Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

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META-MESSAGES
     
    When you communicate a message to your children, you’re actually conveying two messages. The first message is overt and clear to your children, for example, be nice to your sister or clean your room (messages of kindness and responsibility, respectively). The second more subtle meta-message underlies the obvious message and communicates more elemental lessons about the world. For instance, when you get into a battle of wills with your children over bringing their dishes to the sink after dinner, the message may be “You have responsibilities that you must fulfill.” The meta-message may be “Ultimately, I am the boss, and you must do what I saysometimes even when you don’t want to do it.” Or, when you require that your children donate some of their allowance to a charity of their choice, the message is “We value compassion and helping others less fortunate than us.” The meta-message is “We should be grateful for what we have.”
    Behind almost every message is a meta-message. As you think about and formulate messages for your children, you should also be aware of the meta-messages that lurk just below the surface of your messages. You want to ensure that your meta-messages are both healthy and supportive of the overt messages you send to your children.
YOUR CHILDREN SEND MESSAGES, TOO
     
    Though my focus in
Your Children Are Listening
is on how you can send healthy messages to your children, the message highway is not one way. Your children are constantly sending you messages that you may or may not be getting or interpreting correctly. Your ability to receive and understand those messages can help you send your children the best messages in the best way (and to know when to stop sending or to change your messages).
    Children are incredibly good at sending their parents messages about how they are doing at any given moment in time. If your children are anything like our girls, they are very good at sending the message that they are cranky, but parents often miss the meta-message. For example, when Catie or Gracie throw a tantrum, it’s easy to conclude from that very loud message that they are being babies or brats. But the meta-message is, more often than not, that they are feeling scared, unsupported, hungry, or tired. Clearly, how Sarah and I interpret this very emotional message determines, for instance, whether we respond with our own frustrations and harsh tones or with empathy and kindness.
    Your children will also tell you how well your messages are getting through to them. You can judge the effectiveness of your“message transmission” by seeing whether your children’s words, emotions, or behavior are consistent with your messages. For example, if they are saying please and thank you, responding constructively to feelings of frustration, or bringing their dishes to the sink after meals, then you are getting a pretty clear message that they are receiving your messages about manners, emotional maturity, and family responsibility, respectively. If they aren’t sending you such affirming messages or are, in fact, sending contradictory ones, that is another powerful message in itself, namely, that something is blocking your messages from getting through, they are not understanding your messages as intended, something is motivating them to act counter to your messages, or they just haven’t gotten your message enough. You can use this information to figure out how to alter the message so it will get through and produce the desired change in them.
    Your children will often send you a message that it is time to change your message. Think about it this way. The point of sending a message is to get it in their heads. But when you send the same message too often, it can get crowded in their heads and that is really annoying for children. In fact, when I work with young people, I know they are getting my messages when they tell me that I’m really irritating them. It’s the same with my girls. I have to admit that I can get pretty heavy handed and preachy in my desire to get a message across to them. When I send a message one too many times, Catie will look at me with an exasperated look, give me the “talk to the hand” sign, and say “DAAAAD, I know!” So I get her message and back off or send a different message. Her message is one of irritation, but her meta-message is, “I got the message, you don’t need to keep sending it!”

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Are Your Messages Getting