If you have a child in school you're familiar with this conversation at pickup time.
You: How was your day?
Child: Good.
You: Really? What did you do?
Child: Nothing.
You: Huh... so did you learn anything?
Child: I don't remember.
You: Anything interesting happen?
Child: No.
...and so on!
Now, either our education system is even more broken than popularly believed, or we need to find better ways to talk about the day.
Ok, quick aside; our education systems, whichever country/state we're in, absolutely have degrees of brokenness. That's another post for another day.
In my experience our public schools are filled with dedicated, hard working teachers and educators who give and give and give and work hard to provide quality education, often in spite of the less than perfect systems.
I'm not talking about that. Not today.
Today I'm sharing a strategy I developed to encourage conversation with my son about his school day.
Younger children are still working on their communication skills. Let's face it, so are many adults! A question like 'how was your day?' is too open ended and vague. Unless something particularly exciting or out of the ordinary happens, it's hard for a child to hone in on a conversation worthy answer.
I realised that if I wanted to get beyond the single word answers I needed to either employ advanced interrogation techniques, or get better at questioning. Since the morality of torture is debated in the case of terrorists and almost universally frowned upon with the children we love, I worked on my questions.
I decided to give my son a framework of questions to answer. He knew what I'd be asking and he could think about it throughout the day so we could spark conversation on the drive home.
This is what I came up with.
Every day he is expected to give me something for each answer. We made it a game.
Tell me about,
"Something you DID"
"Something that HAPPENED"
"Something you LEARNED"
I found that at first it required a little thought and prodding, but after a few days of consistency he was focused on the questions and was often ready with his answers. He can choose which to give me first, sometimes even trying to game the system by combining answers but ultimately it all leads to conversation.
Even short answers would give me enough to ask him to elaborate and suddenly we were having conversations that could often take us through the entire 20 minute drive home.
I did make some small alterations and adjustments along the way; for example, throughout December I got tired of the daily shenanigans of the Elf on the Shelf hijacking our conversation, so I made it a temporary extra question of it's own.
"What was the Elf up to today?"
Of course I had a lot of fun continuing to ask that question well into January! After all, isn't exasperating our children for our amusement a parental right?
When we were focusing on what he was eating I added,
"Tell me your food choices"
Lately I've been paying extra attention to his social interactions so I added
"Something about your friends"
It's flexible. Having the three core questions give a framework. Adding extra questions allows you to focus on areas you want to emphasise.
Give it a try!
As your conversations flourish, share the highlights in the comments section.
