Read Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You for Free Online

well your messages are getting through to them. You can judge the effectiveness of your“message transmission” by seeing whether your children’s words, emotions, or behavior are consistent with your messages. For example, if they are saying please and thank you, responding constructively to feelings of frustration, or bringing their dishes to the sink after meals, then you are getting a pretty clear message that they are receiving your messages about manners, emotional maturity, and family responsibility, respectively. If they aren’t sending you such affirming messages or are, in fact, sending contradictory ones, that is another powerful message in itself, namely, that something is blocking your messages from getting through, they are not understanding your messages as intended, something is motivating them to act counter to your messages, or they just haven’t gotten your message enough. You can use this information to figure out how to alter the message so it will get through and produce the desired change in them.
    Your children will often send you a message that it is time to change your message. Think about it this way. The point of sending a message is to get it in their heads. But when you send the same message too often, it can get crowded in their heads and that is really annoying for children. In fact, when I work with young people, I know they are getting my messages when they tell me that I’m really irritating them. It’s the same with my girls. I have to admit that I can get pretty heavy handed and preachy in my desire to get a message across to them. When I send a message one too many times, Catie will look at me with an exasperated look, give me the “talk to the hand” sign, and say “DAAAAD, I know!” So I get her message and back off or send a different message. Her message is one of irritation, but her meta-message is, “I got the message, you don’t need to keep sending it!”

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Are Your Messages Getting Through?
     
    By this point, I hope you have bought into the power of messages in your children’s lives. The question you may now be asking is: “So how do I get these messages across to my kids?” Before you can take actual steps to convey specific messages, you need to understand the various ways in which you communicate them to your children.
    A recent study compiled a list of the top ten competencies that, according to decades of research, lead children to positive outcomes, specifically, healthy relationships with their parents, health, happiness, and success. This study supports my belief that it is not only what you do for your children, but also who you are that makes a difference.
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    MESSAGE CONDUITS
     
What you say
What you feel
What you do
Who you are
What your children do
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    In the category of what you do directly to your children, the research found that, not unexpectedly, love and affection are the number-one predictors of raising healthy children. Also, not surprisingly, the study reported that parents are generally quite good at expressing love and affection. Other “parenting techniques” thatemerged were teaching children to be become independent, promoting learning and education, using behavior management strategies to reinforce good behavior, exposing children to a spiritual life, and ensuring their safety.
    Yet just as important as anything you specifically do to your children, the study highlighted the importance of messages you send through modeling who
you
are. In fact, after love and affection, the second and third most important parenting competencies are your ability to manage stress effectively and to have a positive relationship with your spouse. It seems that how you handle crises and maintain relationships send powerful messages to your children that translate into whether they develop those capabilities as well. A worrisome finding, though, was that parents rate themselves rather poorly on these two essential competencies. Other skills that