Discover how your response to your child's mistakes shapes their willingness to share concerns with you. Explore the crucial role of trust and open communication in parenting. Learn why being approachable and calm encourages kids to come to you with their fears and dilemmas. Reflect on your own childhood experiences to understand the importance of listening without judgment. Ultimately, find out how to create a loving environment that promotes connection and honesty.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Responding to Mistakes
Remain calm when your kids make mistakes.
Listen carefully to their explanation before offering solutions.
insights INSIGHT
Earning Trust
Children confiding in their parents is a privilege, not an automatic right.
Parents must earn this trust and respect by creating a safe environment.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Reflecting on Parental Relationships
Reflect on what you hid from your own parents.
Consider the reasons why you chose not to confide in them.
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When your kids mess up, what’s your reaction? Do you freak out? Or are you calm? Do you make the situation better...or worse? Can you actually listen? Or are you halfway through a solution before they’ve even gotten two words of explanation out of their mouths?
The answers to these questions matter if, like a good dad, you want to be the kind of father who your kids turn to when they have a problem. You want them to come to you with their fears, with their secrets, with their dilemmas, don’t you?
Well then you better make yourself the kind of parent that has earned that honor, that has earned that respect. Because it’s a privilege and not a right. Need proof? Think about your own parents and how many things you kept from them. Even more, why you kept it from them.
Sure, some things we hide because we know it’s stuff we’re not supposed to be doing. But a lot of it is stuff we could have used their advice on, that we ached to connect over—but we knew we couldn’t. Because they would rush to judgment. Because they wouldn’t let us explain. Because it would trigger their anxiety or their temper or their moralizing reminders.
You want them to come to you with problems? You want to help them? Then show them. Teach them that it’s worth doing. Teach them that they’ll get a fair hearing. Prove to them that you make things better and not worse.
Let them see how you love them more than you hate any mistake.
The Daily Dad