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A long-term study of college students, The Grant Study, tested their vocabularies while also asking the group to rate their level of happiness. For over fifty years the test subjects with the largest vocabularies declared the greatest satisfaction with their lives. For many of us the vocabulary to express emotions is limited to a few […]
To know who our children really are, we need to observe our children at work and play. J. Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher, wrote that the highest form of human intelligence is observing without evaluating. The more I observe, the more I understand Krishnamurti. Observation and evaluation serve us best as separate activities. Observing people’s behavior […]
Since 2004, I have written this Kids Talk newsletter and blog. The name, Kids Talk, comes from my desire to help adults understand what children need, if only children could express those needs clearly. When we, as adults, seek to understand our children, we must begin by observing their behavior. We then look for feelings. We anticipate […]
Name-calling seems to be a juvenile behavior that unfortunately can continue until adulthood. Research shows that name-calling negatively affects our perception of the victim of name-calling. Doesn’t that appear to be valid? Once we hear something negative about a person, true or untrue, we tend to remember that assertion, even though we may know the […]
“How many times have I told you…?” How would you complete the sentence? Perhaps one or several of these: Shut the door. Remember your lunch. Wash your hands. Set the table for dinner. Walk in the house. The list goes on and on. When we feel that our children are not listening to us—they become […]
As parent leaders, we have many tools we can learn to help us create an atmosphere of trust in our families. One tool is using family meetings. Family meetings can help our families learn how to problem solve together, as well as learn important communication tools, cooperation, creativity, respect, appropriate expression of emotions, and how […]
When I asked one of my elementary students what he didn’t like about his life he told me that it was when people started to sound like blah-blah-blah. Too often our good intentions of telling our children what to do, how to do it, where to do it, when to do, and why to do […]
An effective parenting principle is to not talk “at” our children, but to talk less, listen more and walk our talk. The challenge becomes one of being able to keep on walking our talk. It’s the hard work of follow-through, that becomes our bug-a-boo, when we’d really, really like to do something else. The paradox […]
Our children are inundated with demands from the adults in their lives. At times all those words may sound like a never-ending torrent. I’m reminded of a YouTube video that made the rounds a couple years ago of The Mom Song, three minutes of commands sung to the William Tell Overture. What an exhausting way […]
“You throw that ball and you’re grounded for a month.” “You talk back one more time and I’ll give your bicycle away.” “You don’t eat your peas, you won’t be able to have dessert.” The traps we can fall into as we work with children. In our efforts to have our children change their behavior, […]
