Who hasn’t been here – the uncommunicative adolescent who clams up permanently, answers questions with a shrug or a grunt and removes themselves from our presence as soon as possible (possibly with a slam of the door just to let you know they’ve gone …).
If this is you, take a deep breath and know that this too will pass.
And in the meantime, allow me to introduce you to reflective listening – Hint: it’s different from active listening.
Reflective listening happens when the listener, or in this case the parent, asks a question then reflects back an answer using one of the following three sentence starters:
- “It looks like …”
- “It sounds like …”
- “I can see you’re …”
Peppering these sentence starters throughout a conversation with your rangatahi can significantly improve both communication and understanding.
Who doesn’t want more of that?
Let’s dig in.
“It looks like …”
Starting a sentence with “It looks like …” shows the adolescent that the parent is watching and acknowledging their conversation, including all the non verbal cues.
For example, your rangatahi arrives for dinner and you ask, “How was your day?” They reply absently, “Busy (pause) so busy.” as they also check their phone and glance out of the window with their body angled slightly away from you.
At this point in the conversation it would be appropriate for you to say, “It looks like you’re distracted.”
Then keep quiet, and watch their body language for a nod and some eye contact with you.
Never underestimate the power of keeping quiet. Effectively this conversation is over until your adolescent responds, which they will do once they realise you’ve stopped talking and are waiting for their reply.
Pressing pause is especially hard to do if you’re the parent who has been in the habit of running the conversation! Remind yourself with love that silence is your friend.
Creating this pause allows for a non-judgemental acknowledgement of where your rangatahi is in the moment.
“It Sounds Like …”
Using the example above, swap out the “It looks like you’re distracted” for “It sounds like you’ve got lots going on.”
Then again, press pause.
Wait for their reply. Keep a neutral to positive look on your face, and your body language open. It’s a genuine invite for them to tell you more.
“I can see you’re …”
Cycling back to our scenario of the busy adolescent you might say, “I can see you’ve got a lot of things happening.”
Back to the pause. When you get the nod from them and the eye contact, you know you’re in rapport together and they’re ready to talk.
This is important because:
- We’ve been in the parenting habit of expecting our younger children to answer when we talk to them. With reflective statements we’re inviting them to talk with us.
- Reflective statements show we’re trying to understand what life is like for our rangatahi.
- We’re listening to acknowledge them and therefore our rangatahi feel heard and understood.
- We get to be genuinely curious and non-judgemental.
- Empathy puts us on the same side as our rangatahi.
Yes, it’s a change!
Remembering that our rangatahi are biologically programmed to push back against us, refusing to communicate with us can become a weapon that they wield with strength. In the long run we know this doesn’t help things … Yet for them, it’s powerful.
Especially if they can see it upsets us!
Using reflective sentence starters allows us to deepen our connections, grow our understanding and guide our rangatahi with love and empathy.
It’s a subtle and important opportunity to encourage your rangatahi to grow their problem solving muscles and to begin to generate their own solutions to challenges. A skill is not to be underestimated given how impulsive our rangatahi’s brains can be … they are fully under construction! Reflection creates space for them to gain the perspective they need as they begin to grapple with challenges that can potentially overwhelm them.
Start small with the example in this post and work up to more higher stakes conversations as you go along. These higher stakes conversations – the ones we have with our rangatahi during life challenges – become so much richer and deeper when we’ve using this conversational habit regularly.
Wanting to get started? Use this link to book a 30 minute pick-my-brains kōrero that will leave you with a step forward on your parenting journey.