Building Relationship Skills

Our most important relationship is our relationship with our self.

Your child models your actions; when you treat your child with love, respect and encouragement he is much more likely to be the same with others as he grows up.

More important, he will feel love and respect for himself.

Strong relationships and relationship skills in your child come from a sense of belonging, a sense of inner okay ness, from observing how you relate to others and most of all from how you relate to him.
Anything you concentrate on to develop for your child is not just a one-off event of course.

But let’s play through an activity and focus on some points where a child subtly develops his relationship skills.

Whatever activity you and your child choose together can be tailored to his age and capacity.

If you draw up a family tree together, for a pre schooler it can be as simple as a tree with photos hanging on the branches showing grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and siblings.

For a much older child you can do research together, and involve him in calling them up and asking for dates of births and marriages, and asking for a bit of history from grandparents, aunts and uncles about his forbears.

You could make not only a chart of the family, but a history as well; all to be reproduced and sent around to the family.

In our family we made a couple of books together when the kids were small, and even when they were quite old our children loved to look at those books. One year we went away for several months, and we got our children to keep diaries. Many nights they objected, but those diaries are now dog eared, and much loved. They still have all their books…

click here to read more