Continuing with our series on communicating with your kids, this time we’ll be talking about listening instead of talking.
 

LISTEN, DON’T JUDGE AND BE HONEST – GIVE THEM SPACE

And most of all, stay calm. I know our first instinct usually is to protect them from what we know is surely impending mistakes. But, especially with older children, we have to realize that they have to find their own way and we can’t always fix everything in their lives. Sometimes we just have to be there to catch them when they fall.

Here are more comments from other moms and moms to be:
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START THEM YOUNG

Raising kids is a time sensitive activity. You have but a few years to influence the individuals your children will grow up to be. The earlier you start doing things like communicating with them, the better. Like everything we do, we do it better when we’re used to it and we’ve been doing it a long time. When you start them young it becomes a habit to talk about anything and everything.

Continuing on our series about communicating with your kids, here are more comments from parents based on the question we asked recently, “How you keep the lines of communication open with your children as they grow older and gain more freedom?”

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Continuing our series on communicating with your kids, today let’s talk about their world.

LEARN THEIR WORLD

Our children live in a technology driven world and it is where they are most comfortable communicating. Learn to navigate their world and you’ll be surprised at what you can learn. Here’s more comments from other parents on how they communicate with their kids using the tools that they are familiar with.
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Continuing our series on keeping the lines of communication open with our kids, here is the third set of comments about talking to your kids…anywhere.

TALK ABOUT ANYTHING ANYWHERE

When I was young, the big thing was the ‘family meeting’. This is when the family sets time aside to all sit in the living room or the kitchen and discuss thing. It didn’t always have to be bad stuff or major things, it could be just everyday catching up things; but most of the times these ‘meetings’ come about when someone is in trouble. BIG trouble! When mom or dad says, “get everybody together. We need to talk.” You know YOU’RE IN TROUBLE!

It doesn’t have to be like that anymore. When you make it a habit to talk to your kids all the time and anywhere, then it becomes easier for them to start talking back too. For us who have busy lives, we know how important those few minutes in the car or the moments wandering the grocery aisles are.These are pockets of time when my girls and I like to catch up on what’s been going on in our day. We don’t always have time to set aside and ‘talk’ instead, we talk on the go and on the run. The great thing about this is, we develop a habit of talking so that when the big ‘sit down’ conversations come up, we are already used to talking to each other.

Sometimes all you have to do is start talking. Talk about anything and eventually something will trigger your children to open up about a subject they are concerned about but that you may not have even though to ask about. Here are more comments from our Communicate With Your Kids giveaway.
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