Communicating feelings helps build healthy parent-child relationships
The book you wish your parents had read by Philippa Perry is a parenting book written by a psychotherapist. Perry approaches the topic with an emphasis on the importance of developing relationships with your children.
The main take-home message is that you need to take time to listen to your children’s feelings and communicate with them about your feelings. Investing time and demonstrating trust through sharing of emotions helps to build strong relationships. This will help your children to make healthy relationships with others in the future.
Key points:
- How you feel as a parent is likely a reflection of how your parents were with you when you were your child’s age
- If, as a parent, you are finding it difficult to deal with a kind of situation, it may simply because of how it was in your home
- Communicate with your child about their feelings and acknowledge them
- Try to do this even if their feeling don’t make sense
- Verbaline feelings e.g. “I can see you’re feeling really angry and upset because xyz…”
- Talk about your own feelings in the first person during difficult conversations
- E.g. “I feel scared when you don’t tell me where you’ve been after school.”
- Similarly, use the first person when setting boundaries; justify your rules based on how it makes you feel
- The overall aim is to encourage your children to acknowledge that having (and talking about) feelings is normal
- Hopefully this will cultivate good mental health long-term
- Acknowledge that it is your own feelings that determines whether you perceive a child’s behaviour to be ‘good’ or not
- Instead think of it as ‘convenient’ or ‘inconvenient’
There were many sections of this book that I disagreed with or found difficult to read. That probably means it was exactly the kind of thing I should be reading as it pushed me out of my comfort zone.
More books like this:
- Mindset by Carol Dweck
- The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
Useful links:
