Thanksgiving is a time for gathering, laughter, and warm belly-filling food. As with any relationship, the key to building a positive relationship is to keep the line of communication open.
Communicating with teens can sometimes be difficult, in busy households, it’s easy to overlook making time and space in your day to have a really good talk with your child and find out what’s going on in their life.
And if we do make time, sometimes we can get locked into unhelpful ways of communicating – bickering, nagging, criticizing, lecturing – that once we’re in are hard to avoid.
Your relationship is changing, and you have to be flexible and able to change with your child. But don’t ever think that they need you any less as a good sounding board. During adolescence, they need you just as much as they ever did. The best way to support them is by making sure they’ll come to you with any problems they’re having, and that’s why effective communication is so important.
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Keys to effective communication |
Barriers to effective communication |
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Try these following to encourage effective communication at the dinner table and beyond.
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Try to minimize the following, which act as barriers to effective communication.
LEAVE THEM ROOM TO TALK, FREELY & OPENLY. They didn’t commit a crime. Don’t keep firing questions at them |
There is always more than one way to work through things. Having these sorts of conversations helps your child explore how they manage their relationships and gives them clues about how to communicate well with others.