Parenting Strategy 3:
Listen, Talk and Guide With Love: Communication that Works
BY ARLENE F. HARDER, MA, MFT
NOTE: Four of my first six strategies for confident and practical parenting are central to discipline problems parents often have with their children:
 Listen, talk and guide with love: Communication that works
Distinguish between your child’s needs and wants
Teach responsibility and respect
Discipline as consistently as possible
Notice that discipline comes last, since it is much easier after the other strategies have been put in place.
"Take a moment to listen today
To what your children are trying to say
Listen today, whatever you do,
Or they won't be there to listen to you.
Listen to their problems, listen to their needs;
Raise their smallest triumphs, praise their smallest deeds.
Tolerate their chatter, amplify their laughter.
Find out what's the matter, find out what they're after—
But tell them that you love them, every single night.
And though you scold them, be sure you hold them tight:
Tell them, "Everything's all right--
Tomorrow's looking bright."
Take a moment to listen today
To what your children are trying to say.
Listen today, whatever you do,
And they will come back to listen to you."
—Anonymous
You won’t get very far in listening to, talking with, or guiding your children if they don’t understand that you love them even when things don’t go their way. You may know you love your children, but do they feel it?
As Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell, MD, note in The Five Love Languages of Children, each child has a slightly different “language of love.” Depending upon your children’s temperament, age and disposition, one child may more easily recognize your love when he is physically touched and hugged. Another child may be more sure of your love when you use words of affirmation appropriate to his needs, or when you give him quality time alone, or when you arrange a special gift just for him, or when you express your love through a special act of service.
Although I don’t use the term “love languages” in my strategies for confident and practical parenting, expressions of love—physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, gifts and service—are the core of the Childhood Affirmations Program. And the reason I begin this article by emphasizing the importance of expressing love in communication is simply this: If you listen from your heart, you will hear what your child needs you to know. If you talk from your heart, your child will hear what you say. If you guide from your heart, your child will be more likely to respond as you want him to.
Build Your Communication Around the Golden Rule
As a child, I was taught the Golden Rule that said, “Do unto others what you would have them do to you.” This ethic of reciprocity is an excellent illustration of love. However, recently I read The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and a renowned expert on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. She noted that a generation or so before Jesus gave his version of the Golden Rule, there was a Rabbi Hillel known for his kindness, gentleness and concern for humanity. One day a gentile came to him and said he would convert to Judaism if Hillel could teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. He converted the gentile by telling him, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it."
Do you want others to give you encouragement? Do you want others to let you know when you’ve done something well? Do you want others to listen to your point of view? If so, then communicate in that way with your children. Also, when you communicate with your partner, do so as you would have him or her talk with you—because your children learn their communication skills more from observing their parents than from following rules their parents ignore.
Golden Rule Part One: What you would like others to say and do to you, say and do to others.
Do you dislike it when you are yelled at, put down, harshly criticized, discounted, and ignored? Do you dislike it when you haven’t had a chance to explain yourself before another person tells you you’re wrong? If so, then refrain from using those attitudes and words with your children. Likewise, when talking with your partner, don’t be quick with criticism, disrespect, discounting and sarcasm—again, because your children absorb negative communication patterns as easily as they absorb positive skills.
Golden Rule Part Two: What you don't want others to say and do to you, refrain from saying and doing to others.
Listen More
In the frantic busy-ness of family life, it may seem as though there isn’t time to really and truly listen to one another. Kids are on the computer or playing video games and parents are trying to balance two jobs and keep the house from falling apart. However, there are many times during the day, perhaps on the way to gymnastics, music lessons, soccer, or when driving to a friend’s house or child care, when you can hear your child’s hopes, disappointments and opinions—IF you listen from your heart, even though your mind may try to distract you with a report at work.
Increasingly, families are discovering that by requiring at least several meals a week to be family time—with the phone off the hook—they have a priceless opportunity to share and to help children learn how to participate in group discussions. Many families use this time to explore what a child liked or didn’t like about the day. The sharing can be directed by a moderator, a role that may even rotate between family members so each person gets a turn. First, the things that aren’t so good are discussed when the moderator asks, “What happened today that was bad,” or “What didn’t you like about today?” Everyone has a chance to speak, although no one can put down another person or say someone is wrong in the way they express their experiences. Then the discussion ends with the good stuff, with “What happened today that you liked?”
If you are interested in raising your child's SAT score (Scholastic Aptitude Test), you should know about a study to see whether I.Q. or social and economic circumstances made a difference in how well teenagers did on their SATs. Guess what? Those who got the highest scores all regularly had dinner with their parents, according to Shari Lewis, who wrote the foreword to Thomas Armstrong's book, Awakening Your Child's Natural Genius.
It wasn't the shared food that made the difference. It was the shared talk. It was the opportunity children have for discussing what went on during the day and for giving parents a time when they can talk with their children. As Lydia Bellino, author of Raising Lifelong Learners, says:
"A few fleeting years from now, our children will be confronted with major decisions about drugs, alcohol, sex, and violence, and we'll be desperate to find a way to talk things over with them. The conversational bridge must be built back in kindergarten, first, and second grades. Is it possible to convince a tenth grader who for a decade kept his or her school and social life private to suddenly talk about it? I doubt it."
Another time you can listen with an open heart is when you’re tucking your children into bed at night. Some of the most delicious opportunities to connect with your child happen at the end of the day—especially if you don’t rush to give advice and solve your child’s problems for him. Make a regular point each night of simply asking, “What was best about today?” “Why?” “What was worst about today?” “Why?” The why question helps your child clarify in his own mind what it was about an event that made it good or bad.
When your child tells you she is upset and angry because her friend didn’t invite her to a party, it is natural for you to want her to feel better. In your heart you want to take away her pain. But life is full of pain and disappointment and at some point she needs to learn how to handle these uncomfortable emotions by herself. You want her to know that you think she’s capable of doing that. On the other hand, you don’t want to walk away or tell her to stop feeling bad. Instead, you give her a quiet nod of your head and gently hold her hand. She’ll know you understand, and being understood is often far more important than being told what she should do, for often children's think no one else has the problems with life that they experience. This doesn’t mean, of course, that you can’t comment on her situation, but it’s more important to listen than it is to solve her problems for her.
While listening includes respect for your child’s opinion, there are many times—more frequently than your children would like—when you have the responsibility to make a decision because you are the parent and your decision will be contrary to what your child wants. However, if your child knows that most of the time her point of view is taken into account when you make a decision, she will feel she is an important part of the family, which she is.
Talk Less
One of my greatest mistakes as a parent was in talking too much. As I have said in other writings, I could spend forty-five minutes to explain to my son why he had to do a five minute job. I thought we were “dialoguing.” I was teaching him how to procrastinate.
How much is too much talk? Well, one way to know whether your lecture is going on too long is to notice if your child’s eyes have glazed over. Carol Burnett tells of the time she was giving her four-year-old daughter a serious talk about some discipline matter and had gotten down to her eye level. As the comedienne became more and more serious, her daughter’s eyes got bigger and bigger. Carol interpreted this to mean interest in what she was saying and continued on and on. Finally, her daughter said, “Mommy?” “Yes, dear?” “You have big teeth,” replied the girl, who hadn’t heard a word she said.
The parenting expert Nancy Samalin, author of Loving Each One Best: A Caring and Practical Approach to Raising Siblings, says that when parents ask how they can get their children to listen more, she replies: “The answer is simple to understand, difficult to do. It’s talk less. Whatever you can say in a paragraph, say in a sentence. What you can say in a sentence, say in a word.”
Have you ever told your child not to put her books on the floor? If you have, then, when she casually drops her books slide to the floor, it isn’t necessary to go into a long explanation of how much you paid for them, of how they will get stained or torn if left on the floor where people might walk on it, of how they will get in the way, and of how you are tired of always lecturing about it. A simple, “Susan, books,” will do nicely.
One Reason is All You Need
There are times when reasons are important and times when they aren’t. If you do need to give a reason why your child isn’t allowed to go swimming with friends who have been known to engage in risky behavior, one reason should be sufficient. I say this from having experienced more than one occasion when I got myself into trouble with too many reasons.
You see, your child is extremely talented in getting you to give lots of reasons why you don’t want him to do something. You start out giving your most important reason. Your child, in the process of developing the skills of an investigative reporter, knows you’re on solid ground with that reason and, consequently, asks for another reason. That’s when you give your “second most important reason.”
Okay, he can see that reason might also be valid, but “why else, can’t I?” he persists. So you give yet another, less substantial reason, and he continues in his interrogation. Before you know it, you’re falling through thin ice because each additional reason is less important to you, and less convincing to your child, than the one before it, and he’ll eventually have you convinced that your reasoning is not all that solid after all.
Don’t give him a chance to push you out onto thin ice. If you have a perfectly good reason why he shouldn’t go swimming, that first reason is sufficient.
Negotiate Within Clearly Defined Rules
Some children love to debate every difference of opinion. If done within reasonable limits, negotiation can be a good experience for developing skills that will be useful when your child becomes an adult. However, you will need to set down the rules under which you will allow negotiation. Here are some examples:
1. Negotiation will be held when convenient for everyone and when there is time for consideration of the complexity of a situation
2. There is to be no shouting
3. There will be no name calling or labeling of the other person’s opinion as stupid
4. Everyone will listen quietly to what the others have to say
5. We, the parents, have the final say, although we will take into consideration the views of our child.
Use Feelings to Expand Vocabulary
When you tell your child to clean up her room and she says, “I hate you,” refrain from saying, “Don’t ever say that again,” or “Oh no, you don’t hate me.” The first statement says you can’t handle strong feelings. Of course, you may want to point out that saying you hate someone isn’t a good way to get them to give you what you want. And if you have a rule in your family that, in order to build respect among family members, no one can say they “hate” someone else in the family, be aware that it’s easy for children to confuse the feelings about the deeds of a person with the person herself. The more you are clear in demonstrating that you dislike your child’s actions, but still clearly love her, the more your child will separate her dislike for your rules from her dislike of you, the parent.
The latter statement, “Oh no, you don’t hate me,” denies what she thinks she feels. She thinks her anger at you must mean she hates you, and that is probably true to some degree at that particular moment. However, depending on your child’s age, you can use the occasion as an opportunity to expand her vocabulary. Try responding with something like, “Wow, it’s obvious you don’t want to clean your room, but does that mean you really ‘hate’ me? How about saying, Mom, when you make me clean my room when I don’t want to, I feel angry.”
Incidentally, the word “hate” is frequently used indiscriminately for all negative feelings. You can hear not only children, but adults as well, who say they “hate” war and cancer, but they also claim they “hate” spinach, they “hate” the color of their neighbor’s house, they “hate” their boss, they “hate” doing dishes, and on and on. An endless list of dislikes becomes fused. If you help your child distinguish between gross categories of emotions—mad, sad, glad and scared—into words that convey different intensities of emotion, she can eventually learn to define her feelings more accurately. At the same time, you will give her vocabulary a big boost.
For example, when your daughter responds to something by using the word “hate,” you can take down a dictionary or a thesaurus (and use the Internet, of course) and write down other strong words she might want to use instead. For example, here are a few related words: despise, disdain, scorn, dislike, abominate, abhor, disapprove, detest, resent. She can learn to say she takes offense, is vexed, irritated, disappointed, and annoyed. It may seem that you’re only getting in deeper and allowing her to emote too much, but the truth is that you are acknowledging she has feelings and, at the same time, helping her express herself in other ways than simply saying she “hates” something.
Of course, it will be easier to expand your child’s labels for feelings if you, yourself, are aware of the nuances of your own emotions. See Managing Your Emotions—Especially When You’re Upset.
Don’t Allow Back-Talk
Rudeness is on the rise and, because children are exposed to our culture’s climate of disrespect and put-downs, whether on television, in the movies, or on the playground, they are likely to experiment with insolence at home. They may do this because they want to test their skills in arguing, but have chosen a poor tactic. They may do it to dominate their friends, parents and teachers, to get attention, and to simply feel more powerful than they know they are.
Of course, not everything that appears to be “back-talk” is caused by defiance. When a child is disappointed because his wishes clash with a parent’s rule, there is likely to be a certain amount of grumbling. He just wants to register his opinion and if his parents don’t make a big deal out of it, the matter can end quickly. Also, comments like, “I hate spinach,” (there’s that word again) doesn’t need to become blown out of proportion. He’s just registering his opinion.
On the other hand, it’s easy to recognize serious back-talk—and it’s easy to want to react in kind. However, if you engage in a tit-for-tat exchange, you will continue to have episodes in the future. Instead, you need to let the child know, calmly and clearly, that such behavior is not acceptable. You will need to do this every time! (See Discipline as Consistently as Possible.)
Your request that he not talk back to you will have much more impact, of course, if you have been using the Golden Rule when talking with him, and when communicating with your partner. If you don’t respect your child or your partner and use put-downs and sarcasm, then you won’t have much moral ground to stand on when your child uses that approach with you.
When a disrespectful comment has slipped out of your child’s mouth, sometimes it helps to give your child another chance by saying something like, “Did you really mean to say that?” When she starts over and speaks in a tone that is more appropriate, be sure to compliment the change and point out how much nicer it feels to be respected, just as you show respect for your child.
A side issue with back-talk is interruption. The same general rules apply. Of course, it’s hard not to interrupt adults when they’re engaged in a long, boring conversation (at least boring to the child). Even then, it’s important to have the child wait for a few moments, say, “Excuse me, please, but I want . . .” before proceeding with a request or comment.
Finally, always remember the Golden Rule. Do to others as you would have them do to you and refrain from doing to others what you don't want them to do to you. If you live that philosophy in your actions and by communicating clearly, directly and honestly, your children will absorb your love and they will, in turn, learn how to live the Golden Rule and how to teach such love to their own children.
© Copyright 2005, Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT
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Her mom understands her feelings. She will return.