Most Important aspect of talking to your kids!
One final thought about talking to your kids…..
Don’t Be Dismissive.
If your kids open up to you, whether it is about bullying, romances going on a school, school work, the sports team, whatever it may be, don’t say stuff like. “Yeh, I know, that happened when I was a kid, they’ll get over it.” or “You’re being way too sensitive”, and “Come on, that’s nothing”. Do this and your kid wont talk to you about anything important.
Treat each conversation your kid decides to have with you as if it was the most vital and important conversation ever! Then, when it comes to the most important vital stuff…guess who they’ll go to??
That’s right YOU!
As a grandparent and now a great grandie, I learned the most important sentence from a friend of mine named Debbie. She said that when her kids aksed if they could do something or get something or go somewhere and she didn’t want to deal with the complications of saying, “Yes.”, (driving them, money, time, etc,) she said,
“If you need to know right now, the answer is NO! but if you give me a minute to think about it, we’ll see.”
I liked this so much because usually the NO answere was convenient for ME, not something that would benefit or just be nice for my kids. I must admit that as a teacher, I also used it in my classroom. Soon kids learned to say, “I don’t need to know right now.”