Listen carefully to everything the children tell you, anything, because it is very important that they are heard. Your interests, your enthusiasms, your feelings, your discoveries, your emotions, your thoughts, your successes, your evolution.
There’s a quote from Catherine Wallace that should get tattooed on our skin: “Listen carefully to everything your kids want to tell you, no matter what it is. If you don’t listen enthusiastically to the little things when they’re still small, they won’t tell you the important things when they’re older. In the end, will they still be important?
- Are they expressed in countless words.
- Looks.
- Gestures? Try to put your phone or tablet aside while they play and you will realize that they are looking for you hundreds of times.
- Asking for your approval.
- Your complicity.
- Your attention.
We are so used to postponing what children tell us that we don’t realize that when it comes to eating what’s really important, it’s not the news, it’s the things our kids have to tell us.
As insignificant as it may seem, for a child everything around him is magical; although adults do not realize this because of the loss of the ability to impress us, because it does not define what we can enjoy, but what is useful for our routine and our standard behaviors, as if we were robots with inflexibility. Goals.
Prisoners of haste, we are not useful to our children, we do not offer them our help and our companionship because we do not respect their moments and spaces, because we are unable to listen and be patient, to guide them sweetly and without getting bored. .
The way we talk to our children matters a lot, of that there is no doubt, if we talk to the children with love and strive to maintain full communication with them, we will get a potential growth that will allow us to speak and listen correctly.
As we have pointed out on other occasions, there is a direct relationship between how a child feels and how he behaves, it is a simple rule: if a child feels good, behaves well, we are the key to this process and we can help them achieve well-being. Accept your feelings and try not to send messages like:
The key to good evolutionary development is that we listen to our children and start sending other kinds of messages: “Are you tired despite a good nap ?, do I see that today you are very agitated ?,” I am cold, but you see that you are hot ?, etc.
In other words, it’s about developing their capacity for empathy through ours, allowing them to feel and validate their feelings and emotions. Watch out, keep an interest in what they tell us, work to make them appreciated, and understand each other.
It is customary for us to forget to praise our children when they do things right. However, we must keep in mind that the internal dialogue we foster in this way is unhealthy. How can we pretend that children don’t hurt when they do something right, we say they do nothing but their obligation?
When we want to cooperate we tend to send authoritarian messages, many of us will recognize each other in the following sentences:
As a result, it is natural for children’s attitudes to become a constant challenge, so that they can explicitly or implicitly communicate to us what I do what I want, to this we respond: “I do what I want”, intensifying conflict and endangering construction. of a healthy relationship.
So, again, what we have to change is our speech, trying to stop blaming and blaming our children for dirtying the floor or leaving marks on the glass vase, in this way everything that conveys judgments (is it good, it’s bad, is it beautiful, is it ugly?) Ideally it will be removed from our usual vocabulary. There are many healthier ways to educate.
So when I want to get cooperation and make the child understand that he or she can do something in a different way and the reasons for doing so, we can do it as follows:
? Describe what you’re doing or the problem that exists (rather than?How many times do I have to tell you to turn off the bathroom light?Is that better than what we’re saying?
? Provide specific information about what’s going on (rather than?Who took the milk and left the bottle out of the fridge?Is milk spoiled outside the refrigerator?)
? Ask in a nut words, in a simple, concise and positive way (instead of?Stop playing and go to sleep?Maria, wouldn’t you like to put on your pajamas?).
? Talk about your feelings (rather than?Is this the most annoying thing in the world?I don’t like people yelling at me for things?).