children.
MESSAGE RULES
Here are a few simple rules to help ensure that your messages get through loud and clear to your children:
• Be clear: Make sure that your words, emotions, and actions unambiguously communicate the message you want to convey.
• Be simple: Tailor your message to fit your children’s level of development.
• Be active: The best way to convey messages is through your actions and the actions of your children.
• Listen to your children: Let them help you decide what messages to communicate and how to send them.
• Immerse your children in messages: The more conduits through which you can send messages to your children—through words emotions, actions, activities, and outside influences—the greater the likelihood they will get the messages.
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What Can Block Your Messages?
Have you noticed that sometimes your children only need to hear a message once and they get it? And, frustratingly, you can send a message dozens upon dozens of times and it is as if you had never sent the message at all? Well, welcome to the real world of parenting, where nothing goes as expected, what is supposed to work doesn’t, what isn’t assumed to work does, and what does work only works intermittently or only works for a limited time. It takes detective work and a real understanding of your children to figure out why some messages get through easily and others, despite your best efforts, don’t seem to get through at all.
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MESSAGE BLOCKERS
Overly complex messages
Disconnect between send and receive
Too many messages
Inconsistent messages
Conflicting messages
Different conduits, different messages
Fatigue
Unhappy marriages or divorced parents
Siblings
Extended family
Social world
Popular culture
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Even if you understand the messages you want to communicate to your children, even if you know the conduits through which those messages are conveyed, and even if you have strategies for sending those healthy messages, you can’t be sure that those messages will get through. Every time you send a message to your children, it will probably have to navigate its way through a maze of “message blockers” that can deflect, weaken, contaminate, or outright destroy your intended messages to your children. If you can understand these message blockers, you can lessen their impact and increase the chances that your messages will make it into your children’s psyches.
OVERLY COMPLEX MESSAGES: “HUH?”
One of the challenges of communicating messages to your children is ensuring that they actually understand the messages you send. The key to this understanding is conveying messages in ways that are appropriate for your children’s level of development. I see many parents who send messages that seem perfectly clear to them and then can’t understand why their children aren’t getting those messages. Even worse, parents then blame their children for not getting their messages. The problem is that parents see their messages through their own eyes rather than through those of their children. But your children don’t think the way you do. You have had years of experience during which you have honed your ability to interpret and understand the world. In contrast, your children are still relatively undeveloped when it comes to how they perceive, interpret, analyze, and make decisions about their world, whether they are toddlers, preschoolers, elementary schoolers, or beyond.
This is why you have to walk in your children’s shoes. If you were them, what message would you be getting? Consider what unique aspects of their current stage of development will influence how they get the messages you send them; for example, are they morereceptive to speech, emotions, or actions? If you can understand their true capabilities at their current age, you will be better able to tailor your messages in ways that are developmentally appropriate and to maximize the chances of their understanding your
A D Holland
Grif Stockley
D. W. Collins
Jane Rusbridge
Christine Warren
Lily Evans
Selene Chardou
Samantha Young
Gary D. Svee
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