Do you ever pick your child up, ask how the day went, and get one word back? Fine. Good. I don’t know. And then a few days later you watch that same child sit down next to somebody else and tell them everything you asked for. You’re not alone, and it doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong.
In this episode, I talk about why asking more questions often gets you less, and what the research says about where a parent’s knowledge about her own child actually comes from. It isn’t what most of us assume, and it changes the job.
We look at why kids almost never open with the important thing, what your child is reading on your face before you say a word, and the four things that get in the way, all of which come from love.
Then I give you four things to do, and none of them are listening techniques. If your child has gone quiet and you’ve already tried every question you can think of, this episode will give you a different place to start.
What you’ll learn on this episode:
- Why asking more questions can get you less
- Where a parent’s knowledge about her own child actually comes from
- Why kids almost never open with the important thing
- What your child reads on your face before you speak
- Four things to do that aren’t listening techniques
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Research mentioned in the episode
Stattin, H., & Kerr, M. (2000). Parental monitoring: A reinterpretation. Child Development, 71(4), 1072-1085.
The Swedish study, 703 fourteen year olds and their parents, which found that what parents knew about their kids came mainly from the child choosing to tell them rather than from the parents’ own asking or tracking.
Kerr, M., & Stattin, H. (2000). What parents know, how they know it, and several forms of adolescent adjustment. Developmental Psychology, 36(3), 366-380.
The companion paper from the same research team, showing that child disclosure was the source of parental knowledge most strongly connected to how the adolescent was actually doing.
Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 228-245.
Four studies on what happens when we share good news, finding that relationships where a partner responds with enthusiasm and interest to good news were stronger and more satisfying.
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323-370.
The paper behind the negativity bias, showing that across almost every area studied, bad events get processed more thoroughly and carry more weight than good ones of the same size.
Fivush, R., Haden, C. A., & Reese, E. (2006). Elaborating on elaborations: Role of maternal reminiscing style in cognitive and socioemotional development. Child Development, 77(6), 1568-1588.
A review of decades of research on how parents talk with their children about ordinary past events, linking open, detailed conversations to stronger memory, richer emotional vocabulary, and better emotional understanding years later.
Transcript
Leadership Parenting Episode 160 How to Get Your Child to Open Up
[00:00:00] We all want our kids to talk to us, to tell us the feelings they have, their hopes, the things they’re worried about. But sometimes it seems like getting them to share anything at all is just impossible. If you have a child or anyone in your life that you wish would open up more, this episode is for you.
[00:00:13] This is Leadership Parenting, How to Get Your Child to Open Up. Friends, welcome back as we talk about how to get people that we love to talk to us, to open up about how they’re feeling. It’s more than just talking, right? It’s to share the deeper things.
[00:00:33] Do you ever pick your child up from something and you ask how the day went and you get one word? “Fine. Good. I don’t know.” And then you try again, ’cause you want in, right? So you ask, “What did you do at recess?” Or, “Who did you sit with at lunch?” And then you get another one-word answer. And sometimes it can feel like you’re doing all the work, and you’re not getting anywhere at all. So what do we often do?
[00:00:50] We stop asking. We take it as that’s the end of that conversation. And then do you ever have, uh, and then do you ever notice that maybe a few hours later or a few days later you’re at your parents’ house or your friend’s house and you watch that same child sit down next to someone else and tell them a whole bunch of stuff, all of it, every part that you asked for and you didn’t get anything from them? Here’s what I want you to notice about that. You can be an outstanding listener and still have a child who doesn’t come wanting to be open. And if that child isn’t bringing you something to talk about, then all of your efforts to learn how to be a good listener can feel like they’re a little bit of a waste. So what I wanna talk about today is that this isn’t about knowing how to listen. That is its own skill in and of itself,
[00:01:30] And I’ve created a workshop to help you with that, and I’ll tell you how to find it at the end. But this is about the step in addition to that or before that, what actually makes a child decide to tell you something in the first place. Why do we want our kids to tell us things? Maybe we should start there.
[00:01:45] Is it because we want to control? Is it because we’re nosy? Um, it might be some of those things. But I think that the baseline is that we wanna feel connection. We wanna be in their world, and we want them to know that it’s safe enough that they could come and talk to us whenever they want. You know, I worked with a mom whose daughter was 13.
[00:02:02] 13 is this kind of magical
[00:02:05] Maybe even spooky age. I don’t know. I don’t wanna put a negative connotation on it, but it’s, it’s a tumultuous time. It’s when kids are moving from childhood into teenage worlds, and they’re kind of falling back and forth in, into each worlds. Sometimes they’re in the kid world, and they’re your normal, expected child, and then sometimes they’re moody and aloof, and they wanna do things on their own because they’re on their way out into more of an adult phase of their life or a pre-adult phase of their life.
[00:02:33] And 13 isn’t the magic number. It could be that this happens for your kid at 12. It could be that they don’t hit this till they’re 15. But I just think it’s a thing. I think it’s a thing that everybody talks around about, “Oh, those teenagers, here it comes.” Well, that’s what this mom was talking about. She said, “This girl used to tell me everything.”
[00:02:51] She said it in the past tense like that was part of the relationship that was over. Everything. Who was mean at lunch, what she worried about, what she thought about the boy in her math class. This mom was her daughter’s confidant. And then all of a sudden, it stopped. Not all completely at once.
[00:03:08] It was kind of thinning out over a few months until she was getting these one-word answers from her daughter. And everything she learned about what was going on in her daughter’s life came secondhand from a group chat maybe she wasn’t supposed to be reading when her daughter’s phone was open on the counter or from something that her friend said when she was in the car with her at pickup.
[00:03:25] And she kind of felt betrayed. She felt out in the dark, not aware of what was going on. And she did what any of us would do. She just tried harder. She asked more questions. She sat on the edge of the bed at night and asked her daughter how she was doing, and her daughter said, “Fine.” And then she asked again in a different way, and her daughter said, “Mom, I’m fine.”
[00:03:42] So this mom’s a little freaked out. She says, “I feel like I’m chasing her.” And I said, “I think you are.” And I asked her what she was chasing. What was she missing? She thought about it for a long time, and she didn’t say that it was the big talks because this is what she and her daughter had had, really big talks.
[00:03:59] But what she said was bothering her the most was that her daughter used to come and find her, wanna talk to her, so initiate those conversations.
[00:04:07] Well, I wanna come back to this mom because I think it’s important for us to talk about what’s underneath all of the stuff that’s happening in that daughter’s life and that mom’s life. Underneath all of it, I think, is a specific thing, and it wasn’t what we expect
[00:04:20] Here’s the thing I want you to know first because I think it puts things in the right order. Asking more questions doesn’t always get us more information. Have you noticed that? In a lot of houses, it can even get you less
[00:04:33] And maybe it’s a surprise to you or not a surprise that we have research on this. Researchers in Sweden looked at hundreds of 14-year-olds and their parents, setting out to find where a parent’s knowledge about their own kid actually comes from. Interesting, right? Everybody assumed it came from really good monitoring of that kid, asking the right questions, knowing their friends, keeping track.
[00:04:55] That’s what we all think we’re doing when we kind of follow our kids with these questions. But what they found was that’s not where it came from. What parents knew came overwhelmingly from one source, and that only source was their child deciding to tell them about it. It wasn’t their asking that produced that information.
[00:05:13] It was the child’s deciding to tell. And the kids who volunteered things to their parents were the kids with the fewest problems, more so than the kids whose parents were tracking them closely. What does this information tell us about communication with our children?
[00:05:28] The researchers closed their paper by saying that the question we should be asking isn’t how parents can monitor better, it is what makes a child decide to share and disclose what’s going on in their life. You guys, that’s a completely different question. Becoming a better questioner and becoming someone worth telling are two different…
[00:05:43] Becoming a better questioner and becoming someone worth kind of talking to, safe enough to talk to, those are two different skills or projects, and what we’re finding in the research is that one of them does a lot better than the other. This happens at every age. It just looks different, which is why I think we miss it.
[00:06:00] With a six-year-old, you notice that they’re used to talking to us the whole time
[00:06:00] With a six-year-old, you might notice that something has quietly shift because when they were four and five, they were talking to you the whole time that they played, telling you everything. And now maybe as a six-year-old, they play a little bit more quietly. Or with a 10-year-old, you might get a version of the day that is safe in their mind to tell you.
[00:06:17] And with a 15-year-old, you’re gonna get possibly those one-word answers like, “Fine. Good.”
[00:06:22] Do you notice that all these are little transition points? And it’s the same thing happening in all three of those age structures there’s a little shift in how much that child is talking or telling. So here’s the first piece, and I want you to watch for it this week.
[00:06:35] Children never We want to know the most important parts of what’s going on with our kids. I don’t think anybody will argue with that idea. We want to know the big pieces. We want to monitor, are they doing okay? How are they feeling? Do they feel connected? Are they having fun?
[00:06:48] Are they safe? Who are you hanging out with? We want to know all those big pieces of information. Why? Because it helps us do our job. We’re monitoring their safety. We’re monitoring their skillset. Remember, our job is to get them from being here, where they’re very dependent and they don’t have many skills, to being here, where they’re very independent and they have every skill they need to be functioning well as an adult.
[00:07:08] So, whether you realize it or not, you’re watching for those little steps, and it’s very reassuring when you see them or when you hear them we’re looking for important things. So I’m gonna ask you to pause for a little bit before you… So I’m gonna ask you to consider that concept when you notice that you’re looking for connection with your child
[00:07:25] Because I think most of us, we judge the quality or the success of our connection with our kids by how much of that we’re getting and how much of that seems to fit well with what we’re looking for, and then we can take a big sigh of relief and say, “They’re fine, and I know what’s going on, and I can feel good about the track we’re on.”
[00:07:41] That is normal. You’re supposed to be doing that. So we’re not gonna feel bad about that. But here’s a, I think, a problem that causes the tension at all of these little transition points when our kids are moving into more independence, and they’re not as forthcoming with us with the things that they’re sharing.
[00:07:57] The point is The point is that we’re looking for those big things for our reassurance.
[00:08:03] And here’s the thing I want you to remember. Kids almost never open with the big things. They don’t make this easy. It’s like if we could say, “How are you doing?” And they sort through all the things that they’re feeling and doing, and they could just give us the little points on our map of what we’re looking for.
[00:08:16] “I’m doing fine. I’m safe. I’m having good connections. I’m living my values. I’m using my skill sets. And oh, by the way, I’ve noticed there are a few things I’m not doing well that I need a little help with.” Kids are never gonna say that to you, and that’s actually-
[00:08:27] And that’s actually kind of the thing we’re looking for. So what we’re wanting- so what I want you to remember is that kids don’t open with those things. They open with small things, things that maybe don’t matter so much. Maybe telling you a story about a kid who cut in line, maybe a weird thing a teacher said, maybe something that doesn’t seem important at all to you, doesn’t give you much information about how your child is actually doing.
[00:08:48] But they’re testing you, not in a manipulative way, not even in a conscious way. They’re just finding out what happens when they tell you anything, and that’s what they’re using to decide about the next thing they’re gonna tell you
[00:09:01] So the way that we handle the small things that our kids tell us now is what decides whether they’re gonna bring us the big things later This is really about developing a process of communication with your children so that, they feel super comfortable having these kinds of conversations without you reacting or overreacting.
[00:09:20] I can’t emphasize this enough. Kids that open up to their parents open up because they know their parents can handle it. That puts so much responsibility on us to not launch into lecture, to not launch into judgment, to keep what we call the calm resting face. This is something that I learned as I got trained to be a therapist, to not be reactive in my expressions when a client tells me something that might not match what I was expecting or might be a little shocking or upsetting.
[00:09:52] My job is to hold my shock and my confusion, or whatever that is, in respect of waiting, waiting to understand Waiting before I offer a solution, waiting before I give a reaction, because that’s what’s creating safety. Because whether we realize it or not, the speaker, the person talking to us, is constantly evaluating our response.
[00:10:15] Are they getting a green light to keep going? Are they getting a yellow light like, ah, they’re looking like this is freaking them out a little bit, or are they getting a full on red stop sign that says, “Stop talking, they’re not handling this well. This is gonna go really bad”? We are training our children from the time they are little, tiny, first words to know what to expect from us.
[00:10:36] Why does nobody tell us this? Why are we leaving the hospital with babies? I know why, because there’s so much to teach. How can how can anybody at the hospital teach you all of this? But where is the manual? Where is the explanation of how brains work? Where is the developmental shifts and stages that are written somewhere that we could find so that we’re not freaked out when this starts happening at 6 and at 11 and at 15 or when they’re adults?
[00:10:58] W- where is it? It’s not there. That’s why I’m building it. That’s why we’re talking about this. Because when you know this stuff, number one, you’re not surprised. Number two, you’re not freaked out. Number three, you know what your role is, what your job is. Your role is not to be made comfortable by what your child is telling you.
[00:11:16] Let me pause there for a minute. Did you hear that? Your role is not to be comfortable with what your child tells you, or in agreement or in approval. Your role is to be safe enough that they can tell you. You can’t make them tell you things. You can’t make them talk. And if you’ve had a teenager in your home or even a 10, 11-year-old, you know that You’re gonna get those one-word answers. So talking to us comes when it’s comfortable for the child, and that’s not always because they don’t trust you or because you’re not a safe landing page for them.
[00:11:47] It- or because you’re not a safe landing place for them. It could just be that they’re not ready to talk right then. As frustrating as that is, that’s something that we have to accept. We should expect it. We should expect. We should accept it. Sometimes we don’t, and that’s when we go in, and we ask again, and we hammer again and again, and then we see real walls come up.
[00:12:03] So I think having this vision in mind gives you permission to not freak out, to be like, “Oh, this is expected. This is actually right on time,” or maybe a little early, or, “Gosh, we went a couple of years with this c- not showing up until now.” Our goal is to be that safe place to understand what’s happening.
[00:12:22] So when your nine-year-old tells you about a girl at recess and it goes well, and it’s just like a little not important conversation, not important meaning remember how we’re determining what’s important, is, are, does this, uh… Are we evaluating their safety? Are we evaluating their sense of connection? Do they have the skills they need?
[00:12:38] Are, are they making good choices? Are they living their values? You guys, you may not think that’s the filter that you’ve got on your lens when you’re talking to your kids, but my guess is it is, because that’s what our job is. Our job is to make sure our kids are hitting all those marks. So we’ve got that playing somewhere.
[00:12:54] Our kids are gonna tell us silly things, dumb things. Dumb meaning they don’t match those big-ticket items. So when your nine-year-old tells you about a girl at, that’s doing this really kind of funny jump rope thing at recess, and you’re interested, and you ask ’em more, and you laugh with them, and it, like, goes well, you are building the whole setup, the whole framework for why that same girl is gonna come to you at 15 when she has a friend that’s kind of experimenting with something dangerous
[00:13:24] We’re talking about process here. We’re building infrastructure for
[00:13:28] being that safe place for our kids to want to open up
[00:13:32] And I think that’s the part that no one tells us. Kids don’t suddenly decide to tell us things that are more serious. They test it out. Once again, I don’t think they think they’re doing this. They just gather data, because that’s how human beings work. In a world of potential threats, they gather data, they test things out, and when they see things go well with small conversations, they get a green light that says, “This mom of mine can handle big, hard, gnarly conversations.”
[00:13:59] So when your child brings you something small, and you’re tired, and honestly, you’re not really interested in what they’re saying, that’s the conversation that may matter the most. Not because of what they’re telling you, that’s the content, right? Like, if I’ve got this glass, the content is what goes in it, but the process of listening and being interested, that’s what matters.
[00:14:20] That’s what they’re learning. I can tell my mom anything and they’re gonna be there. So let’s talk about what gets in the way a little bit more because it’s rarely just one dramatic thing I wanna say at the front that every one of our obstacles, things we run into, uh, that get in the way of this, it comes from a good place.
[00:14:39] We do these things because we love our kids, and we really wanna help and support them and get them from here to there, which is our job. Okay, here they are. Sometimes we try to fix, right? Our kid’s four sentences into their story, and we’re already ahead. We have the answer, and so then we kind of give it to them in the middle of their story.
[00:15:00] And the interesting thing is most kids as they’re talk- most adult- most of us, all humans, as we’re talking, we’re not always looking for the answer. Sometimes we’re just looking to say it out loud. Do you realize that most of the change that happens for us isn’t in someone giving us a response? It’s in the process that we have of being able to notice it, bring it out of our brain, say it out loud, see it from a different perspective.
[00:15:21] That’s where real change happens, so we wanna let our kids go through that process, but sometimes we try to fix it. Sometimes we’re asking for too much detail. Maybe they give us one sentence, and then we take that one sentence and we break it down into 12, 13, 14 questions because we wanna understand, and we think that that’s really great listening.
[00:15:39] And our kids will feel like they’re being interrogated because we have too many questions. Gosh, we… I’m not supposed to ask too many questions, but I have to make sure I’m interested enough, and I have to ask enough questions.
[00:15:50] I know this sounds a little bit like I’m saying two things at the same time, but I want you to think about how it feels to be the one that’s speaking and to be the one that’s being listened to. You’ll know what I mean when you start applying this to how it feels for you. Okay, another obstacle.
[00:16:04] Sometimes, and this is, this is mine, by the way. Sometimes we reassure too fast. I was just on the phone with my daughter, who had something she was really worried about with one of her kids, and I could tell she was just kinda beating herself up for it, and, and she just… You could just hear the pain in her voice, and you guys, I could hardly stand it.
[00:16:22] I just kept saying to her, “You know, you know this is not your fault.” You know, like, I just started this whole reassurance campaign.
[00:16:27] And I realized about halfway through what I know, what I’m teaching you, but that I forget sometimes because I feel such exquisite pain watching her be in pain. I wanna reassure her so quickly. And, and I had this thought as I could hear myself talking and reassuring her, and I could hear my voice getting more and more intense and, and really trying to convince her that she wasn’t to blame for this.
[00:16:46] And then I, I had this thought, “She needs to talk about this. She needs to be able to say her worries out loud. She needs to be able to sort through it, and I’m her safe place to do that, and I’m shutting her down through my reassurance.” Have you ever noticed that? It’s like sometimes I wanna say to someone, “Let me just feel bad for a minute, okay?”
[00:17:04] Like, I wanna tell you why I feel so sad and worried about this and bad about this and, and if someone comes in too soon and tells me, “No, no, no, no, no, you shouldn’t feel that way. It’s okay. Your… It’s not your fault,” we lose our opportunity. All well-meaning, all because we love those people so much. And even when you’re the one that that’s happening, you, you could probably say, “Ah, they just love me.”
[00:17:20] But are you gonna take your thing to them when you know that they can’t hear it? My job is to sit in discomfort with my daughter as she was feeling her pain, and just love her and love her and love her and let her talk. And maybe even then not rush to a solution. Maybe even then just validate her a little bit, and maybe even then tell her that I think I can kind of understand how she feels even though I’m not exactly in her shoes.
[00:17:46] And what has she thought about as she’s talking about it? Is anything clarified for her? Do you notice how slow that is, how much I have to slow that down when what I really wanna say is, “It’s not your fault. Feel better, okay?” And does that work? I don’t know. Maybe sometimes it does, but usually it doesn’t.
[00:18:03] We just say, “Oh, they’re well-meaning. They love me, but I can’t really talk to them ’cause they can’t stand how uncomfortable I feel.” Do you hear that? I teach this, and just this week I got stuck in that trap
[00:18:14] So that is definitely one of the things that get in our way. Sometimes it’s our facial expressions. We’re holding our thoughts to ourselves, we’re processing it silently, but that look on our face, we’re not able to control it, and our kids read it before we’ve even said a single word. I think this really happens to us when we’re on the run, and we’re just
[00:18:33] We, we have no warning. Our kids start talking about something, and we don’t have time to process all of this, and it just comes out on our face. So that sometimes gets in the way. I don’t know how we can always prevent it, but it’s important to know that it’s something that happens. None of these things make us bad moms.
[00:18:49] It makes us moms who care a great deal, tons, about what happens to our kids, and I think that’s exactly why these are so hard to see in ourselves. That’s why I’m talking about them, because I want you to just have them at the top of your mind because think about it. If our pressure, if … Because think about it.
[00:19:06] If the solution to our kids talking to us more is that they just have to come with the desire-
[00:19:13] And we know developmentally it’s kind of built in them to not do that as much as they grow older, then we’re putting all of our control in something that we don’t have any choice around. But what we do have control over is the safety that we create in how we listen
[00:19:33] That’s why I created this How to Listen So the People You Love Are Heard workshop. We know that it’s a problem to get our kids to talk to us, but we don’t really have great solutions, and I think these are really good solutions
[00:19:45] So those are ways that you can set up the situation so that you’re preparing a good landing place for your child to wanna come and talk to you. Is this a one-time effort? Absolutely not. This… Is this a one-time effort? No. This is something that you’re building when they’re very, very little, when they’re two, and you’re having those very first conversations with them.
[00:20:03] One or two little comments when you have little children, and they start to know, “My mom’s interested in what I have to say and what I wanna show her.”
[00:20:11] And that gets harder as they get older because sometimes the information they wanna share is about Pokemon cards, and how interested are you really in Pokemon cards, or anything. You’re lucky if you find something that your kid brings to you that you’re really interested in. And I would encourage you to be interested in as much of what they are interested in, the better.
[00:20:28] But many times, we’re not worried about what the content is, right? We’re focusing on the process of that listening, of that safe relationship, so that they can come and know that you’re going to be open to it So that’s how we set it up. But now, let’s say they talk to you.
[00:20:45] What do you do with it? Kids don’t want what they tell us to show up at dinner being used against them or as a lesson to someone else, or in an argument, uh, three weeks later we bring up that thing
[00:20:57] When you think about building that platform of safety and trust, it’s a commitment, and it’s on us
[00:21:03] Kids are gonna decide what’s safe to share, with whom, and when. Not because they’re being secretive, and not because they just wanna pull away, but because they’re gonna protect something that matters to them, which is kind of their privacy and their thoughts and feelings. It’s so private for someone to share their thoughts and feelings with us.
[00:21:21] This is why we, um, treasure our friendships, where you have a friendship that you can share things so private to you, and you know it’s safe to share
[00:21:28] And for kids, all the things that matter the most to them, they’re gonna share the least if they feel slightly unsure of that safety with us Now I wanna talk about something that maybe I haven’t shared that much about because it doesn’t seem as intuitive, but how we respond to the good things or the positive things that people tell us might be more important than how we respond to the negative, right?
[00:21:50] So the research on this is on couples, that the ability that a couple has to respond very well, very interested, or that ability to pay attention to that correlates with a stronger, healthier relationship.
[00:22:04] So showing actual interest when things are going well, when maybe even they’re small or minute, and asking more about those things tend to be correlated with healthier relationships. And the reason for this is because of the negativity bias in the brain. We tend to pay more attention to the things that are wrong than the things that are right.
[00:22:22] The things that are wrong gets more reaction from us. Now, I want you to think about how that might play out in an ordinary house, because here’s a good reason that we do it the way we do. When your child brings you a problem, probably you’re gonna drop things, right? Drop everything. So when your child brings you a problem, you drop everything.
[00:22:37] Of course you do. Our attention goes where trouble is because that’s what a mom’s brain is built to do. Something’s wrong, so we turn toward it with everything we have. And when our child brings us something good, most of us are still in motion, right? “That’s great, honey,” said over our shoulder without looking up from the sink, not because we don’t care, but because nothing is wrong, so nothing in us gets alerted, and we don’t have to put a big amount of energy toward that.
[00:23:02] But here’s what’s happening on our child’s side of things. When we turn toward our kiddo and give them our full attention, something settles inside of them. They are met with warmth and interest, and that’s the way a child’s nervous system learns that they’re safe and that they matter. It’s not just a nice moment.
[00:23:17] It lays down a little more of that foundation, of that sense that she can talk, that she belongs to you, that you’re gonna listen, and she’s learning one more thing at the same time. She’s learning what kind of news gets your attention in your day. The second thing is about the words we use. And I think we all do this depending on how much is left in us from, uh, our energy and our strength for the day. But there’s a long line of research on how parents talk with their kids about ordinary things that have already happened.
[00:23:47] Sometimes we rush them through it. Sometimes we ask a closed question and move on. “How was the party?” “Fine.” “Okay, go get your pajamas on.” And sometimes we open it up a little. We add a detail, uh, to ask for, or we wonder out loud about how she must have felt, or we ask what it was like for them.
[00:24:02] We have both of those kinds of conversations, closed questions and open questions. That’s kinda how we categorize them. But when a child gets more of the second kind over the years, those open questions, something builds. You’re teaching them how to have language inside for what’s going on for them, and they get better at understanding their own emotions.
[00:24:20] And the researchers are seeing that that actually expands, makes a difference in their later years. And that’s worth knowing because it means that our ordinary conversations aren’t just fillers. They’re not wasted time. That’s when our kids are learning how to communicate, to notice what they’re feeling and how to say it when things are important and when they’re not.
[00:24:39] So a child who can’t tell you much is sometimes not withholding things. They just may not have the words. They maybe don’t have it figured out how they feel yet. And the place that she or he is gonna learn how to do this is in those low-risk, low-key conversations about things that are ordinary and maybe not that interesting and that maybe don’t matter that much, which brings us back to communicating about the small stuff.
[00:25:03] Okay, the third one I think is the simplest. The third one is the simplest. You go first. A child who never hears you say anything about your day or expand about what you’re feeling or thinking, they don’t have a model to follow. We want them to have that experience being the one that’s on the receiving end of that.
[00:25:20] Of course, that doesn’t mean you lay all your worries on your kid, but just sharing how you felt about things and conversationally building that with your children. So here’s what to do with all of it. I wanna give you four things, and none of them are listening techniques, and that’s on purpose. If what-
[00:25:30] None of them are listening techniques, and that’s because I wanna talk about setting the stage for listening, and I put those listening techniques in the workshop that I created, and it’s got a great little workbook, and it’ll be really helpful. So I encourage you to go get it. You can it on my website, leighgerman.com
[00:25:45] And it’s all free through the end of September
[00:25:47] Episode 157, and you’ll find it in the show notes, that link to the workshop. And that episode’s great to help you with nailing down those skill sets. But these four things I’m gonna talk to you about are a little bit different. They’re the ones that help your child decide to talk to you in the first place.
[00:26:02] So you’re gonna get the listening skills once they start talking, but we want to invite our kids to talk to us more. So number one,
[00:26:08] the next time your child tells you something, whether it’s small or big, remember that you’re not going to share it with other people unless you have permission to. You won’t use it as an example later. You’re not gonna mention it to her teacher. And then a few days on, let her notice that it didn’t go beyond your circle.
[00:26:24] Nothing came back. You didn’t use it against her. Nobody knew. That’s how she’s gonna find out that she can trust you with something. And you can’t just tell her that that’s true. She needs to be able to watch it happen. I’m not talking about keeping secrets from your spouse. If you need to talk it over with your husband or share it with him, just, you could share, tell her that first, or you do it privately so she doesn’t feel exposed.
[00:26:43] Something like, “I wanna talk this over with your dad. Can we figure out together how to do that?” She can handle you telling him. You’re a team. That should happen. What she can’t handle is finding out afterwards that she thought she had a, a confidence, and it wasn’t kept. The second one, answer good news the way you would answer bad news.
[00:26:59] In how much you pay attention to it. When she tells you something small and good, put down what is in your hands. That’s most of it right there, putting down the dish, or the phone, or the computer, or whatever you’re doing, and turn toward And then listen.
[00:27:13] It teaches her, it teaches your child that, it teaches your child that you’re interested not just in the content, remember that glass is the safety of the relationship and the listening. You’re not just interested in what goes inside, you’re interested in what she has to say, period.
[00:27:25] Third one, bring the small thing or some small thing about what they talked to you about, bring it back up later, not to use against them, but just to check in. Let’s say they tell you something on Monday about a kid at recess, and it’s not a big deal,
[00:27:38] but maybe on Thursday you say, “Hey, whatever happened to that boy in your class? How did recess go?”
[00:27:43] That one question does more than it looks like it does. The first thing it tells them is that you kept track of that, that it stayed with you, and that it mattered enough that you came back to it, and that’s an important message for a child to receive.
[00:27:55] And then it’s also giving them another go at the story. Kids are almost better at telling something the second time. The first time, they might be testing the water and just trying to figure it out, and the second time, they’re more settled, and they’re, they have time to think about it or process it, and more kinda comes out
[00:28:10] So it’s a way to keep the conversation going without hammering them with questions
[00:28:14] And then that fourth one is to be the first one to share if you want your kids to say things out loud, then you want them to hear you doing it too. So tell your child something about your day. Be conversational about it. Tell some stories include something that didn’t go well.
[00:28:29] Two things matter about how you do this. You’re gonna keep it small. We’re not overwhelming our kids with stuff We’re not handing them a worry to carry around.
[00:28:36] We don’t ever want them to walk away from these interactions feeling like they need to take care of us
[00:28:41] What they should walk away with is a little bit more of a picture of what it looks like when you say something hard out loud, because that’s what they need to learn how to do. And they’re watching how you process things. That’s why it’s so important for us to learn how to manage our own emotions, how to regulate those emotions, how to calm our bodies down.
[00:28:58] When you’re learning that and you’re doing that in front of your child, that’s the best way to learn this stuff
[00:29:03] Super hard to ask kids to do things that they’re not seeing us do. That’s why we call it being a leadership. That’s why we call it leadership. We’re leading by doing it first
[00:29:10] If you find that’s difficult, hang with me. We’re practicing this over and over and over again. It’s what I’m doing in all of the programs that I’m building. It’s what we have over and over in our episodes, a long library of those things
[00:29:21] So let’s review. Pay attention to some of the everyday things that our kids are talking about, and treat them just as powerfully as we would if they were worrisome, bad things. In other words, set stuff down, make eye contact with your kids, listen, and then keep those things private, especially when they’re tender or they’re important
[00:29:37] so that our kids feel that trust that we’re building with them.
[00:29:41] For this mom that I’m sh- for the mom that we’re talking about today, it took about six to eight weeks. For this mom that we’re talking about today, it took a couple of months. And what came back first wasn’t deep conversations that she’d been hoping for. It was more like her daughter got in the car after dance and told her about something that was happening with another girl on the team And this is the part that I guess I want to elaborate on because this is our whole episode in, uh, just a few seconds
[00:29:59] That mom let her girl talk. She didn’t ask who else was involved, all the details, all the names. She didn’t say, “That girl sounds like she’s trouble.” She didn’t offer an option about what her child should do next. She didn’t turn it into a lesson about friendship. She said, “Oh, what else happened?” And then she drove and she let her daughter talk
[00:30:20] Sometimes that’s all we need
[00:30:21] And when her daughter finished, she said something like, “That sounds like it was pretty awkward.” And her daughter said, “Yeah, it kinda was.” And that was the end of it
[00:30:30] Disappointing? A little bit for this mom. She thought, “Well, that wasn’t a deep conversation that I’ve been craving and longing for.” But it was one step in the whole process of building that
[00:30:41] And that was the end of it. And then her mom did the hardest part, which was nothing at all. She didn’t text the other mother. She didn’t bring it up at dinner in front of her son. She didn’t mention it again
[00:30:51] She waited
[00:30:52] And then four or five days later, her daughter told her something else. And that’s what kind of setting the situation up and passing the test looks like. You can see that it’s not a deep, long, heartfelt, life-changing conversation. Nothing fancy. It’s one little drop in the bucket that felt like it went okay, and then she told her something else, shared something else about her day
[00:31:16] And then a few weeks after that, her daughter came downstairs, sat next to her, and just started talking about all sorts of other things. She could literally start to see the progression between tiny drop, tiny drop, and then a little bit more
[00:31:29] So here’s what I wanna leave with you. The goal isn’t that we have our kids share everything they’re thinking and feeling with us all the time. That’s not part of the parenting plan, is painf-
[00:31:37] Kids get quieter for all kinds of reasons, and plenty of those reasons have nothing to do with us at all. Some of it is just being 12 or 13 years old
[00:31:45] But we can always work on laying the foundation for, but we can always work on laying the foundation for others to come to us and feel safe enough to share what they’re thinking and feeling. We’ve focused today on this being around our children, but I wanna say it also applies to our spouses and to the other people that are important to you in your life
[00:31:59] We’re building trust with the people we love, and we’re letting them know that we’re safe enough to hear the things that are on their minds and their hearts
[00:32:06] I shared with you I still fall into this trap. I get overeager, I get excited about stuff, or I get worried about stuff, or I want people to feel better and I try to fix it What I know is that repair is always available. We can say, “I got worried and I made that harder than it needed to be. Please tell me again I wasn’t listening.” Kids give you another try more often than not, and often more than we think we deserve
[00:32:26] We are learning how to create safety and how to be good listeners. It’s such a privilege and an honor to be in the position we are, helping kids and their journey as they grow into adulthood
[00:32:37] Let’s get our kids feeling safe and be prepared to know how to be really good listeners. Go get that workshop on how to listen, leighgerman.com episode 157 in the show notes. You could put it on in your headphones as you’re getting stuff done and just get good reminders of what you need to do to, of what you can do to increase your listening skills so grateful we got to spend time together today, and I will see you all next week. Take care
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