These 4 skills can help. What else?
In the first part we talked about how to describe or ‘Say what your eyes see and then bite your tongue’ can help improve our communications with our kids mainly. Today we will discuss about ‘Deal with events, don’t appraise personality.’
With kids there are always events to deal with, always something is going on; it is because they have made a mess, they are fighting or because the toys are all over the house and don’t forget when the school grades arrived.
Motherhood is the hardest job, but we can never say it’s boring. Every day something different happens. It means, we have a lot of opportunities to use and enhance this technique. Then what do we say when there is a mess on the floor? ‘The floor is dirty, we need a broom’ we do not need to say, ‘You must have butter’s hands, you always spilled it all,’ just deal with the event.
When I was little, things slipped out of my hand a lot, this was something that affected me directly, when my kids started to drop things, I decided to do something about it. Then, on one occasion when they dropped something, but could catch it, I said to them, trying to hide my scare face ‘Oh, good reflexes,’ instead of saying what was wrong or over react about how good it was, I made a small comment about what had happened. This happened to me with two of my sons, the most amazing thing was that both in separetedly ocations replied ‘Yes, I have excellent reflexes.’
When they are fighting a sentence like this can help ‘Issues are solved by talking, we must say what is bothering us’ I often say this while I am separating them, if you think that with three sons (9, 7 and 6 years ) there are no fights in the house, let me tell you there are always differences. Before using this second technique, ‘Deal with events, do not appraise personality’ I used to separate them and give them some lectures about fraternal love, then I made them apologize and hug each other. The result, more and more fought and the anger between them lasted longer.
Now I invite them to seek for a solution, many times (mainly between the second and the smaller) get into the fighting, one strikes first and the other one strike back, I separate them and said the «sentence.» They say what is the problem, sometimes they found a solution sometimes don’t, but by saying what is bothering them, they relieve all that energy. Five minutes later, they are playing as if nothing ever happened.
Finally, the school grades. School grades should always be see equally. When I look at them, I just say what I see ‘Oh you did well in this subject, in this other subject not so well, in this one the teacher write you a note, let us read it, and so on.’ Since I do not give much importance, or I don’t said how smart or dumb they are, I’m just relating the events, my own children tell me what happened to them ‘Uh, I did not understand what I had to do’ or ‘Mmm, I can not think of any sentence with that word.’
What I do is listen very carefully and take mental note for the next time that we study and practice what they tell me was dificult from them, there are no tears. There are only events that we must learn to live and find ways to improve them the next time.
You can never learn less; you can only learn more. The reason I know so much is because I have made so many mistakes.
Buckminster Fuller
The third part we will discuss how ‘Describe feelings, don’t evaluate characters,’ may help further with the communication with our kids.
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