It’s a heavy responsibility to raise a young person who comes to your home after losing their parents or experiencing abuse and neglect. You want them to find healing and learn life skills to carry them into adulthood. You want to teach them skills to set them up for meaningful and successful relationships. One of the most essential parts of preparing a tween or teen for adulthood is building healthy communication skills between you.
We All Need to be Seen and Valued
At the core of every human being is the desire to be seen and valued as a precious being. If the tweens or teens in your home have experienced loss, neglect, or abuse, they may not understand how special they are. You face the task of communicating to them that you are present with them in this season and that you accept and love them deeply for who they are. They can learn how to navigate future experiences with confidence and competence when they grasp how precious they are.
Strategies to Communicate Love and Respect
These communication strategies can help you lay a healthy new foundation of unconditional love, mutual trust, and respect for each other. When you employ these strategies, you can help meet their need to be seen, heard, and deeply understood. You will also model how they can learn to give back that same kind of love and respect to you and the others in your family. Eventually, they will use these skills to form other healthy relationships with respectful and loving communication when others come into their lives.
1. Be Balanced.
Practice telling your grandchildren you love them so much that you will be a role model for your family’s values and expectations. Pair that message with the assurance that you are present and available when they struggle or make mistakes. Accept their mistakes as part of the growing-up experience.
Balance your love and presence with grace and space when they make poor choices. They need you to be both a safe place to learn and available when they need help fixing their mistakes.
2. Be a good listener.
Listen to the tweens and teens in your home – no matter what they try to say. Practice listening first before you respond. Be careful to avoid big emotional overreactions. If you jump in too soon when they talk, you risk they will not feel heard or that their voice matters. They might also be tempted to let you fix the dilemma for them.
Instead, ask a couple of questions when they are done sharing. Try to ask questions that will lead them to find their own solutions. Encourage them to seek creative solutions by brainstorming with them – and offer no judgment or criticism of their ideas. Then challenge them to think about their choices and the potential consequences. Look for ways to ask “conversation openers” rather than shutting down dialogue.
3. Be a co-regulator.
Try teaching the tweens and teens in your home how to authentically express their feelings. You might also need to teach them how to read the emotional cues around them. When a child experiences trauma or exposure to drugs and alcohol prenatally, these skills do not typically develop as their peers have.
While they are learning these skills, you must be willing to “borrow and lend” your emotions. They need to see you managing the hard stuff of life. Talk about how you feel about the disappointments you experience. Name your feelings and discuss how you will manage your emotions. You give them permission to name their feelings and use you as a safe space to process them.
For example, if you teach them how to manage the painful emotions around leaving home and missing their dog, name your feelings about the situation. Tell them what you will do about it:
“I am sad that you had to leave home and that you miss your mom. I bet you are missing the dog, too. I am also frustrated that mom didn’t let you come home for a visit to check on the dog. I am going to write a note to your mom and get my sadness and frustration out on paper. I don’t think I’ll send the letter, but it will help me to put my thoughts on paper, so they aren’t stuck inside all day.”
4. Be willing to negotiate.
Encourage conversations with your grandchildren to help them express their thoughts and needs without judgment. You can guide them toward thoughtful decision-making by the questions you ask and by sharing what you hear them saying. Mirroring their thoughts and feelings to them helps them see more clearly what they are trying to express. Sometimes, you must start with simple, low-risk situations to make the process more understandable.
Let them learn from you how negotiation in a relationship works. Model it in interactions with others and by walking through it with them step—by—step. It might feel awkward and too obvious to talk it out this way, but when tweens and teens are learning, the obvious is helpful.
Most healthy relationships need the give-and-take of negotiation to succeed. You are giving them valuable life skills of self-advocacy and self-protection at the same time.
For more help learning how to communicate with your tweens and teens, check out the Center for Parent & Teen Communication.