“Children rely on the language of the adults in their immediate environment to learn both about themselves and the world, Danese said.
Therefore, the way children are talked to can be very powerful in both positive and negative ways, he added.
‘Being the subject of verbal abuse can twist a young person’s understanding of who they are and their role in the world,’ Danese said.”
Those quotes are from a recent blog on mental health and parenting from cnn.com and it really resonated with us, of course.
Talk can cure, and talk can foster constructive change. But it must be the right kind of talk.
The same is true for parents. How they talk to their children will determine whether they will be helpful or destructive. The effective parent, like the effective counselor, must learn how to communicate his acceptance and acquire the same communication skills.
Parents in our P.E.T. classes skeptically ask, “Is it possible for a nonprofessional like myself to learn the skills of a professional counselor?” Thirty years ago we would have said, “No.” However, in our classes we have demonstrated that it is possible for most parents to learn how to become effective helping agents for their children.
We know now that it is not knowledge of psychology or an intellectual understanding about people that makes a good counselor. It is primarily a matter of learning how to talk to people in a “constructive” way.
Psychologists call this “therapeutic communication,” meaning that certain kinds of messages have a “therapeutic” or healthy effect on people. They make them feel better, encourage them to talk, help them express their feelings, foster a feeling of worth or self-esteem, reduce threat or fear, facilitate growth and constructive change.
Other kinds of talk are “nontherapeutic” or destructive. These messages (AKA, the 12 Communication Roadblocks) tend to make people feel judged or guilty; they restrict expression of honest feelings, threaten the person, foster feelings of unworthiness or low self-esteem, block growth and constructive change by making the person defend more strongly the way he is.
While a very small number of parents possess this therapeutic skill intuitively and hence are “naturals,” most parents have to go through a process of first unlearning their destructive ways of communicating and then learning more constructive ways.
This means that parents first have to expose their typical habits of communication to see for themselves how their talk is destructive or nontherapeutic.
Then they need to be taught some new ways of responding to children.
That’s where Parent Effectiveness Training comes in.