Last week I bought the book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. The content of the book reminded me of one of the major points that my husband and I took away from our Discovery Weekend experience, before we got married.

Discovery Weekend, a marriage preparation seminar, taught us all those years ago about the value of listening to and empathizing with your partner's feelings, and how crucial it is, too, to express your own feelings to your partner in a clear way. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen builds on the same philosophy, but applied to child-rearing.

The book doesn't simply preach the value of empathizing with children, it gives practical tips on how to go about it. Throughout the book are comic strips demonstrating how a conversation with your child can go sour if you replace empathy with lecturing, ignoring, or criticizing. It shows how simple strategies, like writing notes to your child, offering them a choice, or giving them a chance to make amends, can be far more productive and empathetic alternatives to punishment, when you are trying to engage their cooperation. The book itself is written as a workbook, with activities that invite readers to put themselves in their children's shoes.

Social norms encourage us to be empathetic with adults, but sadly, the same social pressure doesn't exist for the way we talk to children. It becomes easier to dismiss children's feelings because of our positions of authority. The book offers powerful tools for becoming a more caring, empathetic adult when dealing with any child, not just one's own. Just a few days after reading it, I've already become a lot more conscious of the way that I talk to my son, especially when he's upset or when he doesn't want to cooperate with me.

I bought the book from Amazon, and I'm not sure if it's available here in the Philippines, but if you do chance upon copies in our bookstores, I urge you to get one, whether your child is two or twenty.

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