3.10 – Listening to your family
How can we listen more effectively?
At the beginning of this session on listening we looked at how we are listening to our children. We then looked at some examples of situations where it is important to listen to children at different stages of development. You have read our session on difficult areas of communication and made some notes in your journal for preparing for those tricky times. Now we can make informed choices about how we are going to listen on a daily basis. Answer the following questions: What do you do? What do you say?
| Situation | |
|---|---|
| They are asking you questions constantly? For example “Why is the sky blue”, “Why are you doing that?” etc. | |
| You want your child to talk to you more. | |
| You want your child to develop their own views, but they are so different from your views! | |
| Your child doesn’t want to talk about something. | |
| Your child tells you something really worrying about themselves or a friend. |
It is daunting to think about how much we have to do, how available we have to be, what our children need from us, how much time we need to put to one side. But if we can have a bit of a plan and think about what we need to do and how we can do it we will save ourselves from some dilemmas later on.
On the following page we have provided some tips on how to listen to our family and when we can try and find the time to do this.
Next: 3.11 – Listening to your family – feedbackBack: 3.9 – Listening to difficult issues