What's right with this picture?
Dinner time questions
How were you brave?
How were you kind?
How did you fail today?
I refer to Megan Conley’s HuffPost article, We Ask Our Kids The Same 3 Questions Every Night in many of my workshops. Celebrating regular acts of bravery, kindness, and resilience helps us call up these attributes when we really need them. Conley describes kindness as “leading with understanding and becoming stronger for others,” and she reminds us that if we seek success, we need to become secure in the face of failure.
Asking these questions and answering them yourself can support children’s emotional development. We need to help children and youth feel safe with their emotions because feelings are a fact of life. Kids benefit from insights about how we manage situations and find healthy ways to express ourselves. They also learn from seeing our responsible displays of strong emotion and hearing our stories. And we can certainly learn from listening.
|