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| Reviewed by Barbara Homeier, M.D., January 2005; http://www.kidshealth.org/parent/positive/family/comm_6_to_12.html Communicating with a child is one of the most pleasurable and rewarding experiences for both parent and child. Children learn by absorbing information through daily interactions and experiences with other children, adults, and the world.
How Should I Communicate With My Child?
As children enter their school years, they become increasingly independent, spending much of their days outside the home in school and with peers. Talking with your child is essential to bonding with him or her, so share ideas, opinions, and information.
Here are a few suggestions to aid communication with your child: Typical Vocabulary and Communication Patterns As your child progresses in school, both his or her comprehension and usage of language will become more sophisticated. Usually, children will understand more vocabulary words and concepts than they may be able to express. Your child should be able to engage in narrative discourse and share ideas and opinions in clear speech. What Should I Do if I Suspect a Problem? You should have ongoing communication with your child's teacher about overall language skills and progress. Children with language comprehension and usage problems are at risk for increased academic difficulties. If your child has a specific communication difficulty, such as persistent stuttering or a lisp, he or she should be referred to the school speech-language pathologist (an expert who evaluates and treats speech and language disorders). You should routinely communicate with the therapist regarding the therapy goals, language activities to practice at home, and your child's progress. If your child's teacher suspects a language-based learning disability, comprehensive testing will be necessary. This can include a hearing test, psychoeducational assessment (standardized testing to evaluate your child's learning style as well as cognitive processes), and speech-language evaluation.
Typical Communication Problems
Problems in communication skills may include: Medical professionals, such as speech pathologists, therapists, or your child's doctor, can help your child overcome these communication problems. |
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Humor an Important Skill to Encourage Continued...
Researchers may marvel at this “pre-riddle” stage, but parents mostly bemoan it. Who wants to hear the same un-funny joke repeated and repeated? Laugh anyway. If nothing else, it’s important to encourage children to try again.
“humor in children has been correlated with higher intelligence, creativity, sociability, empathy, self-esteem, and problem solving,” says psychologist and humor researcher Louis Franzini of San Diego State University. Children with a good sense of humor tend to be well-liked by peers and by adults. Franzini, author of “Kids Who Laugh, How to Develop Your Child’s Sense of Humor” (Square One Press), calls laughter “the legal high.”
There’s long been speculation about why human beings like to laugh, but it was only in 2003 that researchers discovered neurological evidence that the brain is wired to take pleasure from humor and laughter. That’s good news for parents. It means that for your child to have a good sense of humor, the most important thing you can do is nurture and support it.
Pediatrician Mark Waltzman worked as a clown during college and uses humor to defuse children’s fear at Children’s Hospital, where he works in the emergency room. “It has to be appropriate to the situation and the child, or course,” he says, “but if you can make a patient relax and be calm, everything goes more smoothly.” With a young child, he’ll often start by vigorously washing his hands and making bubbles with the soap. With a school-aged child, he may begin an exam by asking, “Are you married?” He’s building on children’s delight in incongruity. “Having an adult ask such a silly question in such a serious place cracks them up,” he says. One of the nice things about laughter is that it can make you feel good even when you’re by yourself. But it’s even better when you make someone else laugh. “There’s a bonding process that occurs. You feel closer to someone you share a laugh with. That can happen as young as 12 months,” says Paul McGhee, one of the nation’s preeminent researchers on children’s humor. A professional speaker, he is author of “Understanding and Promoting the Development of Children’s Humor” (Kendall/Hunt) and president of laughterremedy.com.
Don’t confuse a baby’s first laugh with humor, though. An early laugh is usually in response to a physical sensation such as tickling. “It reflects pleasure but not humor. There’s no thought process,” says McGhee.
It’s typically between 6 and 12 months that a baby begins to delight in a parents’ or caregiver’s unexpected actions. McGhee’s favorite example is of a 7-month old who laughed out loud because mom sucked on his bottle. The mother wasn’t trying to be funny, she was checking to see if the nipple was clogged, but it violated the baby’s understanding of what is supposed to be: babies suck on bottles, not mommies!
Without realizing it, most parents signal that something funny is about to happen. “We have exaggerated ways of talking or extreme facial expressions that say: ‘This is silliness,’” says educational psychologist and humor researcher Doris Bergen, of Miami University of Ohio.
Some months after they react to incongruity, toddlers initiate it, first with clowning actions and then, at about 2 years, with words—for instance, calling objects by the wrong name or substitute nonsense words into a song.
Twenty-five-month old Lauren Geise of Arlington has been loving a game like this for six months, ever since parents Shannon and Jay first asked her, “Who are you? Are you Elmo? Noooo! Are you Ernie? Noooo! Are you mommy? Nooooo! You are . . . Lauren!” Now she initiates the game. “It’s such a source of pleasure that we can use it as a diversion when she’s on the verge of a meltdown,” says Shannon.
As their understanding of language deepens at 4 and 5, Bergen says, their humor more and more reflects multiple meanings in words: covering the dog with a blanket and calling him a hot dog; telling a “tall tale” about growing as tall as the ceiling and jumping over the house. From there, riddles and knock-knock jokes become the perfect showcase for the new-found skill with words.
At older ages, humor becomes more individualized and patterns are too complicated to predict. The best response from a parent at any stage is to share in a child’s delight. Bergen says that if you ask a young child why something is funny, even when they don’t understand the word play, the answer often is, “Because it makes my mom or dad laugh.”
“To want to please, to mutually enjoy, those are good things,” she says.
What parents often find offensive in potty humor is what delights children. “There’s shock value,” says Bergen. “It breaks the boundaries of what they can say and do.” The more we react and the stronger our reaction, the more delight they take.
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