3.9 – Listening to difficult issues
There may be some areas of communication that are really difficult for parents and children to deal with.
There are lots of resources online where you can find help in talking about difficult issues with your family. If you can do research together it can help, otherwise arm yourself with as much information as you can, plan a quiet time when you can talk together and think about how you want to introduce the subject. If you can introduce it into the conversation, maybe relate it to a news story on the TV or in the newspaper, it can be a more natural way to bring it up.
These subjects are often difficult to discuss. It may be worth taking advice from someone in your community who has already dealt with them. No matter what our own personal, religious belief or value systems, the Internet means that our children are exposed to many dangerous influences that they are not yet prepared to deal with.
Use your journal and try to remember the situations you have experienced where you found it hard to talk to your children about difficult topics, whether they were about their lives, such as sexuality or perhaps their feelings towards their parents, or about the way you felt.
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