A Quote by Delbert L. Stapley
When children are ready to talk, that is the time for parents to listen, regardless of the hour.
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Parents are with their children almost constantly and can observe when they are ready to be instructed. From questions or behavior or because of experiences in their own lives, they can sense that it is time to teach. Parents must know when the time for the lesson is now, right now, for their children are ready for it.
Adolescence is a time when children are supposed to move away from parents who are holding firm and protective behind them. When the parents disconnect, the children have no base to move away from or return to. They aren't ready to face the world alone. With divorce, adolescents feel abandoned, and they are outraged at that abandonment. They are angry at both parents for letting them down. Often they feel that their parents broke the rules and so now they can too.
For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.
Every hour that goes by with family separation policies in effect is another hour that mothers weep thinking of their children, another hour that kids are fearfully wondering where their parents have been taken, another hour that trauma deepens.
Mothers, take time to be a real friend to your children. Listen to your children, really listen. Talk with them, laugh and joke with them, sing with them, cry with them, hug them, honestly praise them. Yes, regularly spend unused one-on-one time with each child. Be a real friend to your children.
It's tough for parents to talk to children about heavy-weight topics such as peer pressure, drugs and morality if they don't already have a closeness. A parent can't just all of a sudden pick out an hour and talk to a son about being morally clean if the parent and child haven't spent much time together for three or four years. I think closeness is developed more quickly by having fun together.
Make that extra effort for every relationship. Whether it's with your parents, your children, your husband or your friends. It makes a difference to them. I try to give my kids a lot of solo time where I play with them, talk to them, listen to them. Similarly, you give time for your workout. You slot a time for it, no matter what.
Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old. Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
There are great parents of small children - they keep their little hair in bows - but those parents are not always good parents of young adults. As soon as their children get up to some size, it's "Shut up, sit down, you talk too much, keep your distance, I'll send you to Europe!" My mom was a terrible parent of small children but a great parent of young adults. She'd talk to me as if I had some sense.
Children are ready to learn when they are ready to learn, not necessarily when their parents are ready to teach them.
...as parents, we have to find the time and the energy to step in and help our children love reading. We can read to them, talk to them about what they're reading, and make time for this by turning off the television set ourselves. Libraries are a critical tool to help parents do this.
Let them get at the books themselves, and do not let them be flooded with diluted talk from the lips of their teacher. The less the parents 'talk-in' and expound their rations of knowledge and thought to the children they are educating, the better for the children...Children must be allowed to ruminate, must be left alone with their own thoughts.
Teach your children to listen carefully and to speak thoughtfully. The best way to teach this is to listen carefully and speak thoughtfully to your children, from the time they are babies. Take their questions and ideas seriously... learning to speak and listen as if our words matter is fundamental to education. Dialogue is not the same as mindless chatter. Above all, listen, listen, and listen to your kids.
Well, most women are full to the brim, that's all...We are, most of us, ready to explode, especially when our children are small and we are so weary with the demands for love and attention and the kind of service that makes you feel you should be wearing a uniform with "Mommy" embroidered over the left breast, over the heart...If a stranger had come up to me and said, "Do you want to talk about it? I have time to listen," I think I might have burst into tears at the relief of it.
Parents should talk to their children, even when they are babies and can't talk back.
I used to listen to my dad a lot as a way of trying to be close to him, as well, because my parents were divorced and I didnt spend that much time with him. I used to put head phones on and listen to my dad talk and sing and kind of had a weird bonding in a way.
