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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We all have our own style of parenting our children and probably foremost in our method of parenting is the way we keep the lines of communication open with our children. I recently asked readers, “how you communicate with kids?” and the response has been varied and valuable. I didn’t want to keep them to myself, so I thought I would share some of them here with you.

If you’d like to enter the giveaway, there is still time. The giveaway ends on September 4 and you can win a $200 Visa Gift Card just by telling me one of the things you do to communicate with your kids. (Click on the link to enter the giveaway.)

One of the most popular responses to the thing we parents do to communicate with kids, is to eat together. I’ve always believed in eating together and we try to do it as often as we can although in this busy and hectic world we live in now, it’s not always possible.

In order for us to be able to eat together, I try to cook simple meals that the girls can help me prepare. When we work together, we can have dinner on the table in an hour. We don’t always have scintillating conversation with dinner. Sometimes it’s just inane small talk, other times it’s snappy bickering but either way sometimes it leads to topics we didn’t plan on discussing. More often though, it’s just our way of catching up with what we’ve been up to.

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