parents is to make sure they have the tools available to them to navigate their mistakes and learn to make better choices in the future. As parents, we should be the first resource our children have. However, we will not be utilized as a resource if our children feel as though we’d rather chastise them than converse with them. When you converse with your child you get an understanding of their logic (regardless of how flawed) in making the choice they made. That information is helpful in aiding them in a solution to rectify those mistakes and move forward from them. When we leap to chastise our children before conversing with them first we typically don’t get the full story, and this can lead to them making the same mistake again in the future.
Listen with your whole self
As a parent, mastering the ability to listen to our children with our whole selves is critical to our ability to learn what their challenges are, and to their ability to master those challenges. Listening with our whole self allows us to be present in the moment, perceptive to what they’re saying verbally and behaviorally, and receptive to their needs. One of the most important aspects of communication is having good listening skills. Listening goes beyond just “hearing” our children, but taking it to the deeper level of being in tune with their situation at that moment. It’s connecting to them on a personal level and acknowledging what they’re communicating to you, asking questions when necessary, and listening for hints that they may be leaving something out. The best way to do this is to find a quiet place where you and your child can be alone, putting away the cell phones, pressing mute on all other outside noise, and being present in the moment with your child to get a full understanding of what they’re saying to you. This is what listening with your whole self requires.
Apologize when You’re wrong
So, we’ve already established that our children will mess up, but as parents we’re guaranteed to mess up as well. How we communicate our own mistakes to our children is equally if not more important than how our children communicate their mistakes to us. Why? Because we’re setting an example for our children, and our ability to acknowledge when we have done wrong to our children and apologize for our actions lets our children know that making mistakes is a human thing and not a “them” thing. It doesn’t matter how big or small the mistake is—if we do something wrong that affects our children, we need to acknowledge it, let them know why we made the mistake, and apologize to them for it. Apologizing to our children lets them know that we value their feelings and we as parents are not above reproach. Having an open and loving relationship with your children requires their ability to feel comfortable with letting us know that we’ve hurt them. Children who feel as though they are both loved and respected by their parents tend to have more open and frequent communication with them, and in the end, that’s all we can ask for as parents.
How do you communicate with your children?
