We don’t talk any more

Parents and their children sometimes get caught up in a vicious cycle. It does not, as many would believe, always begin in the teenage years. It can happen at any time but it is likely to accelerate in the teenage years if a pattern has already begun.

There are a myriad of reasons for children to become angry, hurt, insecure or rebellious and it can be difficult to find out why.  Effective communication with children is an art that can be learned.

Below are some tips that may help.

How to communicate with your child

Do you find that that you are constantly repeating your instructions to your children? Children tend listen to the first few words and then switch off. For example, if you say to your child, ‘you are grounded because…’ the first three words are most likely to be only the ones that are heard. Communication with children should be brief and as positive as possible. Those first words in a conversation are very precious, choose them wisely.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a branch of psychology. Practitioners will tell you that the human brain cannot process negative language. If you were asked to close your eyes and not think about a pink elephant (please take a moment and give it a try) you would find it impossible to comply, especially if this request was repeated. The same applies to a child or anyone else for that matter. ‘Don’t run across the road’ is processed in the brain as ‘run across the road’, exactly the opposite to your intended instruction. The way to get your child to hear what you want is to state it in a positive way. “Look both ways then walk across the road when it is clear,” is more likely to get the message across.

Ian Lillico a high school principal from Western Australia travelled the globe studying the needs of boys. In his findings for the Churchill Fellowship in 2000, one of the 52 recommendations is that boys do better if you talk with them when they are actively engaged in an activity. He encourages people to actively spend time doing things with boys and they will be more likely to open up and tell you what is going on in their lives or what is troubling them.

Children wear a kind of mask at school in an attempt to conform to their peers. It is important that when you try to communicate with your child that you give them some time to take this mask off first. If your child comes home angry from school, encourage them to work off some of the anger through physical activity, especially if your child is a boy. A calmer person without a mask is more likely to communicate the real source of their anger to you.
 
Most girls talk more easily about what is important to them than boys do. Even as adults, men tend to talk with their mates about sport rather than personal issues whereas women freely talk about such issues with their friends.

How children access and process information

To complicate matters further, we all access and process information differently. In NLP this is called the Representation System. Everyone has a primary, and possibly a secondary, representational system and we all use some of these systems at varying times.

Some of us are very visual and need to see things to understand. Language such as ‘I see’, ‘I get the picture’, ‘it is clear cut’ may give you an idea of this kind of person.

Kinaesthetic people access information through their feelings and by doing things. These people may say ‘that feels right’, ‘I have this gut feeling’ or ‘I get the drift.

Then there are the auditory people who may say ‘It is as clear as a bell’ or ‘I hear you’. These people often talk to themselves to process information.

There is a further category of auditory digital people. They say things like, ‘Give me some time to process that’. These people can appear not to be listening but they hear you perfectly. Sometimes all you need to do is plant the seed of an idea with them and they will begin to think about it. 

If you are an auditory person expressing yourself through words and your child is kinaesthetic, they will want and need activity. They may well be feeling that you are ‘nagging’ and keeping them from doing what they want to do. You are talking in what is like a foreign language to them. Changing some of your language to match your child’s method of understanding may well be the solution. It can be that easy.

Does your child really know that you love them?

People communicate and feel love in different ways. In his book The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman describes the Love Language categories as Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service and Physical Touch.  As Chapman describes it, people usually need an element of each to fill their ‘love tanks’.

We tend to show our love in the way in which we would like to see it expressed to us. It may be very useful to experiment and observe your children to determine what they perceive as being most important for them. By being able to communicate to your child in a way that is important to their sense of feeling loved, you will help build their internal security, understanding and sense of wellbeing.

All of these suggested forms of communication, though far from being complete, may give the parent an idea that communication as we know it is not as uncomplicated was we would originally assume. Effective communication requires a willingness to listen, honesty and openness but most of all it requires practice and a willingness to learn.