How to Help Your Child Cope with Disastershock

How to Identify When Your Child is Stressed
How to Reassure Your Child
How to Use Art to Help Your Child Cope With Stress
How to Listen So Your Child Will Talk to You
How to Help Your Child to Relax: Ten Methods

How to Listen So Your Child Will Talk to You

Perhaps there's no more important skill for a parent to possess - especially following a traumatic period - than the skill of being able to listen in such a way that you actually help your child talk with you about his or her experience and about his or her feelings and concerns. All of the approaches mentioned in this section are known and practiced by most parents when things are going along smoothly. At times of difficulty, crisis or trauma - such as a recent disaster - when we adults ourselves are under extraordinary stress it's sometimes easy to forget these methods. This section offers a brief review of some of the most important things you can do to help your child talk with you. As you read this section, you may not read anything that is truly new to you or to your way of listening to your youngster. We suggest that you just use what follows as a kind of review checklist to remind yourself of some of these important ways of helping your child during this difficult period.

Basic to your youngster's willingness to explore his or her fearful thoughts and stressful feelings with you is his or her trusting recognition of your love and acceptance of him or her. Remind yourself of the importance of actively letting him or her know that you love and accept him or her. This includes, of course, saying "I love you", or "I really like being with you" and any other words and phrases that let your youngster know of your respect and liking for him or her.

Touching is also a simple and powerful way of communicating these important feelings. Hugging, patting, and stroking are all very valuable ways of letting your child know just how special he or she is to you.

Careful listening has to begin with your genuine interest in whatever it is your child is experiencing and feeling. From this feeling of sincere interest we can move to letting our children know that we want to hear them; we can convey to them a recognition of our deep interest in their experience and in their thoughts and feelings.

We all can tell when someone is really listening to us - we read this in what they do as well as in what they say and how they say it. We can use this awareness to build a checklist for ourselves as we watch the ways we encourage our children to share themselves with us. A beginning list would include four reminders; you'll be able to add others that will seem natural to you. Four points to begin with are:

First | Looking at your child with attention and interest; making and keeping direct eye contact;

Second | Making sure that each day includes some time when you let yourself stop everything else you're doing and just listen to your youngster;

Third | Using encouraging expressions like "mm-hmm" "and what did you do then?" to let your child know that you're truly following what he or she is saying;

Fourth | Just allowing your youngster to tell his or her story in his or her own way and in his or her own words and with his or her own sense of timing.

Three other specific points might be helpful reminders for you. These are: using wait-time, using "I" messages and avoiding defense-provoking questions. Let's review these briefly.

When you ask your youngster a question, how long do you wait for an answer before you repeat yourself, ask him or her another question, or offer a series of suggestion. Wait-time, as its name implies, refers to the period of time you wait for an answer after asking your child a question. If you are like many parents, you may allow very little time sometimes only one second - for your child to begin his or her answer to your question. And then, after a child makes his or her response, many parents are apt to wait even less time than they did prior to his or her answer to repeat what the child said or to rephrase it or to ask another question. If you think this describes you at times, you may decide to experiment with increasing your wait-time. When you ask a question, try waiting longer for an answer than you typically do. We know that waiting even five to seven seconds can sometimes produce some rather profound changes in the child's answer. You may even want to try counting your wait-time seconds by saying to yourself "one-1000, two-1000, three-1000, four-1000" and so forth in order to get a more clear sense of just how much time you're allowing your child to respond.

As your youngster learns that you're not going to hurry right on with another question or comment, you'll discover that he or she will begin to add to his or her answer, to say a bit more and to become even more exploring of his or her own thoughts and feelings.

Sharing yourself with your child by using "I" messages can be one of the most useful ways of enriching family communication. Recall that this method uses "I" as a starting point and includes a genuine expression and report of your own feelings and your own experience at that moment. When, for instance, your child says, "I really like being with you, Daddy." Instead of responding with "That's nice," try saying something like, "When I hear you say that I feel really good. I feel the same way about being with you."

Our final reminder is to try to avoid questioning in a way that puts your youngster on the defensive. An easy pit-fall here is to slip into the habit of asking only "Why" questions such as "Why did you do that?" or "Why did you go there?" "Why" questions usually make most of us try to think of reasons or explanations and can easily put us on the defensive and make us close down our communication. The same is certainly true with our children. One way of helping your child talk more freely is to rephrase these questions in a softer, more exploring way. Instead of "why did you do that?" you might try something like "say more about what you were thinking when you did that..." Instead of "Why are you still frightened?" you can probably hear much more from your youngster by asking "What things seem most frightening to you now about the fire (flood, etc.)?"

Reminding yourself to employ these caring ways of listening can bring rich rewards to you and to your child. Careful listening is one of the most important ways to build a strong, positive relationship with your youngster following a disaster.

This kind of listening also affords your child the opportunity to listen to himself or herself in constructive and less stressful ways. Your way of listening to him or her can help him or her develop ways of listening to his or her own inner voices in more loving, self-accepting ways that will significantly reduce his or her disastershock.