Practice Active Listening With Your Children - Fatherhood

Probably you heard about active listening technique. Let us see now what is that because active listening is first and important step to understanding your child. How to use active listening with your child?

The technique is based on understanding of emotions which feels child and returning them back to him. Active listening means not only understanding of what child needs at the moment but the ability to react correctly to make him understand that you know the way he feels now.

For example, your child came home upset and said that he does not want to be friends with Peter anymore. First natural response of an adult is to ask ?What's happend?? or ?Why are you aggravated??. In this case you get interested in facts and events which occured with your child but you leave him alone with his feelings.

Right reaction according to active listening technique suggests mirror reflexion of child's emotions and transforming them into words.

?You are offended. You do not want to be friends with Peter anymore.? First, you repeat what your child said, which proves that you heard what he said. And then you define emotion that experiences child. At first sight this response seems strange and unnatural but exactly it creates a special impression in child. Because when he hears such response he feels that you are ready to listen to him.

What is the secret?
The difference between phrases is not much great, words are alike, but as you see the effect is so different. The thing is that statement of phrase in form of question does not give feeling of compassion while affirmative phrase influences child and causes the desire to continue to tell.

Using active listening in conversation is unusual for us, therefore it requires to be learned. There are three reasons to learn it:
1. this teqniques allows child to tell all he wants to tell
2. when he talks about the problem, he finds himself ways to solve it
3. when relationship with parents gets improved, all tensions and negative emotions go away

Source: http://fatherhood.typepad.com/blog/2012/11/practice-active-listening-with-your-children-.html

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