Sharing Thoughts and Feelings
Quality time not only means doing things together, but it is a means for knowing your child better. As you spend time with your children, you will find that a natural result often is good conversation about everything related to your lives. Phil Briggs, longtime professor of education at a California seminary, loves the dividends of golfing with his son. “My son wasn’t much of a talker until we started golfing together regularly.” The Briggs’ father-son twosome often talk about their game—the swing and other golf nuances—as they walk the fairways, but soon they get around to discussing other areas of life. When a parent shows a child how to throw a football or make pasta, he or she often creates an environment in which the parent and child can talk about more important issues.
Quality Conversations This is when a father can reveal something of his own history,
perhaps tell his child of his dating relationship with the boy’s mother, and discuss moral and spiritual issues. This kind of “real” conversation communicates deeply to a child on an emotional level. It says, “My father trusts me. He cares. My father sees me as an important person and he loves me.” A mother can mention her own fears about her appearance growing up as she helps her daughter shop for her first pair of glasses or a special dress for the prom. The conversation draws them together and helps the daughter understand that her value is not based on appearance. Children never outgrow a need for quality conversation with parents and other adults. Such sharing of thoughts and feelings is the fabric of which life is made. Learning how to communicate on this level will serve them well in their own future relationships, including marriage. It will teach them how to build friendships and relate to work associates. It will show them how to process their own thoughts and to communicate in a positive, caring manner that respects the ideas of others. It will provide an example of how to disagree without being disagreeable.
Children never outgrow a need for quality conversation with parents and other adults.
Because your children will learn more from talking with you than you will probably ever realize, it is crucial that you spend time in healthy conversation with them, no matter what their age. If you limit your talking with them to correction, your children may never learn the value of positive, focused attention. Negative attention alone cannot meet their need for love. With younger children, one of the most effective times to initiate conversation is at bedtime, when they are especially attentive. This may be because there are fewer distractions then or because the children want to delay going to bed.
Whatever the reason, they are listening well and this makes meaningful conversation much easier.
“Read Me a Story” All children love stories. Reading to them is a great way to begin your bedtime ritual—and do make it a ritual, because this will help to keep communications open when they become teenagers. During or after a story, you can pause to let a child identify his feelings about the events or characters and then talk about them. As you are reading a story about someone who experiences disappointment, for example, you may talk with your child about feelings of disappointment she has had,
along with the accompanying sadness, anger, or whatever is appropriate.
We strongly recommend these times of conversation. Sadly,
many young people today do not understand how to handle their feelings, especially anger. Many years of warm and close bedtime talks, which include gentle, relaxed sharing of feelings,
can help prevent some of life’s deepest problems down the road. Bedtime rituals that are warm and close, gentle and relaxed,
sound just the opposite of the busy world in which many parents live. Don’t be a victim of the urgent. In the long run,
much of what seems so pressing right now won’t even matter.
What you do with your children will matter forever.
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