From The Counselling Suite

What are you going to do these holidays?

Both parents and children look forward to the summer holidays. Generally, the weather is warmer, the days are longer and there is not the relentless urgency to get to school on time, to sporting practices, to music lessons and the like. The school year is filled with activities and demands on time for both parents and children.  The Christmas holidays provide a welcome relief to the busyness of life.  

The danger with the holiday break is that some of us try to fit in all the things that we haven’t had time for during the year, leaving both parents and children exhausted. Both parents and children need to ensure that the holiday break provides an opportunity for some meaningful conversations to take place.

It is important that as parents we stop and take the time to talk to our children. The children might be reluctant to tear themselves away from their mobile phones, computers and PlayStations, but with a little effort, it is possible to convince them to turn off and to engage in meaningful conversation. 

Talking to your child is crucial to ensure in the development of the child-parent relationship.   Talking to your child, sharing your thoughts and ideas with your child will help them to understand and appreciate your values and your opinions especially regarding social issues. Allowing your child the opportunity to talk to you will help you understand what they are thinking about important social issues and what values and attitudes they are developing. Communicating in this way, will enhance your relationship with your child so that when there are problems that need to be discussed and dealt with you both have already developed the skills of meaningful communication.  

As well as promoting good parent-child relationships, there are other benefits such as enhancing emotional literacy – once your child is skilled at matching their emotions to words and comfortable expressing them clearly, they are more likely to be able to resolve their problems through discussion.

Verbal communication provided by parent-to-child interaction is crucial for learning and language development. Talking to your child will enhance their vocabularies and allow them to become confident in speaking to others and engaging in conversation in social settings. Unfortunately, there are some children who are skilled in SMS messaging and talking to SIRI, but do not have the necessary word knowledge or confidence to carry on a conversation with a real person in face-to-face situations.  

Some children are reluctant to talk, but persevere. Use this holiday time to start the process so that with time it just becomes ‘one of those things’ that you do with your child. Importantly, start when they are young as those of you with adolescents will know just how difficult it can be once they reach those teenage years.

The Counselling Team can be contacted counselling@bps.sa.edu.au for support.    

Ms Cathie Oswald

School Counsellor (Monday, Thursday and Friday)

Mrs Karen Davies

School Psychologist (Tuesday and Thursday)