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

particular, this conversation might be easier because you won’t be offending their parenting sensibilities; their parenting is far behind them. I have found that the best approach is to start by being appreciative beyond a doubt for the grandparents’ spending time with your children (and giving you a break!). Then, discuss the values you want to instill in your children; the grandparents will probably find it difficult to argue against them. Next, provide guidelines to the grandparents on what messages you want to send to your children—for example, limiting gifts and sweets and expecting your children to be respectful and cooperative—while giving the grandparents some latitude in appreciation for all that they do for your children.
SOCIAL WORLD: “IT’S A JUNGLE OUT THERE.”
     
    Your children don’t live in a vacuum outside your home either. There is a wide world out there in which you’re not their only influence. As soon as your children walk out the front door, they are receiving messages of all sorts from their immediate social world, including from their friends, other children, other parents, caregivers, schoolmates, and teachers. This social world can be an immense message blocker because you can’t control everyone to whom your children are exposed outside the home.
    You can’t protect your children from their social world, but you can do your best to minimize for as long as possible their exposureto messages that you don’t want them to get. The best way to do this is to thoughtfully create a social world that will communicate the messages that you want them to receive. You can accomplish this by carefully choosing your children’s childcare (e.g., babysitters, daycare), preschool program, elementary school, extracurricular activities, and playdates to ensure that most (all is unrealistic) of the influences in your children’s world support your messages.
    From that social world that you have created, your children’s social world of peers will emerge. The majority of their friends will come from their daycare, school, and the neighborhood in which you live. When you make deliberate choices about the social world that your children inhabit, you increase the chances that the friends they make and their friends’ families will also convey healthy messages. You can further ensure that your children’s peer group sends the right messages by getting to know your children’s friends and their parents. You can see whether they will be supporting or undermining your messages.
    I’m not saying that you should reject your children’s friends just because they or their parents do something with which you don’t agree. At the same time, you should be open with the parents of your children’s friends about the messages you do and don’t want your children to get, and ask those parents to respect your limits. For example, when our girls have a playdate, we tell their friend’s parent or caregiver that the girls don’t eat candy regularly and ask that they not be given sweets. We’ve never had a bad reaction to our request and have never heard that our request was ignored.
POPULAR CULTURE: “NO, YOU CAN’T HAVE ANOTHER DORA THE EXPLORER DOLL.”
     
    Popular culture can be another significant obstacle in communicating healthy messages to your children. From relatively old media (e.g., television, DVDs, and magazines) to the explosion of newmedia (e.g., mobile phones, the Web), popular culture has become an ever-present, intense, and unrelenting vehicle for sending messages to children, and many of those messages are not healthy (e.g., those on junk food, and those that emphasize wealth, celebrity, and beauty).
    Popular culture does offer a variety of entertainment that conveys positive messages to young children. For example,
Dora the Explorer
communicates messages of kindness, diversity, exploration, family, cultural tradition, friendship, compassion, and physical activity. At the same time, just about all TV shows and DVDs aimed at children have strong merchandise tie-ins that send messages of consumption. Also, while Dora and her friends are out in the world exploring, the children watching
Dora
(or any other TV show) are sitting idly in front of a screen. In fact, research by the Kaiser Foundation has found that two thirds of children under two years of age use screen media (e.g., TV, DVDs, video games) for more than two hours a day, despite the recommendation of the American Academy of