profile

Melanie Medland

It's a Wrap

Published about 18 hours ago • 1 min read

Welcome to Connections

Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent.

Kia ora Reader

March was quite the month, thank you for taking the time to try out the reflective starters I shared. I loved hearing your stories and celebrating with you.

There's a summary of March's emails in this blog post, 'Unlocking Understanding: The Power of Reflective Questions in Parent-Adolescent Conversations'

Who hasn’t been here - the uncommunicative adolescent who clams up permanently, answers questions with a shrug or a grunt and removes themselves from our presence as soon as possible (possibly with a slam of the door just to let you know they’ve gone …).

If this is you, take a deep breath and know that this too will pass.

And in the meantime, allow me to introduce you to reflective listening - Hint: it’s different from active listening.

Reflective listening happens when the listener, or in this case the parent, asks a question then reflects back an answer using one of the following three sentence starters:

  • “It looks like …”
  • “It sounds like …”
  • “I can see you’re …”

Peppering these sentence starters throughout a conversation with your rangatahi can significantly improve both communication and understanding.

Who doesn’t want more of that?

Let’s dig in.

​Keep reading here

Kia pai tō wiki ... have a great week

Melanie

Melanie Medland is a communication coach, an author, and a course creator.​

More at www.beautifulconversations.co.nz​

Click here for your complimentary strategy call.

Melanie Medland

Communication Coach working with parents of tweens, teens and adolescents

Coaching individuals, families, and management teams to change the patterns of their communication. Magic happens when we connect to ourselves and others with clarity and kindness. www.beautifulconversations.co.nz

Read more from Melanie Medland

Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader Time and attention are our most precious commodities, so how can we fit it all in? One way is to listen while we’re doing something else. And to a point, this works beautifully. We can listen while we drive, while we walk, while we eat and while we wipe down the kitchen bench. So yes, some of our listening can be done while we’re paying...

about 18 hours ago • 1 min read

Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader This month we’ve been getting into detail on the art of reflective listening. We’ve tried out a three different sentence starters all useable for changing the way we communicate with our rangatahi on the daily. The recurring piece that follows every single one of these opening lines is the pause. It's powerful! When we pause, we’re waiting...

8 days ago • 1 min read

Welcome to Connections Your weekly pānui for tips, tricks, and strategies to deepen your connection with your tween, teen, or adolescent. Kia ora Reader We’ve had a week of practising, “It sounds like …” and a week of practising, “It looks like …” How are you getting on, Reader? Remember to be compassionate with yourself so far, and curious. We’re giving grace to ourselves as we try this out and create a new habit. I especially love this quote, attributed to Buddha, “First I create my habits,...

15 days ago • 2 min read