It'll not take you a lot of time to realise that now you need to raise your child as soon as you become a parent. While physical growth is as simple as knowing what to feed the kid, mental and emotional growth is tricky to understand.

You want your kid to grow up sincere, kind and free from any bad habits. The problem is that it becomes a task when you fail to communicate effectively with your child. Not being able to communicate weakens the relationship. Ultimately, you miss to make them learn what you want them to learn in their learning phase.

To ensure it's not happening with you, read these five communication strategies to use with your child to strengthen the parent-child relationship.

1.   Use Active Listening

Children always ensure that they are being listened to when they talk to anyone. However, this assurance is not their job but yours. If your kid comes to you to tell you something, it's your responsibility to let him know that you are engaged in his/her talk. How do you do it? With active listening. It refers to making actions and making small verbal exchanges. For example, you can nod, smile, or laugh according to what they are telling you. Moreover, with a few words like why, how, or when, you can provide them with a continuation.

2.   Use Reflective listening

Reflective listening is even a great strategy to use with adults, but let's stick to children for now. You can use this strategy by simply repeating almost the same sentence that your child said at last. For example, if your kid said, "Tina took my toy to her home.", you can reply with "Tina took your toy to her home?". But why? It's important because if you answer the same thing with, let's say, "Okay, I'll buy you a new one.", it'll not let the child proceed with whatever else they want to say, creating a communication gap between you and your child. The key here is to let your child's emotions be released.

3.   Speak the Right Way

Now let's come to how to speak to your child, as it's the other half of effective communication. When you talk to any person, it barely happens that they are receiving anything other than the sentences. But with children, they are in their learning phase, be it the language, emotions, or motions. So, while talking to them, make sure your language is simple, kind, and non-derogatory. It'll make the child feel beloved, and since he/she is learning, the child will replicate this when talking to you or others.

4.   Notice and Interact

To strengthen your relationship with your child, you should notice what they are doing, good or bad, and interact with them right away. Using noticing statements like "I saw you did your homework by yourself, keep it on!", you can create a sense of awareness that their good jobs are getting noticed and appreciated by you. Another benefit of it is that it'll make them think twice before doing anything you may not like because they'll assume you are noticing.

5.   Make it a Fun Relationship

Now, there is no doubt that playing with your kids strengthens the relationship. So, you should be doing it. What you can ensure that you are involved in the activities you want your kids to do and keep them are away from other activities. In the long run, it makes your kids dislike those activities. From the relationship POV, it makes your kids mostly relate with you and eliminates situations where you need to restrict them.

The need for effective communication: Key to right parenting

This is how you can draw a successful curve on the parent-child relationship graph. To give you a reference how important these practices are, look at the stars below:

●      38% of parents are likely not to have a good relationship with their children.

●      The number dives as low as 50% with adoptive parents.

●      It takes another dip to 69% in the case of step-parents.