Communicating With Your Children, A Different Perspective
Like so many parents, I too sometimes have a hard time communicating with my children or dealing with their upsets. Can you relate to when your children go through different experiences with other children where one day their peers are nice, and the next day they are mean? For example, their so-called friends come to your house to hang out on one day, then don’t allow your child to sit with them at lunch the next day? It’s more often girls who suffer injustices of emotional torture by their peers. And that’s what we’re going to talk about.
Several months ago, something fun happened in our home. Our family went wireless. Now I can chat online from anywhere in the house.
One day while I was sitting on the couch, chatting with my friends online, I heard my daughter’s fingers typing away on the computer in the next room. So I sent her a message. She got all excited and started teasing me online and sharing her woes like girls do.
It was then that it hit me! I didn’t have to HEAR her whine and yet she could tell me everything over and over again without getting on my nerves. {{{Smile}}} Sometimes it’s so hard to listen because there isn’t much I can say or do to make her feel better.
But hey, if I’m online chatting with “my” friends, I’m actually available to my daughter too. She can type out all of her thoughts and send them to me in chat. This exercise alone helps her feel better. I can then send her responses that she ends up reading. When talking to her face to face, she tends to shut me out because she just wants to go on and on.
This way we both get to say what’s on our minds without mowing over each other and guess what, it works!!! This is definitely communicating with your children from a different perspective! Now that’s not to say that when she wants to talk I make her get online. But after talking to me several times in the day I get tired of the complaining. That doesn’t mean that that I don’t care. But nothing I say makes her feel better. So she gets online with her girlfriends. If I’m in the other room and hear her typing I get online and say something goofy. Then she opens up.
MY mom on the other hand is more patient (as grandmas are) and can be calming. So when she’s available, I have my daughter call her. Today my mom was over and I reminded my little one that she wanted to talk with grandma. It was so heartwarming when I heard my mom be so grandma-ish. LOL
It really DOES take a village to raise a child. However, I want to choose who’s in our village. That way I know they have the same values as we do.
©2001 Susie Glennan
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