Tuning Children In
One of the main issues I hear from parents as I work with them is that their children won’t listen to them. The children ignore their requests as if the parents weren’t even there. There is a valid reason why this happens.
Years ago the CB radio was extremely popular. Even today the modern radios used by police and fire departments are offspring’s of that original technology.
These radios communicate over channels. Each “channel” is directly linked to a quartz crystal that vibrates at a specific frequency.
Imagine that you were listening to and using a radio such as this each day and your next-door neighbor suddenly began to communicate over one of the frequency channels. No matter the time of day this person would be there jabbering into the channel making it literally impossible for anyone else to get a word in edgewise.
What would you do? Well, you could simply avoid that channel and use other channels to communicate or you could remove that crystal altogether.
That’s exactly what children do to parents.
The parents communicate with children on a specific channel. After a while children learn that the “parent channel” generally is something they don’t want to hear. Do this, do that, don’t do this and don’t do that echo on that channel all day, every day.
So the children simply “tune out” or remove that channel.
That is why a third party stranger can communicate with your children better than you can. The stranger has a different channel and frequency that the children actually listen to and hear.
The solution?
1. Keep communication positive.
Try to avoid cluttering your parental channel with only strong directives and requests that children find objectionable. Make sure that at least 50% of your communication with a child is supportive and praise related. Children love and crave praise and won’t tune out a parent that makes it a point to regularly stroke their egos and feelings.
2. Keep communication simple.
Once you past the early twenties in age your communication shifts from childlike to almost entirely adult in nature. Almost every parent talks to children in an adult voice and makes adult requests. Children are just that, children. They simply cannot come up to mature adult standards of communication. Learn to get down on their level and speak to them in terms they can understand.
3. Communicate over “other” channels.
Use “other people” as a way of teaching your children. Teachers, relatives and friends may be very instrumental in directing your children as you are in redirecting their children.
4. Make communication fun.
Children haven’t developed an “instruction channel”. Instead they have an “imagination channel” in that place until they reach the late teens to early twenties. The requests and information you as a parent are sending down are most likely instructional in nature and that information is in direct conflict with what the child is using the channel for. Parents try to instruct a child as the child uses the channel to watch television or play and the parent gets ignored.
5. Separate parental channels.
When both parents stand side-by-side and direct children group the communication onto one channel. Parents that work individually with children maintain separate channels of communication that allow for more effective interaction. Parents should support each other, but communicate separately with children.
Try these suggestions and you’ll find that new avenues of communication will open up within your family.
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