Communication between parents and children is important, and it is also critical to use appropriate techniques when asking questions of your child. Parenting experts offer some communication tips for parents. Many parents like to ask a big open-ended question, such as “How was your day at kindergarten?” In fact, this is a very big question for children. They feel very happy. Children have different feelings at different times of the day in kindergarten. This kind of macroscopic question is difficult for children to answer. Other parents may ask what they learned today, which is also a very big question. There are so many activities in kindergarten and different classes have different contents, so where should the child start? This definitely gives the child a problem. So parents should start small by asking their children, for example, “Did you have a drawing class today?” and “What did you draw?” These are very specific questions that are easy for children to answer. When communicating with children, parents are accustomed to making direct reasoning and normative evaluation and correction of their children’s behavior, always thinking that this is education, which is a responsible performance for children. In fact, this can also make children reluctant to talk to their parents. Ms. Yang says that it is important to understand and accept the child’s emotions and feelings, and to talk to the child with empathy, so that communication will not become difficult. For example, the child came back and said that a child was making faces at lunchtime today, disturbing his own sleep. If the parent denies the child at the beginning and says, “That’s someone else’s business, you don’t need to care about other people’s business, just do your own. The child may not say anything further, and the parents have lost the opportunity to understand the child. If you ask the child why that child was like that, what were you thinking at the time …… then the child may keep going on and on. Only if the child is willing to talk, communication can continue. Start with other people’s stories Parents who want to understand how their children behave outside can start by asking their children about their children, such as did Sweetie come to kindergarten today and what games did you play with her. When a child hears such a question, he or she will naturally tell stories about others and even talk about them. Because when a child tells his own story, he will always pay attention to his parents’ attitude towards his behavior, whether they approve or disapprove, and it is a matter of his quality of life in the family, while it is always safer to tell other people’s stories without inviting any lectures or accusations. While the child is talking, the parents then slowly lead to their own child’s story, asking questions such as what he did. In this way, parents will know roughly what happened in kindergarten and it will help them understand their own child’s situation. Crouch down and talk to your child “Crouch down and talk to your child” is a way of communication that Ms. Yang emphasizes a lot. She believes that squatting down is a great care and understanding for children; it is a way for parents to care about their children’s inner world. Squatting down also means that parents put down their authority and become friends with their children, using love and respect as a guide. Squatting is not just squatting from the body, but from the mind, understanding and respecting the needs and uniqueness of the child, and accepting the child’s emotions and thoughts. Why can’t parents squat? “It has to do with the weight of the parent’s love for the child and their own empathy. Some parents who are good at communicating, who are good at capturing some of the subtle signals in the communication process, are prone to really squatting down.” Why do some parents always talk to their children in a condescending and fierce manner? “Such a parent often has a great pain inside himself and he is not willing to touch it, looking at certain emotions of his children, he disguises a hard shell to treat them, because he does not know how to face the child’s softness in a soft way, and they are afraid of being knocked down inside. There is also the possibility that he himself was not treated by his parents crouched down when he was a child. He will follow this way of his parents treating him. Some children grow up being beaten by their parents, and when he becomes a parent, he will naturally enable his parents to do the same thing.” So how can parents really get down? Where do parents start when they want to really get down and talk to their children? Ms. Yang suggests that parents start their own personal spiritual growth journey and sort themselves out. If parents want to improve their quality of life, they may want to try to go to a spiritual growth workshop or go to a counseling room and let professionals help them sort out and integrate their life, understand how they came to be where they are today, what regrets they had as a child, what unfulfilled desires they have, and what they long for deep inside, and think about how they can better develop themselves and how they can better face their children. How can we better develop ourselves and how to better deal with our children? But nowadays, very few parents work on their own spiritual growth, and instead spend a lot of energy on their children’s education, such as enrolling in interest classes and taking various talent exams. But there is a simple truth here: if you are a dry river inside yourself, how can you even out the water to supply others. The same goes for love given to children. How can you give quality love to your children when you don’t feel love inside yourself, because you are often troubled by boredom at work and at home, and it becomes a difficult task to squat down naturally and treat your children gently. If parents sort themselves out, their lives will be planned more rationally, the priorities of unimportant things and important things will be easily distinguished, they will be organized when dealing with big and small things, they will not be attached to other things when dealing with a certain matter, and so they will be in a better state to treat their children.