You may have suffered a hard time speaking to your family or not receiving the communicative support you require. Perhaps you and your loved one feel neglected, and the energy in your home has changed.
It’s human nature to avoid confrontation, especially when it involves a member of one’s own family but turning a blind eye can make things worse.
Yitzhak D Stern’s Take on Improving Communication
Avoiding conflict won’t make it go away, but it will make future disagreements more emotionally charged. Realizing the value of open dialogue within the family can help you avoid the short-term ease but long-term regret of ignoring problems.
In this article, Yitzhak D Stern shows us how to Communicate Better with Our Families.
Have family Dinners
A family that eats together stays together. Avoid having your partner and kids have meals while cooping up in their rooms. Instill the habit of regularly sharing a meal by sitting at your household table. Sharing a meal is a great way to break the ice and get to know one another better in a group setting. And it adds a lot of fun to mealtimes, too!
Have Face-To-Face Conversations
Prioritize quality time with loved ones to engage in heartfelt dialogue. Generational gaps between parents and their offspring are a major barrier to effective communication in today’s world. Most members of today’s youth culture prefer to communicate with one another via electronic means like texting, chatting, and email.
We have a lot less face-to-face interaction. Many people of all ages still prefer talking on the phone or in person, but even the oldest members of society are beginning to see the light. It’s important to remember that your parent’s generation values face-to-face interaction more highly. Yitzhak D Stern advises setting aside time daily to sit down and talk with them.
Have Regular Family Time
If you schedule time for your family, it will appear. Set aside time daily to sit and chat over a meal or do nothing. Twenty minutes will do just as well as an hour. Plan out some things to do or get some conversation topics ready, like current events, popular topics, or whatever your kids or other family members want to discuss.
Open Your Ears to Listen
Although you may be able to “hear,” are you “really listening” to your loved ones when they talk to you? Listening can be either passive or active. Body language and evasive responses, like “Oh yeah” or “I see,” are hallmarks of passive listening.
Contrarily, there is more of a give-and-take in active listening. Using phrases like “It sounds like…” and “So you think…”, you actively check the other person’s assumptions about what they’re saying. Both active and reflective listening are used, with each being more useful in specific contexts.
No matter what manner of speech you employ, Yitzhak D Stern says not to sit there and wait for your turn to speak. Actively listen to the speaker and process the information being presented to you.
Yitzhak D Stern’s Concluded Thoughts
Open lines of communication are the cornerstone of successful relationships. As no one can read minds, we must be comfortable sharing our thoughts and feelings openly.
But it’s often challenging to communicate with family members because we’re so ingrained in the roles we’ve played for years, if not decades. Yitzhak D Stern hopes that the advice in this article will help you communicate better with your loved ones and grow closer as a family.