By W. Lee Fjelstad
Vice President of the Verbal Judo Institute
Take an interest in what children have as interests, and try to understand their perspective, and you will get a better grip on how their thinking will shape their needs. This information will be instrumental in shaping social skills, communication skills and the ability to deal with inevitable conflict in a non-combative manner as they face people with interests not of their own.
As a kid, I had plenty of confidence and communication skills when I spoke to adults and they took the time to listen, especially when it was a conversation revolving around farming. Whenever the topic fell off the barnyard fence, so to speak, they lost interest and would turn the conversation away from me and toward another adult farmer in the group. I would now be dismissed by a lack of eye contact and eventually no one even noticed me leave the room. I began to feel detached as my interests waned from agriculture toward the world at large. My confidence in my ability to bring up other subjects waned, and my communication skills suffered.
I discovered later in life, that they weren’t trying to be disrespectful but simply did not know anything about the subject areas I was attempting to discuss. My mother was an educator with an off the chart IQ, obsessed with my development, and because of that I could speak full sentences at two and read at four. She encouraged me to become a voracious reader and to question everything with the possible exception of my father, which might be why I went head-to-head at him with such alarming frequency.
Stubbornness runs pretty deep in the family history, so it came as no surprise to her that most of the questions I had were unanswerable in the microcosm of the locations and time of my childhood. There was no internet, and television was limited to three stations with the third having reception only with one end of a “rabbit ear” antenna ensconced in aluminum foil and your hand holding the other “ear” while leaning toward the window. So I read an old set of World Book Encyclopedias to pass the evenings. It also gave my father peace from my frequent questions. I truly went inside myself for comfort and solace.
Dad just didn’t have the education or the interest in things he did not understand unless he could see an immediate relation to how it was going to help us get in the crops. His priority was not my communication skills, but how we could eat daily and pay the bills. But as a child the importance of those needs was easily lost on me. My father was forced to leave school half-way through the fourth grade, during the Great Depression, to help his father on the farm. I’m certain his struggle with reading and writing severely limited his ability to have a discourse on a variety of subjects.
Afraid of looking ignorant (and quite the opposite was true) he simply replied with two of his favorite phrases, “What’s that going to do for you?” and, “What do you need to know that for?” The two questions always preceded the coup de grace of, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.” Dad wasn’t a big hit on the nurturing front -- a good man, but what he did not understand he ridiculed, and so I rebelled.
As a result I cannot ever remember going to my father, even though I loved and respected him as a good parent, with a single problem in my life. I faced them alone. I would not wish that on anyone.
Children can feel that if they cannot trust you with their dreams they cannot trust you with their secrets either. This thought process is devastating and leads to a severe isolation from the people children should need the most growing up—their family.
The way children socialize is to have things in common. They form initial bonds immediately and are crushed when the bonds are broken. They usually never see it coming. If we are to be of assistance with their communication skills, we need a commonality of knowledge, and with it we can, on occasion, alter the course of how they problem solve; how they communicate in both good times and bad; and how they will see the world around them to discover doors rather than see only walls.
The way kids communicate with us adults will be based upon how much they trust us with their problems. Trust is only warranted if we have a bond of effective communication already in place and you must reach out for trust.
Respect may be offered by the position and inalienable right as a parent, but respect as an individual worthy of trusting with secrets must be earned.
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W. Lee Fjelstad is a Vice President of the Verbal Judo Institute (www.verbaljudo.com) and a regular contributor to the website, www.ManageBullying.com. Contact Fjelstad directly at wleefjelstad@earthlink.net.
