On 22 June 2019, parents of Junior 1 students gladly showed up for the talk entitled “Learning how to communicate with children – Deep Communication”. The heavy rain certainly did not stop our enthusiastic parents from attending this talk. We were greatly honored to have Mr Tan Yong Chin as speaker of the day, to assist our parents in communicating with their young children. Mr Tan is currently Head of the school’s Counseling Department.
The talk mainly focuses on five key aspects to improve our communication skills. That includes the role of parents on their children’s communication, the relationship building, and five different communicating ways to convey certain messages, the Satir Iceberg technique, the need to practice communicating verbally, not only just head knowledge. Additional learning materials have also been given at the event.
First and foremost, the first topic, “the role of parents’ relationship on their children’s communication” began when Mr. Tan showed a myriad of questions to the parents, which he later revealed related answers that had been given by their children earlier at Junior 1 Class. Although there were some students who were confident about their outcome, a large group of students however felt the opposite. From the point of view of the much anxious group of students, the outcome of their results was like a life and death matter as it directly affects their parents’ expectations on them. Hence, students who were worried could relate their experience on what’s like to pray before receiving their school results and figuring out on how to explain their grades to their parents in hopes that they will understand their situation. It was extremely hard for students to face with such scenarios because in their best effort, as they had tried not to disappoint their parents. If they fail to do so, depressed feelings such as guilt and shame were actually felt by the students and not the parents, adding burden to themselves. To help parents understand that their actions in a family play an imperative role in affecting their children emotionally, a demonstration of different types of families was accomplished with the help of parents whom willingly volunteered themselves in helping out for the short demonstration. Through the small play, parents understood that by respecting and loving their spouses, the harmonious atmosphere that is liberated from their actions will not only make their children feel at ease but at the same time, children are more likely to share their thoughts as well as daily struggles with their parents.
There are five different communicating ways that are widely used during daily conversations: blaming, fawning, rationalizing, interrupting and acknowledging. From the explanations given by the speaker, parents were able to know that acknowledging is the best way to communicate with their children as compassion for others matters the most.
On the other hand, a technique by a late American author who works as a therapist was introduced by the speaker. Virginia Satir, who has been widely regarded as the “Mother of Family Therapy”, was also known for her pioneering work in the field of family reconstruction therapy. The famous Satir technique which is called “The Personal Iceberg” is often used as a transformational tool to explore the self. The tool utilizes the metaphor of an iceberg to represent human experiencing; the small tip of the iceberg represents visible behaviors, which is often what we focus on as we move through life.
Virginia Satir once said: “Every person is an iceberg, but we tend to show the tip of the iceberg while communicating to others”. This metaphor corresponds to different behavior stances we see when people are in stress or flow. After giving a few examples to study the iceberg in the stories, parents learned that they should calm down by taking deep breaths and then only face the problems or hardships they are facing. Parents and children should speak out their inner desires without blaming, fawning and escaping from others to get the problem solved in a more efficient way.
Parents are encouraged to use methods shown in this talk to improve their bond with their children. Addition to that, the speaker also introduced some methods for parents to use in daily life. Parents can take a pause and clear their thoughts when they get angry to prevent them from saying hurtful words. They can repeat the focal point in their children’s sentence and stay positively curious when their children are speaking. The “table tennis method” is also a way to improve parent-child communication skills as parents are able to keep a question and answer flow when communicating with their children. Some books were furthermore recommended by the speaker and he gladly invited the parents to send him message privately in Facebook for further enquiries or for other seminars of related topics.
Before the talk ended, we expressed our gratitude towards our much loved and respected speaker, Mr. Tan, also to all teachers that had contributed their time and effort in organizing and supervising this meaningful and eye-opening event. Last but not least, we were thankful to the parents for making an effort and being so supportive to participate in this event.
