Spend some time reflecting on your family relationships, and you can usually find ways to enhance them. Here are some points that might help you reflect on the relationships that matter to you:
- Your experience of life—your well-being—is affected by how your relationships are going. And if a relationship stops working or hits a rough spot, it does bother you, even if you don’t like to admit that it does. That’s why being great with your children is so important to their self-esteem and to their ability to deal with challenges in life.
- You could say that the quality of a relationship is expressed in how often you have meaningful conversations that matter to each person. If you look at a relationship in this way, then changing the conversation changes the relationship. What would your kids like to be talking about?
- If you have a bad day or are even just a little bit off, people you care about are impacted. So if you have a bad day, your kids usually notice.
- If you can’t talk about something or aren’t bringing it up, it usually ends up getting in the way of being great in your relationships. What would give you or another family member a sense of relief if you got it out of the background and into the conversation?
- Relationships run down. it’s the natural order of things. Don’t be surprised when a relationship runs down, just get back into conversation, and the relationship will regenerate. Trust yourself. You know how to listen. You can express yourself. Just start listening and talking and see what happens.
The best way forward is always to simply slow down, make time, listen, and pay attention.
