Great Ways to Communicate With Your Child - Part 6

From Head to Heart
This is the final installment of the series and it sums everything together. It’s about helping our children take the lessons we teach from their heads to their hearts.
While I’m not a fan of rebellion, I understand the spirit behind it – forging an identity separate from that of your parents. Not such a bad thing, if done properly. And if you listen to your child’s heart closely and carefully, you can escape a lot of the drama of teenage rebellion by making allowances for them to shape their own experiences.

1. Start with Regular Daily Communication – asking them tons of questions about their day is fine, but make sure you share about your day. For every question you ask them, be sure to address items from your own day. Talk about highs and lows, successes and failures, excitements and disappointments, about your mistakes and lessons learned and ask them what they might do if they were in your place. This lets them into your experiences and then gives you an in to theirs. Everyone’s defenses are down and dialogue will only grow.
   
2. Add Quality Time – Include quality time that includes interaction and dialogue. Find out what they love doing and do it with them. Also introduce some of your hobbies and let them share in your life. One of my favorite things is doing chores together with my boys. Working together on a common goal is a great bonding experience and you share in the success of the job well done.
   
3. Increase Instruction, Reduce Demands – As our children grow up, we want to move away from the hand-holding and start to provide them choices hat have real options for failure that can allow you to teach. Perhaps you allow them to create their own after-school schedule. This is a good one because it reveals your child’s priorities. Then give it a go and after a few days or a week, sit down and talk about what worked, what didn’t and how to improve upon it and turn them loose again. This makes them feel a bit more in control of their lives and decisions, which is important. If we continue to make every decision, we’ll have 40 year olds at home who expect to be woken up for work, have their clothes washed and their bills paid … by us. Allowing them to experience the natural consequences of success and failure will create more responsible children who can be confident in their decisions because they have learned how to make adjustments when they fail and know how to stick to things that work. Try it with money management, chore schedules, etc. It’s something we do in our family and we’ve seen it really help our kids with other types of decision making as well. I’m not suggesting passive parenting. I’m only suggesting finding teaching opportunities in everything.
   
4. Don’t Hassle them about their Friends – So you don’t like their friends - express it and share why. Then do the opposite of what you would normally do and teach them about character. It’s what we did. Deion had some poorly chosen friends who we thought would be negative influences. We shared our concern. He disagreed and we knew he would. So we then decided to spend time teaching him about how to choose friends based on character. After a couple of months, he changed friends WITHOUT our asking him to. Why? Because choosing good friends based on good character became his conviction, too. He saw the benefit of it. And that killed the possibility of rebellion, as well.
   
5. Let them Struggle with Things – As kids grow up into teens, they become notoriously lazy and inquisitive, and they challenge the rules more. These are all good things for the parent who is ready to teach their children how to survive in the world. My boys ask me how to spell stuff, I direct them to the dictionary. They ask me where the Lysol wipes are, I tell them to look for them where they think they might be. If they really can’t find them, I’ll give a clue, but I’m beyond just telling them to look in the cupboard. If they come to me on Sunday night asking for their gym clothes to be washed, I tell them to figure it out. They know Saturday is wash day and if they didn’t get it down, they’re out of luck. Now I’m not saying that you never throw them a bone and remind them, but do it too often and it never reaches their heart. Nothing like a zero in gym or having to stay after school to make up assignments to help them learn about responsibility. Let them struggle. Let them feel the consequences of failure. Perseverance leads to maturity. I rarely help Deion with homework. I’ll check it, but I make him figure out why I ‘x-ed’ question 16 on his math worksheet. Frederick Douglas said that without struggle there can be no progress. He’s dead on. Let them struggle, but do so with love. Keep the letter of the law without violating the spirit of it.

I’ll conclude with a story related to teaching and struggling. I hope you enjoy it.

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to squeeze its body through the tiny hole. Then it stopped, as if it couldn't go further. So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bits of cocoon. The butterfly emerged easily but it had a swollen body and shriveled wings. The man continued to watch it, expecting that any minute the wings would enlarge and expand enough to support the body. Neither happened! In fact the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around. It was never able to fly. What the man in his kindness and haste did not understand: The restricting cocoon and the struggle required by the butterfly to get through the opening was a way of forcing the fluid from the body into the wings so that it would be ready for flight once that was achieved. Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives. Going through life with no obstacles would cripple us.We will not be as strong as we could have been and we would never fly. So have a nice day and struggle a little and teach well.

Chris