Lesson 8- Active Listening

Welcome back to another Coping Power Caregiver video! This is week eight of the program, and it’s also a really important transition point in the program. For the next four weeks, your child and their peers in the small group will be learning content that is slightly different from what they are learning in the classroom. With this in mind, we encourage you to watch both this video to learn about the small group session, and the additional video which focuses more on the classroom lesson.

Over the past few weeks, your child has been practicing a range of thought, behavior, and relaxation-based coping skills to manage their responses to difficult situations. Now, they will begin exploring how to re-enter and effectively resolve the conflicts and stressors that they face in their everyday lives using effective communication skills. These communication skills continue to build on the skills they’ve learned earlier in the program, such as by first using coping skills to manage their strong emotions during challenging situations and using perspective taking to understand more about another person’s experience of a situation. Recognizing the thoughts and feelings of those around them is important to helping your child think through problems and communicate about them effectively.

This week, your child is practicing the active listening skills they are learning in the classroom lesson, while also learning how to create an effective I-Message during their small group time. I-messages communicate how the speaker is feeling without potentially causing the listener to feel defensive and shut down. I-messages allow an individual to state how they felt when an upsetting event occurred. For example: “I felt upset and rejected when we were waiting for the bus and didn’t speak to each other” or “I felt scared that my book was lost when you borrowed it without asking, because I was afraid I would get in trouble with the teacher.” These statements communicate the feelings experienced, instead of placing blame on their friend, and potentially pushing them farther away or causing an argument. This is very different from the classic “you-statement,” which is a common default for a lot of people. You-statements place a lot of blame on the other person in a disagreement and can lead to that person feeling defensive or resentful.

The goal here is for your child to become an assertive, effective communicator to ensure that their needs are being met, without hurting anyone else.

Throughout this lesson, your child is practicing turning unhelpful statements into I-messages that clearly communicate the speaker’s experience of an interaction. By practicing this, your child is learning effective self-advocacy that can lead to meaningful problem solving.

It’s important to note that I-messages are best used when both people involved in the conversation have a low emotional intensity – which we are talking about as being low on the emotion thermometer.  Ideally, your child will recognize when their emotions are intense, and they will use their strategies to step away before having these sometimes-challenging conversations.

As always, we’ll wrap up by giving you a few suggestions for continuing to practice these skills at home. For this week’s power practice, we encourage you to ask your child how you can show them that you are really listening when they talk to you about something. This might mean putting down your phone or turning off the TV, looking at your child when they’re speaking to you, or summarizing and asking them questions. We encourage you to remind your students to do these same behaviors that you’re modeling for them!

In addition, we encourage you to practice using “I” messages with your child in everyday conversations at home, both by modeling the use of “I” messages yourself and helping your child practice reframing “you” statements into “I” messages. To do this, try to think of ways you can reframe your feedback in the following sentence structure: “I feel [emotion] when you [behavior] because [why].” For example, “I feel disrespected and undervalued when dirty dishes are left on the counter because I spend a lot of time trying to keep our home clean,” or “I feel frustrated when I ask multiple times for the same chore to be completed because it makes me feel like others don’t listen to my requests or needs.”

These can be difficult conversations to have, but they are also incredibly powerful. You might even find that some of these skills and strategies work with other adults in your life, too! We hope your conversations with your children go well, and we’ll see you next week for another Power Up! Caregivers video.