Help Communication Challenged Kids Learn to Interpret Emotions

Teaching children how to communicate effectively is one of the greatest gifts you can give them. Few skills increase their confidence, social competence and self-esteem more because kids use these skills in every area of their lives. We also know that many kids have difficulty reading emotions. Duke and UCLA are just two of the many universities researching ways to help children diagnosed with communication handicaps. The good news is that you can improve your child’s communication skills and boost his or her emotional intelligence. Here are eight ways to do so:

1. Listen more attentively. Attentive listening keeps the lines of communication open so that your children always feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, feelings and experiences with you. You discourage your kids from expression themselves when you cut them off, deny their feelings, lecture, order them, roll your eyes, shrug your shoulders, raise your eyebrows, frown, turn away, or shake your head. (Woah, eh? Not to send you a guilt trip, but… do tune into your communication skills a bit closer, and beware of how influential you are).

2. Help your children send and receive nonverbal messages. Sending and receiving nonverbal messages through body language enhances your child’s social and emotional competence. Often kids don’t listen to your words as much as they watch your posture, gestures, and facial expression, and hear the tone of your voice. Help children understand that their body posture, facial expression, and voice tone send messages and that if they don’t interpret or send nonverbal messages correctly, serious misunderstandings occur.

3. Teach two critical skills – eye contact and smiling. Using the skills of eye contact and smiling increases children’s social success. As you talk with your child, use eye contact. Whenever your child displays a great smile, point it out! By reinforcing these skills and modeling them regularly, your child will soon be smiling more and using eye contact. Hint: These two skills are the most commonly used traits of well-liked kids. They are also easy to teach!.

4. Make an emotion scrapbook. Collect pictures of facial expression in a scrapbook. Include the six basic emotions: happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid, and disgusted. Now make a game of naming the emotions by asking, “How is this person feeling?” Help your child predict the body language and voice tone that would accompany each expression.

5. Guess people’s emotions. With your child, watch other people’s faces and body language at the playgound, park, or shopping mall. Try together to guess their emotional states.

6. Watch silent movies. Turn off the sound on your TV and watch a show together. Guess how the actors feel based on what you see. Tension behaviors include blinking eyes rapidly, biting nails, twirling hair, clenching jaws, and grinding teeth. Withdrawal behavior include folded arms, crossed legs, rolling eyes, and not facing the speaker. Expressions of interest include nodding, smiling, leaning into the speaker and standing or sitting close to the person.

7. Play emotion charades. A fun game is to have family members play charades using only their face and body. Try to guess the person’s emotion.

8. Observe good listening behaviors. Be on the alert for people demonstrating good listening habits; point them out to your child. The better your child understands what good nonverbal listening behaviors look like, the greater the chance he will use them on his own.

Learning these skills takes practice. At home, provide opportunities for your child to practice a wide range of communication skills, enabling her to get her point across more confidently in the real world.

Just remember: it’s never too early–or too late–to enhance communication skills.

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Dr Borba’s book The Big Book of Parenting Solutions: 101 Answers to Your Everyday Challenges and Wildest Worries, is one of the most comprehensive parenting book for kids 3 to 13. This down-to-earth guide offers advice for dealing with children’s difficult behavior and hot button issues including biting, tantrums, cheating, bad friends, inappropriate clothing, sex, drugs, peer pressure and much more. Each of the 101 challenging parenting issues includes specific step-by-step solutions and practical advice that is age appropriate based on the latest research. The Big Book of Parenting Solutions is available at amazon.com.

How to Set Limits for Your Teched-out Tween

By the time they hit middle school, most kids either have cell phones and Facebook accounts – or are begging to get them (“Everyone else has an iPhone!”) – leaving parents to figure out how much digital time is too much. Setting boundaries early can help keep things in balance, at least for a while.

Once kids hit their teens, social media takes a huge bite out of their free time. The average 12- to 17-year-old blasts out 60 texts every day, according to a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center, and nearly one-fourth of teens plug into a social media site at least 10 times per day, according to a 2011 report in the journal Pediatrics.

Here, experts explain how to set limits on your teched-out tweens … while you still can.

Talk before you make rules. Kids are more rational than we give them credit for. “If you ask kids whether they want to spend five hours a day in front of a screen, most say it’s unreasonable,” says Dr. Dina Borzekowski, professor of health, behavior and society at Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health. Then set rules that they agree to keep.

Choose a hard number. It may be difficult to always enforce, but come up with a set time formula for kids to stick to, suggests Dr. Larry Rosen, psychology professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and author of Me, MySpace and I: Parenting the Net Generation. Start with a 1-5 ratio: For every minute of gadget time, younger kids should spend five minutes of free time doing something else. As tweens become teens, adds Rosen, expect that balance to shift, perhaps tipping to 5-1 the other way.

Pick the right plan. Pick a phone package that gives your tween enough usage time but not too much. “Otherwise, you’re going to get a $500 phone bill for text messages,” says Rosen. Tell her how much time she has to use monthly, and explain that she will have to pay for overtime using her own money.

Create a no-phone zone. If the phone’s within reach, it’s hard to ignore — for kids and parents. Choose times and places at which phones aren’t allowed: the dinner table, the family room when everyone is together, and the kids’ bedrooms at night. That includes your phone, says Borzekowski: “If parents constantly check text messages during supper, what’s going to prevent a tween from doing the same?”

Establish penalties. Consequences are what make rules stick. If your tween breaks one of the rules (e.g., bringing his phone to bed), start with a short-term punishment, such as banning video games for the rest of the day, suggests Rosen. If they continue to disobey, double the punishment to two, and then four, days. “Pretty soon, they get it,” says Rosen. “I’ve rarely seen kids get past four days.”

The limits you set for your middle-schoolers may not last, but they will help keep tech time in check for a while … and set an example for spending more face time and less screen time in the future.

Is Thirteen Too Old for a Pediatrician?

A board-certified, properly trained pediatrician offers the best medical care for all teens. Unlike other primary care providers, a pediatrician spends three to four years or more of intense study and preparation to take care of all kids — including adolescents. None of the other primary care doctors has this level of education and training in dealing with the unique problems of teenagers. The massive physical and emotional changes brought on by puberty aren’t seen in any other age group. Teens, despite their protestations, are not young adults — and there’s no benefit to switching from a pediatrician to an adult’s physician until they are!

Is Your Tween (Illegally) on Facebook?

You have to be at least 13 years old to legally use Facebook, and there’s a reason for that: According to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), websites that collect information from a general-audience population must receive guardian permission to gather data from children 12 years old and younger. Often, sites like Facebook choose to make the legal age of usage 13 and up to bypass the litigious headaches that parental consent incurs.

But, as I’m sure you know, rules are made to be broken. Even if you help your child set strong privacy settings on Facebook, the service frequently changes its privacy policies. This makes it difficult to continuously adjust the settings to create a “bubble shield” around your tween.

And of course, many unsuspecting parents out there have tweens who are sailing on Facebook, playing games and socializing. Many parents aren’t aware of relationships their children are building on the social network.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project found that 46 percent of 12-year-olds surveyed in the United States use social networks. That sounds like a high percentage, but the number makes sense when you consider that today’s children meet and connect emotionally through their digital devices.

You can imagine how difficult it is to find those tweens who are feverishly posting pictures, taking quizzes and making friends through the service. However, the website says it does take measures to find those young ones and remove them from the system. Recently, Mozelle Thompson, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, told the Australian Federal Parliament’s cyber-safety committee that the social networking giant deletes 20,000 accounts each day for age violations. Although an impressive number, he went on to say that the tools employed to find underage users are not foolproof.

What You Can Do

Just because Facebook is intended for 13-year-olds and older kids, it doesn’t mean that you as a parent should wait to introduce their kids to the concept of digital citizenship. Instead, you should carefully choose online environments that are specifically created with tweens in mind.

Currently, there are plenty of fun social networks for children on the Web. The level of control, permission and oversight needed to play in these realms makes them more secure than other spaces. More importantly, getting your children set up on age-appropriate sites is a great way to start talking about the boons and burdens of social media.

Remember: Don’t close doors — just guide your children through the ones that lead to safer and healthier relationships online. Statistics show that kids want to use social media. It only makes sense that they learn how through you.

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Pediatric Safety Editor Addendum

Additional References for Concerned Parents:

• Article discussing the number of kids under 13 that use Facebook, often with parental consent: “Facebook Users Who Are Under Age Raise Concerns “- NY Times, March 11, 2011
• “Facebook’s Commitment to Child Safety Online” presents Facebooks views on the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act – Facebook, May 26, 2011
• Computer monitoring software applications
  • “AVG Family Safety Restricts and Reports on Kids’ Web Activities“

Sex, Alcohol and Your Tweens

With texting, video chat and hormones raging are we moms nervous, you bet! We have some great mom generated tips to help you and your kids navigate middle school.

1. Get informed. There are a lot of rumors flying around about sexting, rainbow parties, drug use and more. Some of these are in fact true and supported by feedback from local police agencies. But we need not panic. Become a parent a parent who knows the facts by joining the PTO at your school, attending MASK meetings and reading relevant books and articles on the teen years.

2. Learn to talk effectively with your tweens. Annie Fox at anniefox.com and Dr. Oguntala at TheTeenDoc.com offer timely and meaningful tips on communicating with your tweens. Consider reading The Parent as Coach by Diana Sterling, Are you Wearing That by Deborah Tannen and Get Out of My Life but First Will You Take Me and Cheryl To The Mall Anthony E. Wolf Ph.D. Learn to appreciate the ebbs and flows in your relationship, they will come close then be distanced. This is part of the tween-parent relationship.

3. Participate in school offerings such as the parent education seminars provided during the year. Learn what activities your school has to offer so that your kids are busy developing skills through activities at school such as sports, photography, art, music and dance. Research shows that kids who are involved in activities have less down time, less screen time and develop friendships with more productive schoolmates.

4. Take your tween seriously. Your tween is closer now to being an adult than a child. Your role is moving more toward mentor and coach. Respect your tween’s personal privacy. I don’t mean fail to check their room if you suspect drug use. But I do mean stop talking about them, sharing their experiences with your friends and talking about them like they are a youngster. Having them overhear you on the phone talking about their stuff is the fastest way to make them feel outed. They’ll clam up like no tomorrow.

5. Teach your child problem solving and decision making skills by listening carefully to their concerns and generating solutions with them. Allow them some personal space where you do not constantly question. Allow them to come to you to start a dialogue. If you must, use open ended questions and refrain from offering your immediate opinions.

6. Make time for your tweens. Just cause they are into their friends doesn’t mean they are not into you. Find out what interests them and learn how to participate. If it’s a sport, art or music, get with the current trends so that you can express interest and share their enthusiasm. Finding common ground is the key.

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