PSI Malaysia FB Live: The Family Communication during Pandemic

The founder of Azon and consulting psychologist, Ms. Lee Li Li has shared about "The Family Communication during Pandemic" on the Facebook live talk show invited by PSI Malaysia, on 6th May 2020 (Wednesday), 8:30pm.

Most of the parents are having communication barriers with their children. This happens because both parents and the children did not communicate their expectations with each other. Parents think that communication is tough. There are two basic types of communication, verbal and non-verbal communication. For parents that are struggle to communicate, they are encouraged to use non-verbal language to interact with their children through their actions, facial expressions, voice tone, and volume. When communicating verbally, parents should use two main guidelines as a reference, especially when educating children: First, refrain from using nouns or adjectives, and try to use verbs in a sentence; Second, use the pronoun “I” instead of “you” to start a sentence (if there is a need to use “you”, use it in the middle of the sentence). For example, parents may say ““I realized you are spending more time (verb) on digital games recently” instead of “You are as lazy (adjective) as a pig (noun)”.

To communicate with the children effectively, parents have to first adjust themselves and set a routine:

1. Career. Parents have to classify their tasks into cognitively demanding and non-cognitively demanding task, integrate their schedules with the children’s schedules and make use of their non-deep work time to accompany children for homework. Besides, parents have to spend time on learning. For example, learning new working and communication skills.
2. Mental Health. Parents have to set a me-time or relaxation time for themselves. It can be a short duration every day or at least two or three times a week. Other than that, parents may keep in touch with friends to maintain social relations by having a conversation on a relaxing topic.
3. Physical Health. It is important to let the body sweat. In other words, exercise more. Parents may do house chores or play with their children to achieve this purpose.

Family meetings are an important communication tool that needs to be used between parents and children after the parents’ self-adjustments. Parents may combine parents’ and children’s schedule first, and then call for a family meeting. During the family meeting, parents need to discuss with their children about their schedules, as well as educate them about the three aspects of adjustments mentioned above. The purpose of the family meeting is to allow both the parents and the children to know each other's schedules and to have a consensus to avoid misunderstanding between both the parents and the children. The family meetings can be conducted many times as the rules set need to be adjusted often. The behaviour of coordinating with each other’s schedules during the family meetings is a family communication. Hence, parents have to conduct more family meetings to allow children to learn the concepts of negotiation and communication from a young age as this prepares them for the group communication at work in the future.

Other than discussing only their schedules, health education can be integrated into a family meeting by discussing the pandemic. Parents need to fix a few hours at home to practice some steps to deal with the new norm, such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Parents may use a whiteboard to create a chart to record the practices of these steps. For instance, if any family members did not wear a mask, he or she has to cook for the family as a punishment.

In fact, it was an opportunity to educate the children with life education during the pandemic:

1. Responsibility. For example, the front liners are willing to sacrifice to continue their responsibilities despite the fear of being infected by the virus.
2. Helping others. Parents may use the participation in charity work by non-profit organization as an example to educate their children to be grateful, as well as the values of helping and sharing practiced by the non-profit organization. Parents may encourage children to donate their own pocket money to help those in need.
3. Turning a crisis into an opportunity. For instance, some enterprises treat crises as a turning point.

Parents may conduct family activities, such as watching life education movies, story sharing, etc. Parents need to first listen and accept their children’s thoughts instead of criticizing immediately, then express their own thoughts. It is not necessary for parents to ask their children to remember what they have said. This is because after children reflect on parents’ advise, eventually, they will accept and learn the values parents trying to convey to them.

Remember: The purpose of communication is to express own expectations and understand others’ expectations to reach a consensus. Children will always prefer parents to communicate with them through conversations and sharing. Meanwhile, the most powerful way to communicate with the children is to set an example for them.

Note: The above content is adopted from the Facebook live talk show at PSI Malaysia - The Family Communication during Pandemic on May 6th, 2020 (Wednesday). Kindly contact our office for more information and further assistance. Thank you.