Communication is the Key (or "We Interrupt this Blog to Go Back Momentarily to Chapter 3")

This is Jordan, and she wrote an entry on chapter 3 a VERY LONG TIME AGO. She even sent it to me a day early, but something in the "e-mail universe" went awry, and it never reached my inbox. She just resent it, so here it finally is -- alas, all typically works out, even in e-mail world!

Jordan is pictured here with her niece Mia and her nephew Michael. From the sounds of her entry, my guess is that she's a pretty good aunt, as she's got some good ideas about what helps children develop. Happy reading!

Chapter 3 was about communicating. There were several suggestions of how to communicate with your child starting at prime time when they are infants. Children are born to communicate, and throughout this chapter the author gives many good reasons and examples of how communicating with your child is very important. Many of the main points Galinsky talked about were common communication skills, but there are many parents who would not have thought about these to use as tactics of communicating with their child.

When becoming a parent you will need to make a plan and learn what you want to teach your child. Teaching your children about communication is something you have already learned yourself. According to Galinsky, “Learning what you want to teach your child all starts with how you talk, how we look, and what gestures we use with our young children” (p.113). As I mentioned before, Galinsky had many suggestions of ways to communicate with children. When thinking back to my younger years, one of the suggestions that caught my attention was “Narrate your children’s experiences with parent-talk, parent- look, and parent-gesture” (p.143), and talk with your children from the moment they are born. After watching family videos and talking to my parents about my childhood, I found out that they made sure they were always talking to and communicating with me. They would read and tell me bedtime stories every night. As the youngest of 4 children, I would always be read to or even told made-up stories by my siblings. While my older siblings held me when I was an infant, they told me stories from books my parents would read them, or even what was going on with the TV show they were watching. My parents believe the reason why my siblings would talk to me even though I couldn’t respond was because they saw my parents do it to the other kids, and knew it was okay. Growing up, my parents still would read to us every night and day; they would make sure we understood the story and talk about it when we were done. Naming what we see is a great way to communicate and and find out if the child understands. When we would be driving in the car I can remember we always would play the game “Do you see what I see?” We would describe what the object looked like. Once we were done describing, everyone in the car would try and guess what we were talking about. Games were what my family did best. On weekends we would have family game night; my parents did not like us watching much television when the family was all together. We had many games I can remember and this would be the time we would all spend together and play all sorts of different games.

I do agree that these strategies do work for communicating with children. Galinsky presented the idea to use familiar words in new ways. She states that research has shown that children who were found to be communicating better were the children whose parents and teachers were communicating with more sophisticated words. Although I do agree with Galinsky that using more sophisticated words will help children with communication, how old and when do you start to change their vocabulary? When do you know they are able to communicate and talk with others using more sophisticated words? How will they know the meaning of the words? Will their parents explain to them the words they don’t understand? I feel it is a good idea that parents use new words, but the children need to understand what they are talking about. If the parents just throw all these new words out there in conversations they may be lost and not have any idea of what they are trying to talk about.

In conclusion, communicating is a necessary skill that people of every age are working on and will use for the rest of their life. Even though there aren’t perfect ways of communicating with children, Galinsky talks about many strategies to use and these could be very helpful. Learning more about these strategies will help me educate others and hopefully they can pass it on. Throughout every day we experience communication with others, so learning how to communicate properly in our younger years will continually help us with our day to day experiences.