My experience is, when kids are left to decide for themselves, trust enough and believe that people are interested in them, they will find a way to open up. Their social intelligence might need a bit to grow still, but emotionally - they know really well how others feel. They only get numb to that and filter when they fully grown up.

I just read some research on the vocab used when kids play. They keep comunication to simple, unsophisticated words when they interact with grown ups during their play, while they share a lot of complex terms and nuances amongst themselves. It is logical.

I think the communication weakens when our and their language is not the same.

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"L'homme ne peut pas remplacer son coeur avec sa tete, ni sa tete avec ses mains." J.H. Pestalozzi

“The only difference between a rut and a grave is a matter of depth.” S.P. Cadman

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." A. Einstein

Our eldest is turning 8 soon and we are now treated to occasional grunts at suppertime. But we have noticed that every time we play music during dinner, the kid goes all chatty and animated. Talks about the pieces he likes (Michael Jackson gets a very high note). Yesterday the chat was about Prince and he changed his name to bypass his contractual obligations. And a little bit of Chuck Berry too, just to pay homage to the great man.

If they don't want to use words, tempt them with music

https://youtu.be/R20f-TPKjzc?t=216

For those who speak German / French or Italian, pls have a look at the James Studie which is for Swiss youth:

https://www.zhaw.ch/de/psychologie/f.../james/#c77096

Equivalent in Germany:
https://www.mpfs.de/studien/?tab=tab-18-1

Another good website with a lot of infos for kids and parents etc:
http://www.jugendundmedien.ch/home.html

Quite honestly, the way some teenagers treat their parents and their friends, I rather hoped they had no idea how hurtful they are being.

Sure. When one daughter's morning conversation reduced to 'Ugh' and the other's was "I can't find my....." we weren't even in the same film.

Apart from the fact that no two people are alike or always react similarly even in identical situations, other folks' teenagers are not in the same game as one's own.

Would someone please correct the title? I can't help seeing the irony about reprimanding parents about phones when one's spelling isn't up to par either.

The way I see it puberty is the process by which children take ownership of their own identity. It is a difficult process for all involved. The child enters puberty with a subsidiary identity, and finishes it with their own. They discover and take responsibility for their own humanity, and give you yours back, warts and all.

Unfortunately, it seems that lots of kids first investigate the path of anhillating their parent's identity ("I can stop being my mommy's child by ensuring that my mommy no longer exists"). It seems very personal, but it isn't really. Just don't take the bait.

If you do take the bait, you both end up missing the point of the exercise.

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If everyone you know agrees with you consistently, they are either not listening, or not capable of critical thought.

An interesting conversation I had with my son recently regarding an awful history teacher at school, who all but destroyed my son’s love of history.. this teacher belittled and humiliated the kids regularly, luckily he has left the profession now, but then my son was scared of him/hated the lessons.

I asked my son who was the scariest person in his life, who had the most power.. after much joking and laughing, he agreed it was me. (dad works away a lot so it just me on the ground 90% of the time) I then asked him if he thinks I am scared of anyone.. answer was of course a big no. I also explained to him what I and his Dad were going to do with the power we had in our possession to protect him - little by little, we will hand it over to him until he has complete control over his life with his own individual emotional strength to make his own choices and mistakes. But right now, due to his age, it's understandable he is frightened of this adult teacher and we talked about possible ways of managing it for now, with references to you-might-have-a-future-boss-like-this scenarios; however, if it got really bad, he knew I would step in and then it’s God help that teacher - seriously I am very scary, lol!

It’s a tricky business raising kids, but it’s all about love, love and more love with an eye to setting them free.. and no matter the teenager angst of difficult times, no one is allowed to treat me or dad with disrespect. A full blown argument, yes as it is healthy and very much allowed, but none of that rudeness, snarky replies you often hear teenagers throw at their parents when out and about.

TBH it's because of that irony that I, for one, decided to leave the spelling mistake alone. It may even have been deliberate, so who are we to judge?

(See also spelling errors in thread titles).

Great post Swisstree- how old is he? 13-19 covers a great range Bonne chance.

My baby is 12

Well what do you do when someone approaches from other direction and is fully absorbed in his handy. Do you walk into him /her or avoid. These people annoy me. They think all have to get out of their way. They are egotists. Bad! People get dummer because of handys

Some have their kids walking into them for a couple of years.

I'd say - let's think about the easy and accessible ways we try to saturate our brains with dopamine. And the fact our kids will, of course, copy our ways. It's not the best habit to pass on.

In my experience youngsters have always walked into people. Deep in conversation. Forty years ago four abreast walking down the Strassburgerallee in Basel (every lunchtime, one group after another). Now they simply have their eyes on their phones. The effect on the oncoming pedestrians isn't all that different.
And as for following the example of their parents, with regards to mobile phones in general and smart phones in particular, until recently it seemed mostly parents following the example of their children.

hahahaha---have you ever been in HB at 'rush hour', people constantly do this even without handys to distract them:


I give you this EF gem:


https://www.englishforum.ch/complain...objects-7.html

Back to mealtimes for a sec...

At the moment we eat dinner more or less together. That is, I start cooking, kids wander in, see that I am cooking, and demand food NOW. Their play kitchen can produce all manner of delicious perfectly cooked food on a few seconds' notice and they don't see why mine should be any different. Husband wanders in, sees me fending them off with "the water hasn't boiled yet", "it's still raw in the middle" and other such patently absurd excuses, and asks if he should put them in their chairs and give them some bread or cheese or something "to start on". My rule is I don't mind what anybody eats as long as it's reasonably healthy food and they eat it at the table without involving me, so I say "sure".

So they get in their chairs and start eating. Husband supervises, I finish cooking, if we're lucky the end of their meal still overlaps a little with the beginning of ours, meaning a few minutes of "tell me about your day" could be squeezed in. Which they interpret pretty liberally... you might hear about something they actually saw or did today, or you might hear for the seven thousandth time all about the yellow! blinking! LIGHTS! on a worksite next to a big church in Konstanz, which is where we took them three weeks ago. (There was also a Roman castle next to the same big church - for that matter the big church itself was quite beautiful, not to mention older than mommy's entire country - but do they remember that? Travel is wasted on the young, I tell you. Smartphones or no.)

Eventually they ask to get down and go play in the living room. We breathe a sigh of relief - fondly imagining we'll get to talk to each other for a few precious minutes - but no. It turns out that "playing in the living room" is toddlerspeak for "dragging half the contents of your playroom into the kitchen and heaping them carefully around mommy's and daddy's feet where you can then build cities and helicopters and drum kits out of them, not forgetting to launch yourselves into mommy's and daddy's laps for a squirmy cuddle every fifteen seconds just in case they were having any silly notions about finishing either a sentence or a plate of warm food."

So that's dinnertime at our house right now. They'll grow into it.

Breakfast is a completely different story. Mr. MathNut rises at 6am and so do I. We have breakfast together, talk or read according to mutual inclination and level of sleep. Kids on the other hand don't get up until 8:30-9:00 and even then they're not hungry right away. Oh, I could stuff them in their chairs and poke food at them - or at least I could try - but it'll be much more pleasant for all of us if I wait an hour or two. So I do housework, pausing at 15-minute intervals to ask if anyone is ready for breakfast yet. By 10:30am they are finally hungry enough to eat and I am ready for another cup of coffee and a sit-down myself. Not a whole-family meal as such but I do sit down with them while they eat. That tends to be when we work on table manners (at this point less "chew with your mouth closed" and more "that water is for drinking, don't dip your fork in it") and discuss plans for the rest of the day. The day which, I want to point out but don't, is nearly half gone by that time.

Works out nice on weekends though.

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You can't imagine it at the moment, but there will come a time when you miss all that.

Sounds very bucolic...enjoy. Thinking of mealtimes makes me hungry! Can't remember when somebody actually cooked for me. Gotta start pretending I can't cook or cook poorly.

I will just hop back to cells and human mind - to work with people who's attention, concentration and cognition have been eaten by ott screen exposure is not easy. And, with growing trends, gets harder.

Well the moral of the story is-give them both a Samsung 7-that will keep them busy until a new model comes out!

LOL totally. As said before, totally different with toddlers. My comments were for school age children, from age 6 onwards. I use to bathe them and get them in pyjamas before dad got home- so they could go to bed and stories soon after dinner.

Swisstree- 12 is a lovely age. You may (might) find that things change a bit when he gets to 14/15