When parents are reunited with their kids at the end of a long day, they naturally want to know how their time at school was, but most kids aren’t giving any info up. Instead, when parents ask about their child’s day, they get one-word responses and grunts, revealing little to nothing. Frustrated with these kinds of answers, one parent turned to Reddit’s parenting subreddit for advice.
“My 10-year-old doesn’t say anything about what he did at school,” the parent writes. “I don’t even know if he has friends! He used to speak a little, now he doesn’t at all, says he ‘forgot’ and did ‘nothing.’” Fortunately, lots of other moms and dads jumped in to share what’s worked for them to get their own kids to open up.
- “Don't jump on him as soon as he leaves school and give him some time to decompress first, maybe try asking over dinner.”
- “Try asking unusual questions to get dialogue flowing. For example, ‘Did anyone get in trouble in school today?’ ‘Did anything make you laugh today?’ ‘Who did you sit next to at lunch time?’ ‘Did the teacher tell any jokes today?’ ‘What’s the gossip on the playground?’”
- “As my kids have gotten older they have shared less on a day-to-day basis. They talk at random times but almost never right after school. It will be at dinner, or right before bed, or while we are driving to or from an after-school activity. I think this is a normal part of development.”
- “Do not start barraging him with questions the second he gets in the car after school. When you have a long day at work and walk in the door, would you want to be asked to rehash that entire day the second you walked through the door? Assume this processing and sharing can happen at any point in the day, and is probably likely to happen after some decompression time.”
- “Kids do what they see modeled, so if you’re not sharing about your own day, why should he?”
- “I would start a family practice at the dinner table or some other time called Rose/Bud/Thorn. Each person shares one good thing about their day, one thing they’re looking forward to or want to learn more about, and one thing that was challenging. It’s important that everyone in the family participates in this. For a 10-year-old boy, it’s also important to see the men in the house participating. When it’s only women talking about feelings, boys can internalize the incorrect idea that men just don’t do that.”
- “I have a very close relationship with my son but the only way I found out stuff is by asking his friends that are girls. So if I'm picking up like 5 kids at school to bring them over to play games or something I directly ask the girls in the car and they give me all the details!”
Source: SheKnows
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