How Can I Get My Son To Tell Me Important Things? A Practical Guide
Throughout my professional career I have found myself both in individual sessions and in training for parents with the same question: how can I get my child to tell me important things? Talking to them I see that they are worried because they indicate that on many occasions their children do not tell them things such as how they are at school, their studies, if they are doing well with their classmates or if they have received any type of harassment Things that really worry parents. Sometimes even being sparing in words when responding to direct questions of this style.
All of this leads me to explore the behaviors that they, as parents, are having with their children not only at that moment but also in other moments of their daily lives. And taking this into account, we can highlight 5 points that we can influence to ensure that children are able to express themselves better.
1. Body position
As its name indicates, this point refers to what we are doing physically while our children are talking to us. Take a moment to think about how you usually are when he is telling you something. It is common to find ourselves in situations in which the child talks to us and we are not looking at him if he wants to When we talk about a correct position we mean orienting ourselves towards them and looking at them. This denotes that there is an interest in their words and you understand that what they are saying is being attended to.
Sometimes we can observe that we are doing other things while they start talking. Well, at this point it is good to start prioritizing what we are doing and the attention we are giving. For example, if we are lying down looking at our cell phone, the option seems to be clear. Doubt tends to arise more when we ask ourselves things like what if I am cooking or doing some work in general that prevents me from being able to orient myself? Well here we can make two options.
In tasks where you can attend to while doing them (like most housework) you can orient your body as much as you can towards it and generate eye contact as much as you can. In addition to adding “I listen to you” style phrases while you do your work In those that you cannot attend to (for example if you work remotely), you can turn to him and tell him that “right now you cannot attend to him but that you want to listen to what he has to tell you and as soon as possible you can talk about it.” This is not the same as a simple refusal, which we tend to fall into without realizing it.
These last points not only have to do with the position, as has been seen, but also with the response we give. That is, feedback. Therefore, it is the next point to discuss.
2. Feedback
Feedback, also known as Feedback, is what we are giving back to our child while he is telling us something Here we can see not only what we say or answer, but we also include interjections, body postures, gestures we make with our faces, physical reactions we have (like hugging), etc.
However, there is one point that we often forget to ask and that is the questions. When faced with someone who tells us something (not just children), we tend to resort to advice, to say what they have or could do or even to say well, me… generating a change of focus from one person to another. These behaviors, useful at some point, can be replaced by a question.
Open questions allow the person to express more about that idea, become more aware of what they are talking about, and even make better decisions due to a greater understanding of what they say In addition to, obviously, feeling that you are being listened to and generating much more trust. A good point when not knowing what to ask to get him to continue talking, is to repeat the last thing he is saying with the intention of getting him to continue.
3. Use of paralinguistics
The rhythm, the tone, the speed, the timbre… In short, everything that surrounds the verbal message that we are giving is what we refer to as paralinguistics. Therefore, we are going to start listening to each other when we speak. To observe the words we say and how we say them. A changed tone can cause the entire sentence to change meaning for the person listening to us
We tend to speak in a certain way and say “that’s just how I am.” And it is good to distinguish how we are from how we express ourselves. In this case, the expression is a behavior, and therefore it is good that we review it if we want to achieve good communication.
4. Questions and emotional validation
In this section we are going to divide the questions into two aspects:
Taking this last type of question into account above all is when we can talk about the emotional validation section. Emotions are necessary for being human and we tend to avoid those that hurt us. Therefore, it is good that if you tell us something that hurts or bothers you, we act accordingly
The questions above allow you to express yourself and feedback such as “I understand that you feel that way” generates a better response than the usual “it’s not a big deal” that we can often fall into. Let him express himself and observe that emotions are important when establishing correct emotional communication. If I normally do not validate fear, when something happens that may scare them and is important to us, it is possible that they will not tell about it because they do not feel that they can be supported in it.
The last and most important point. Here comes the question of what is important? Well, what is important to you may not be important to your child… and vice versa. For you, perhaps that game of play that he played with some friends is not important, but it is possible that it is for him
On many occasions we err on the side of being the ones who decide what is important and that is why we act differently when we are told one thing or another. If we go to his point of view we can understand it better. Imagine that you approach a person to tell something that is important to you and the attention they pay to you is minimal.
This generates learning. That person is not interested in what is important to you, so… why tell them other important things? If our son wants to tell us something, it indicates that it is important to him In this way, we later worry that they don’t talk to us about what is important… However, do we listen when it is also important to them? If we want them to tell us what is important to us, it is healthy for our communication to listen when it is also important to them.
