SAMPLE EXCERPT Tips and Tools for Getting Thru to Kids 25 Great Ways to Communicate with Children and Teenagers By Phillip Mountrose Table of Contents   Excerpt from Book   What People are Saying   Ordering

Introduction

If your plan is for a year, plant rice.
If your plan is for a decade, plant trees.
If your plan is for a lifetime, educate children.

                                        - CONFUCIUS

HELPING YOURSELF SO YOU CAN HELP CHILDREN

        Let’s consider how communication is traditionally approached. Most child-care books divide their audience: On the one hand there is the adult readership, and on the other hand there are the children whom the adults will help by reading the material. However unknowingly, this approach can create separation between children and grown-ups. Often the child-care author’s message is: I will offer material for you, so you can better manage and relate to kids.
        It seems that something is missing in this orientation. What’s absent in the picture is the adult’s responsibility for himself or herself. In other words, when giving kids directions and criticisms, we too often forget to see how well we do in those same areas. To offer a few examples: If we want kids to have better boundaries, how healthy are our own boundaries? If we want kids to redress their own errors, how do we handle our own mistakes? In child-care books, this crucial missing piece of self-reflection is often embodied in the division between an author writing to “you” (the adult reader) about “them” (the children in your life).
        To be sure, there are distinctions between adult and child. Adults have accumulated more experience. They have more knowledge in certain areas. They have gone through more stages of life than children have. These differences, though, can easily be emphasized at the expense of what adults share in common with children.

What we have in common bonds us together, helping us to understand that our own self-development relates directly
to helping children develop.

FULFILLING OUR POTENTIAL

        We sometimes fear that looking inward will open a Pandora’s Box of untold miseries. Actually, looking within does not aggravate problems, but simply helps us process and integrate incomplete parts of ourselves in order to live a better, fuller life. Our inward search helps us discover the unwanted baggage of our life, such as negative emotions, limiting beliefs, and harsh judgments of others and ourselves. By probing what’s underneath, we can then choose to give up our own limitations, popping the bubble of our self-imposed prison. Understanding ourselves better, we are then freer to fulfill our own potential, which includes loving ourselves and our children.
        Inside ourselves also lie our own strengths, areas where we excel with ourselves and with others. These parts deserve to be acknowledged, reinforced, and developed too. Looking within, we discover a wonderful, loving person who has much to offer. The more in touch we become with ourselves, the more in touch we can be with others. Then helping children is not such an overwhelming task, a role that we may agonize over or glibly describe by saying, “Everything is fine.” As we connect more with ourselves and our kids, problems become opportunities for learning and growth. Life becomes filled with more fun and joy. We are freer to grow together, in our own way, at our own rate.
        Ultimately the secret becomes revealed: It is not what we do for kids, it is what we do with ourselves, and the rest naturally follows. To this end, refer to the quote at the start of this Introduction. Confucius, the ancient Chinese sage, points out that educating children brings success for a lifetime. Implicit in this vision is the value of children receiving an education. Those dealing with children, such as caregivers and educators are the instructors, who must have knowledge about themselves as well as the world in which kids will be raised.

As we learn to trust ourselves more, we can better teach, demonstrate, and live that trust with children. As we develop healthy boundaries in our own lives, we know how to set appropriate limits with children. As we grow, the kids in our lives are free to fulfill their potential, supported by our own self-knowledge to appropriately guide them.
        A woman once brought her ailing son to Mahatma Gandhi for help. After examining him and asking questions about his diet, Gandhi requested that the woman bring him back in a week. When she returned, Gandhi told her that the son should restrict sugar from his diet. The woman responded, “Why didn’t you tell us that on the first visit?” Gandhi responded, “At that time, Madam, I was still eating sugar myself.”
        Dealing with our own issues can make us effective communicators and healers. Self-knowledge also brings self-fulfillment.

TOOLS FOR BREAKTHROUGH COMMUNICATION

        As the title of this volume indicates, there are many practical and powerful tools offered in this book. To be exact, there are   25 interactive tools. These approaches come in the form of exercises, checklists, journaling, fill-in-the-blank sentences, and affirmations.
        In order to more easily reference the 25 tools in this book, here is an overview of the complete list. The tools are grouped according to the part of the book in which they appear.

PART 1: HELPING YOURSELF, HELPING KIDS

Tool 1: Affirmations for Growth
Brief sayings that can spur growth and help fulfill your children’s potential—and your own.

Tool 2: Developing an Attitude of Gratitude
A gratitude list to appreciate more of what you have in life, helping move past the hurt and loss.

PART 2: GETTING TO THE BASICS

Tool 3: Establishing Trust
Practical methods to help kids establish trust, a vital component for their developmental growth.

Tool 4: Jump-starting the Discussion Checklist
Various key points to help you initiate discussions with young people; this checklist can be particularly helpful when they are resistant to talking.

Tool 5: Phrasing for Validation
Helpful phrases for you to validate children’s thinking.

Tool 6: Phrasing for Empathy
Helpful phrases for you to empathize with kids’ feelings.

Tool 7: Beginning the Feeling Exploration
Various ways to bring out children’s recognition and expression of feelings.

PART 3: MAKING GROWTH CHOICES

Tool 8: Defusing Anger
A powerful technique for kids and adults to find the underlying needs that anger covers, concluding with an action plan to resolve the situation.

Tool 9: Using “I Statements” to Express Anger
Simple “I statements” direct your feelings so children can hear the message you truly want to give.

Tool 10: Defining Boundaries
Strategies to help children recognize and establish healthy boundaries.

Tool 11: Turning Telling into Asking
Clear-cut questions to increase kids’ listening and thinking ability.

Tool 12: Phrases and Tips to Avoid Lecturing
Practical ways to communicate without resorting to the negative practice of lecturing.

Tool 13: Learning from Our Mistakes
A straightforward approach on how to use mistakes—both children’s and adults’—as learning tools.

Tool 14: Affirmations for Healthy Remorse
Sayings to identify and develop remorse for both children and adults.

Tool 15: Acting as an Honorable Person
A technique to help young people correct situations and feel good about themselves, rather than be defensive and blaming.

Tool 16: Honesty and Its Benefits
A question-and-answer approach for helping kids understand the results of honesty and dishonesty.

Tool 17: Catching Children Being Honest
A way to reinforce children when they tell the truth, and teach them how to get in the practice of truth-telling.

Tool 18: Exploring Courage
An inventory to define and evaluate your courage.

Tool 19: Courage to Play the Fool
Ways to help children take healthy risks and avoid harmful ones, using the archetypal idea of the fool.

Tool 20: Effective-Consequences Checklist
Key points to consider when using consequences with kids.

Tool 21: Finding the Lesson and the Alternatives
An easy-to-use process to prevent and deal with problems.

Tool 22: Asked and Answered
A simple technique to stop children’s repeated requests and nagging.

Tool 23: Developing Consistency
A method to evaluate and develop consistent responses with children, helping to provide them with a stable environment.

Tool 24: The “I Know” Technique
A quick and simple response to acknowledge children and avoid power struggles.

Tool 25: Improving Your Results
Ways to evaluate and strengthen the relationships you have with young people.

        As you may have gathered, the tools in the book can be practically applied to a wide range of subjects. A particular tool can be used for your own self-improvement, children’s advancement, or both. Here is a sample interactive tool excerpted from the chapter “Learning to Listen”:
 
 

YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE

        The fact that you are reading this book [or website] says some positive things about you: You are interested in and committed to helping children. You are also interested in improving yourself and your communication skills. As you activate your own growth and assimilate what you have learned, you help pave the way for yourself and those around you.
        This book is intended to be more than a resource for you. Although it can be a valuable reference, Tips and Tools for Getting Thru to Kids is not meant to be an authoritative text that holds the answers outside of you. Rather, the information and tools can serve as a catalyst for discovering your own inner wisdom and resources. The material you choose to assimilate then becomes transformed inside you. As you discover more of the light within you, your own understanding becomes a torch that will shine and be passed on to children for generations to come.

“This book offers a great opportunity for personal growth and awareness while increasing more effective interactions with children. Phillip Mountrose provides practical and innovative solutions for parents/educators that will help children develop skills for well-balanced and self-fulfilled lives.”