10 tips for having difficult conversations with your kids

We are continuing the help you as a parent here on KiddyCharts, with some extremely useful 15-min techniques from Joanna Fortune thanks to her excellent books covering parenting tips that you can do in bite-sized chunks. Simple little tips that make big differences. She has a book for ages 0-7, and these tips are taken from the one covering the 8-12 age range. Today. we are looking at how to have difficult conversations with your kids.

This post includes Amazon affiliate links.

This list are sharing gives you ten really key pointers for having those difficult conversations within your kids, it could be anything:

• Talking to the about something that you know they won’t like, e.g. reducing their screen time,
• Chatting to them about an awkward topic for you, for example relationships, sex, condoms, periods, or anything else that you personally might find a bit weird OR that they might. My kids would visibly cringe when I started talking about these kinds of topics. Quick tip here – get this book on puberty from Dr Christian to help. It is perfect, and covers everything they need to know. Most importantly for us, it covers gender and homosexuality as well, and
• Just talking to them AT ALL when they approach the teens as you can feel a little bit like you are encroaching on their personal space. It is hard for kids as they change from kids to adults. There is a lot going on, they want to be independent, but still need you. Even though they would like to think that they didn’t. For older kids, why won’t my teenager listen to me, is a good book to help even more.

Here are the tips from the book on how to have those difficult conversations with your kids:

1. Use your active listening skills and watch out for those door slammers.
2. Talk often with your child to bring out positive opinions, ideas and behaviours by using an affirmative tone and body language.
3. Treat your child with the same respect you would have them treat you.
4. Remember that your tone of voice is extremely important. Yelling can shut down the listener.
5. Plan ahead. Think through your main talking points and key messages you wish to convey in the conversation.
6. Be precise and detailed about what you expect and have agreed from the discussion.
7. Discuss some things together on a one-to-one basis and some things with the whole family.
8. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ doesn’t work. Modelling is the best way of learning. You are your child’s model and they will emulate your behaviours.
9. Never shut your child out to show that you disapprove of their behaviour, statements or beliefs.
10. Be clear that difficult conversations are not a one-way system in your family and that your child can raise a difficult topic with you too. In fact, you should encourage this.

We know it isn’t easy to do all, or indeed any of these things. It IS worth it though; give it a bash though, and if you can’t manage them, don’t beat yourself up though.

As always with everything parenting, we do the best we can, and that’s good enough. We don’t have to be perfect. Good enough is totally fine.

Click on the circular image below to download the checklist!

If you are looking for other resources to help with parenting, then do check out some of the parenting tips that we have on the site. We do have a lot of other checklists that are worth checking out too.

If you are after articles generally on talking to your kids. Do nip over to these fellow kid sites. There is a lot of great information out there, and it isn’t all just from us 😉

Phew – we hope all that chatter didn’t make you too tired!

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