Talking with Your Children

One of the things my daughter’s preschool requires is occasional parenting classes. These tend to actually be pretty interesting.

One of the recent courses was on communicating with your children. One of the topics that was especially interesting to me was how they suggested talking to kids about when they make mistakes. There were some tips I especially wanted to share.

One of the ideas was to lead your child through a series of questions to help them understand what they did and what they should have done in a particular situation.

You start out with questions to identify what it was that happened. You want your child to answer the questions – don’t tell him or her the answer. This is most effective with your child’s perception of the issue.

Then you ask questions to help him or her analyze what happened. What was important about the situation? What made it happen?

Finally, talk about what could have been done differently. How can your child use the experience and what did he or she learn?

Allowing your child to lead the way through the answers to these questions will help him or her learn to think these things out on his or her own. It’s an important tool as they grow up.

[tags]raising children,kids,family,talking with children,family communication[/tags]