Positive two-way communication is essential to building your child’s self-esteem. While children thrive with words of encouragement and praise, listening to your child boosts their self-esteem and enables them to feel worthy and loved.

It is worth remembering that children can understand language long before they can master speech. You can keep up with your child’s evolving language development by paying daily attention to them.

If you set up clear and open communication patterns with your child in their early years, you are setting up good practices for the future.

Positive communication with young children

A child’s ability to manage stress, feel confident and motivate themselves in later life has a lot to do with their early childhood experiences. One’s ‘self-concept’ is their sense of who they are and how they feel about their place in their family and community. This begins to develop between the ages of two and six years.

Positive relationships between parents and children are an important part of building a child’s positive self-concept. A child who feels constantly blamed, judged and criticised may grow up to become an adult with a negative self-concept.

Listen to your children

If you want your child to be a good listener, make sure you’re a good role model. Take the time to listen to them. Busy, distracted parents tend to tune out a chattering child, which is understandable from time to time. If you constantly ignore your child, however, you send the message that listening isn’t important and that what your child has to say isn’t important to you.

Some suggestions include:

• Pay attention to what your child is saying whenever you can.
• Make sure to allocate some time every day to simply sit and listen to your child if you have a busy schedule.
• Encourage your child’s ideas and opinions. Positive communication is a two-way street in which both parties take turns listening and talking.
• Resist the urge to correct their grammatical errors or finish their sentences – concentrate instead on what they are trying to say.
• Allow important or difficult issues to be discussed without the fear of over-reaction, criticism or blame.