Kids form their view of themselves and the world every day. They
need your encouragement to see themselves as good people who are
capable of good things. And they need to know you’re on their side.
friends. So as hard as it is with the pressures
of job and daily life, if we want a better relationship
with our kids, we have to free up the
time to make that happen.
4. Start with trust, the foundation of
every good relationship.
Trust begins in infancy, when your baby
learns whether she can depend on you to pick
her up when she needs you. By the time babies
are a year old, researchers can assess whether
babies are “securely attached” to their parents,
which basically means the baby trusts that his
parents can be depended on to meet his emotional
and physical needs.
Over time, we earn our children’s trust in
other ways: following through on the promise
we make to play a game with them later;
not breaking a confidence; picking them up
on time.
At the same time, we extend our trust to them
by expecting the best from them and believing
in their fundamental goodness and potential.
We trust in the power of human development
to help our child grow, learn, and mature. We
trust that although our child may act like a
child today, he or she is always developing into
a more mature person, just as (we hope) we are.
We trust that no matter what he or she does,
there is always the potential for positive change.
Trust does not mean blindly believing what
your teenager tells you. Trust means not giving
up on your child, no matter what he or she
does. Trust means never walking away from
the relationship in frustration, because you
trust that she needs you and that you will find
a way to work things out.
5. Encourage, encourage,
encourage.
Think of your child as a plant that is programmed
by nature to grow and blossom. If
you see the plant has brown leaves, you consider
if it needs more light, more water, more
fertilizer. You don't criticize it and yell at it to
straighten up and grow right.
Kids form their view of themselves and the
world every day. They need your encouragement
to see themselves as good people who
are capable of good things. And they need
to know you're on their side. If most of what
comes out of your mouth is correction or criticism,
they won't feel good about themselves,
and they won't feel like you're their ally. You
lose your only leverage with them, and they
lose something every kid needs: to know they
have an adult who thinks the world of them.
6. Remember that respect
must be mutual.
Pretty obvious, right? But we forget this with
our kids, because we know we’re supposed to
be the boss. You can still set limits (and you
must), but if you do it respectfully and with
empathy, your child will learn both to treat
others with respect and to expect to be treated
respectfully himself.
Once, when I became impatient with my then
three-year-old, he turned to me and said “I
don’t like it when you talk to me that way.” A
friend who was with us said, “If he’s starting
this early, you’re going to have big problems
when he’s a teenager!” In fact, rather than challenging
my authority, my toddler was simply
asking to be treated with the dignity he had
come to expect. Now a teenager, he continues
to treat himself, me, and others respectfully.
And he chooses peers who treat him respectfully.
Isn’t that what we all want for our kids?
7. Think of relationships as the slow
accretion of daily interactions.
You don’t have to do anything special to
build a relationship with your child. The
good (and bad) news is that every interaction
creates a relationship. Grocery shopping,
carpooling, and bath time matter as
much as that big talk you have when there’s
a problem. He doesn’t want to share his toy,
or go to bed, or do his homework? How you
handle it is one brick in the foundation of
your permanent relationship, as well as his
ideas about all relationships.
That’s one reason it’s worth thinking through
any recurring interactions that get on your
nerves to see how you might handle them
differently. Interactions that happen more
than once tend to initiate a pattern. Nagging
and criticizing are no basis for a relationship
with someone you love. And, besides, your
life is too short for you to spend it in a state
of annoyance.
8. Communication habits start early.
Do you listen when she prattles on interminably
about her friends at preschool, even
when you have more important things to
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