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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My giveaway on Communicating With Your Kids has generated a lot of useful tips and comments on how parents foster good communication with their children and I thought it would be a shame to let them wallow in the comments section so here I have compiled some of those comments into categories.
The first tip in this series was to EAT TOGETHER. This time, we’ll talk about how individual, one on one time with your kids can encourage them to talk more openly. That is certainly true with my girls who vie for this ‘alone’ time as much as they can. Sometimes it is just a matter of them feeling special but other times it’s their only chance to tell you things that they wouldn’t want anyone else to hear, even their sisters.

INDIVIDUAL TIME

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