Focus On Your Child

(From our March 2025 Issue)

The Art of Conversation in Your Home

By Dr. Danny Huerta

One of the most important parts of a family’s daily rhythms is conversation. Conversation offers parents and children the opportunity to help understand and align their behaviors, feelings, and thoughts. But it requires intentionality, and it takes practice.

Conversation with children 3-years-old and under sets the stage for conversational skill development. This is a great season of life to connect, read, and play together. Unfortunately, parents only spend about 3 minutes a day reading to their kids younger than age 6. Reading to your young kids is incredibly beneficial to their brain development, and especially to language skill development.

In this stage, you can begin developing the nonverbal back and forth communication that will be essential in years to come as you nurture conversation. Take time to describe experiences (including what you’re sensing through touch, smell, sound, taste, and sight) and emotions. Your child will be synchronizing with you through their vast array of empathy neurons (around 200 million), which help your child mimic others to establish connection.

Children in the 4- to 8-year-old stage will have opportunity through conversation to develop and practice the critical character traits of humility, self-control, and empathy. Help your kids learn to become curious about other people’s thoughts as they try to convey their own. Use reflective questioning (for example, “What I hear you saying is…”) to help them communicate. This helps your child know that they are being heard, and whether they need to clarify something. As they learn about themselves, they’ll recognize that others have similar experiences and the same desire to be understood.

In conversations with 9- to 12-year-olds, you may start to notice your child’s personality and temperament showing. Preteens are learning how to manage thoughts that are negatively influenced by their emotions (and their hormones). One way to help them do this is to validate their experience and point of view. Your preteen wants to feel heard and known, regardless of whether they know why they feel the way they do.

A second critical piece in conversations with preteens is listening. Even if your mind is spinning with your own thoughts, emotions, or worries and you’re having a hard time focusing, ask if you can take a quick break and dive into the conversation a few minutes later, when you can offer greater attention to the conversation. Otherwise, if your preteen feels dismissed or repeatedly unheard, they will stop coming to you for conversation.

Third, take time to mirror back what was said with reflective questioning. The goal is to make sure you received what was being communicated, and to show curiosity about your child’s thoughts.

The fourth step is the back-and-forth, when you take turns talking and listening to each other. This provides the safety to connect which will shape the rhythm of conversations in the teen years.

In your conversations with your kids, the bottom line is to make sure you’re attentive, that you validate (not necessarily affirm) them, that you actively listen rather than immediately fix, and that you allow for turn-taking and for curiosity to unfold.

For more practical parenting tips, visit focusonparenting.com.