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

children may get fed up with all of your messaging and resist the messages out of sheer irritation with you.
    In contrast, “stealth” messages are those which leave your children completely unaware that what they are doing is connected with a message, for example, participating in activities or playing games. Let them think they are having fun or just helping you out. You know that your message is sneaking past them into their little minds.
LET YOUR CHILDREN HELP SHAPE YOUR MESSAGES
     
    Children have an amazing ability to send their parents signals about the messages they might need at any given time or the best way to send a message so that they will be receptive. It’s up to you to “have your radio tuned to their frequency” so you pick up on those signals. Your children will have experiences, challenges, and reactions every day that should alert you to great opportunities to communicate messages to your children.
    Let your children guide you in how best to send your messages. Listen and watch for opportunities that can be turned into catch-phrases, routines and rituals, and activities that convey the messages you want. Kids are also creative and playful, and as a result, can turna serious message into serious fun, which increases their attention to the message and their desire to act on that message.
FOUR KEYS TO MESSAGE SUCCESS
     
    Your greatest challenge in sending healthy messages to your children involves getting those messages to really sink in. Patience, repetition, persistence, and perseverance are the most powerful tools you have for meeting that challenge. Effective message retention, defined as your children receiving, assimilating, and expressing the desired messages, depends on communicating messages over and over and over again. I have found that the best way to tell that our messages are getting through to Catie and Gracie is when the messages begin to irritate them. Their irritation indicates that they are paying attention and we are getting into their heads. Of course, when they send this signal to us, we try to respond by easing up on that message or perhaps switching to another message so they don’t get totally annoyed with us.
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    FOUR KEYS TO MESSAGE SUCCESS
     
Patience
Repetition
Persistence
Perseverance
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    Patience acts as the foundation for the other three keys to successful messaging. When you make a commitment to deliberate messaging, your first acknowledgment is that, as a parent, you are in it for the long haul. Also, the more experience you gain as a parent, the more you realize that few things related to your children happen overnight (or over a few nights). Just about everything about children takes time, lots of time.
    Unfortunately, we live in a culture where we are told that nothing in life should take time or be difficult; “instant” and “effortless” are central to its zeitgeist (celebutantes, microwaves, and Web searches come to mind). Yet, when you buy into this attitude as a parent, youpretty much guarantee a parenting experience replete with frustration, anger, despair, and failure, because this attitude simply can’t coexist with the child-rearing universe.
    So it all starts with patience, knowing that most of your efforts will not be rewarded for a long time, perhaps months, perhaps years, but it is also grounded in the belief that your commitment and hard work will bear fruit sooner or later. When you begin with this Zen-like patience, you accept obstacles, setbacks, failures, and resistance as part of the long journey of raising your children. Although, because you are human, you will certainly feel some of those less-pleasant emotions associated with raising children, your overall attitude will be one of equanimity in the face of the many challenges that are parents’ constant companions. The result is greater resolve, more level-headedness and empathy, less frustration, and most important, a very clear meta-message to your children that “
I am never giving up
!”
    Repetition addresses the simple fact that children won’t get most messages the first or second or tenth or hundredth time we send them. I read a study not long ago that found that it takes 2,000 repetitions to gain a sports skill. I don’t know whether this finding would apply to children absorbing messages from their parents, but, given the number of times we have asked Catie and Gracie to set the table or bring their dishes to the sink or take their shoes off when they enter