Understanding children and explaining oneself to them can often be a challenging issue for parents. Sometimes parents wish there is someone to be able to explain what the children want or say, or vice versa. A wish comes out of them that they should immediately understand what they try to say, immediately hear what they say and do it right away. In fact, adults and children both want to be understood in such a situation.
Although the development of verbal capacity brings children somewhat closer to the speech world of the adult, quite often, there may be problems in communication with preschoolers as well. Because the emotions and events experienced by the child, independently of the vocabulary, can affect the child’s both narrative and listening state. In this case, adults may need to stay calm and look at their methods of communicating repeatedly, and discover where the waterways are blocked.
What can you do to strengthen communication?
- Before asking anything, ask your children to direct their attention towards you. It is difficult for them to focus on the sentences coming to their ears, especially when immersed in a game.
- Try to brief them about the situation you want to describe in pretty short and clear sentences. Long sentences are complicated in terms of memorability.
- While talking to your child, be sure to speak below your breath. Unlike talking to an adult, speaking calmly is important for the sake of clarity and comprehensibility.
- Be sure to give your children some time before repeating any sentence and wait for the feedback that may come from them.
- Be sure to ask questions to make sure they understand the situation you are talking about. In cases of misunderstanding, repeat the topic more clearly.
- In some cases, try to explain what you want to say in different words in different ways, especially the topics that have been discussed before but not been understood.
- If you are going to assign a task to your children, explain it in detail. If the explanation is too short, this may make it difficult for them to understand the task.
- If you are going to give your children multitasking, be sure to put these tasks in order and number them together. In this way, you will prevent the children from confusing and skipping tasks.
- Be clear on what you say. You know your children best, for this reason, be careful to choose the words that they can understand.
- Do not stop using visual cues to reinforce your narrative. In this way, you will have used both verbal and visual memory.