Communicating With Warmth

      We have been looking at wasy to be warm (better understanding your child's limits, disabilities and can'ts) as well as ways to be firm with discipline (to help you deal with defiance, won'ts and intentional behavior).   Now we will be focusing on another aspect of improving warmth in your relationship with your child by using specific communication techniques.   As parents it is easy to find ourselves focusing more on our children's negative behavior or behavior that we feel may need to be corrected.   It is much more difficult to notice positive behavior or to look for any positive behavior in your child's actions.

      As human beings, we all feel good when someone gives u positive feedback.  A typical response to positive feedback is to feel encouraged, special, and noticed.   Children, especially, love it when people who are important to them notice positive things about them.   (And you may also notice that if children do not get noticed for positive things, they may accidentally learn that they can also earn attention with negative behavior).   Spending more time praising or encouraging your child will make them feel warmer toward you as well as more cooperative.   As you begin to look for positive behavior, it will be helpful to learn specific ways to encourage and praise that will be meaningful to your child.

      We will first examine the difference between praise and encouragement.   Of late, this has become a controversial top in the field of child development.   Most of us have a basic, yet clear understanding of what praise is.   We often find ourselves praising our children for serveral reasons: to improve the child's self concept or self esteem, to teach the child self reliance, independence and as motivation for learning.   Primarily, we often find ourselves praising children when we see behavior that we hope will continue.   Some examples of praise might be:

      Praise has often been used as a way of helping children gain a positive self concept and improve their behavior.   Children often use positive comments from significant adults as a way of providing important guideposts for their behavior.  By definition, praise means: 1)to express a favorable judgement of, 2)to glorify, especially by attribution of perfection and 3)an expression of approval.

      There has been some concern in recent years that if children are only praised they become pleasers and may develop self concepts that are totally dependent on the opinions of others.   For example, if we tell Johnny we love the blue shirt he is wearing today, he may wonder what we thought about the black shirt he wore yesterday when we said nothing.   If we tell Julie that her reading today was excellent, she may worry that she may not be able to uphold that image when her next turn to read comes along.   If earning such positive praise is so important to the child, he or she may tend not to take chances or try difficult tasks in order to avoid a negative evaluation.