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A New Year's Resolution Worth Keeping

Posted: Friday, December 26, 2008

by Kathy Slattengren
Priceless Parenting

If you could resolve to do something in 2009 that has the potential of greatly improving your relationship with your children what would it be? After giving it some thought, I decided I'm going to work on becoming a better listener.

Now that both my children are teenagers, it's more important than ever that I take time to really listen to them. I've read plenty of research reporting teenagers often feel their parents don't listen to them but those same parents feel they are listening to their teens. Why is there such a discrepancy between what the teens and parents think?

Maybe it's because there are a lot of ways for parents to unintentionally stop conversations with their kids. For example, if your child is telling you about being nervous for an upcoming test, these types of responses will probably leave your child feeling unheard:

Analyzing: "I think you just like to focus on being worried about the test because that's easier than actually studying for it."
Reassuring: "You've studied enough. I'm sure you'll do great on the test."
Giving advice: "If you study an hour right before going to bed, you'll probably remember more for the test tomorrow."

Even though I know about various roadblocks to conversation and even covered this topic in the Priceless Parenting class, I still find myself using these types of responses. Knowing something is certainly not the same as being able to consistently do it. This year I'm going to work on avoiding conversation roadblocks and really listen to my children!

Kathy Slattengren is an internationally recognized parenting educator and founder of Priceless Parenting, http://www.PricelessParenting.com. Priceless Parenting provides an online parenting class, parenting presentations and parent coaching.

While raising her own two children, she learned many wonderful parenting techniques from classes, seminars and books. Through studying research, she discovered a universal body of knowledge about how effective parents do their job. Her Masters of Education degree from the University of Washington combined with her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Computer Science from the University of Minnesota has enabled her to pull together parenting research into a course that is easy to understand and apply.

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