How To Get Your Child To Talk To You

When kids are roughly five to nine years of age, parents have a window of opportunity when kids want to talk to you and dominate the conversation, says Chris. “This is the time to be patient and help them develop their speaking skills.” However, after age nine, that window can start to close. If you’ve laid the groundwork, tweens will feel you are approachable with an attentive ear, readily available to listen without judgment and help find solutions to problems. But in some families, engaging tweens in conversation can be a struggle. Chris says that some kids talk more to their peers as they try to build their own independence. Engaging them in conversation can be hard. It’s tough to compete with text messages, Facebook accounts and tweets.

This is when your communication skills get tested. Rather asking point-blank ‘how was school?’, circle around the subject by talking about something else that interests your child. You can learn a lot about your child by asking non-intrusive or open-ended questions about a show or movie or news report that you’re watching together. “The whole purpose is to help them build a vocabulary so they know how to express themselves when the need arises,” says Chris. “It doesn’t have to be about school. Maybe they’re watching a cartoon and you can ask them why they think SpongeBob did that. Take advantage of the fact that you can pause a movie at home and ask them how they think that character feels or what they think will happen next.” Not only does this exercise open up lines of communication, you’re also helping your child build basic literacy skills of inferring information, predicting, making connections to real-life events or examining alternative viewpoints, says Chris. “It’s also a wonderful jumpingoff point for a serious topic worthy of further family discussion…but wait until the movie’s over!”

SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT

Here are some ideas to keep the conversation flowing: