Building Trust with your Kids: The Key to Open Conversations - Resilience & Relationships (R&R) - Stephanie Olson

In this conversation, Stephanie Olson emphasizes the importance of creating a safe space for children to discuss difficult topics. She discusses the need for parents to listen actively and engage in conversations about issues like social media safety and human trafficking from an early age. By establishing a foundation of trust and open communication, parents can help their children navigate sensitive subjects more effectively.

takeaways

• Provide a safe space for conversations.
• Listen to what your kids care about.
• Your reaction matters when they share difficult things.
• Create opportunities for communication in comfortable ways.
• Start conversations about tough topics early and often.
• Engage in discussions about social media safety.
• Talk about consent and trustworthy individuals.
• Be available for your children when they want to talk.
• Don't make scary topics scarier than they are.
• Establish a foundation of trust for open dialogue.

Sound Bites

• "We need to provide a safe space."
• "Start those conversations so early."
• "It's not a one and done conversation."

Chapters

00:00
Creating a Safe Space for Conversations

09:27
The Importance of Early Conversations

12:55
R&R Outro.mp4

Transcript

Stephanie Olson: 0:17

Hello, I'm Stephanie Olson, and welcome to resilience and relationships R and R and I am solo today, but I want to talk about parenting and how to talk to your kiddos about anything. But I think I want to talk about that foundation of what sets the tone for the conversation about anything, any of the important things, whether you're talking about human trafficking, or whether you're talking about sex or, you know, whatever it is. I want to talk about the foundation of getting to those conversations, because they're uncomfortable conversations to have, regardless of whether you're comfortable or not, it's going to be uncomfortable for your kiddos. It might be annoying to your kiddos, depending on their response, but I think the foundation of what we need to do as parents and caregivers is provide a safe space. Now. What does that look like? Well, I say often that before you are ever going to have a conversation about anything important, anything that is critical to the lives of your kiddos, anything that makes people feel uncomfortable you need to be having those conversations as a parent or caregiver that your kids want to have. I cannot tell you how many times I listen to the importance of Minecraft or whatever it may be that you think I have no idea what we're talking about, nor do I really care, but my kiddo cares about this, and so I'm going to care about this. That's got to be the foundation, and whether they're talking about something that happened in school or something that's going on in, you know, their life, wherever it may be, we need to listen. We need to be available to hear those things I will never forget. I was at the orthodontist office, and my daughter was getting her teeth done or worked on whatever, braces, all the things. And I was sitting there waiting and watching a little girl. She was probably nine years old. Her and her dad were also waiting for their sibling, daughter, whomever, to get their braces done. And the dad was on his phone the entire time, and he was kind of looking down, and the nine year old was desperately trying to get his attention. Would talk to him, he would ignore her. She started dancing in front of him so that he would pay attention. He ignored her, and the entire time, he did not look up from his phone to give attention to his daughter. Now that's kind of what I'm talking about. One of my favorite things to tell parents and educators and anybody who's working with youth, because this advice was given to me is that when your child walks into the room, and whether that's your your child, whether that's your student, whether that's a youth you're serving, but when they walk into the room, your eyes should light up like you have never seen anything so amazing. That's what it's all about. And those are the things that I think we need to remember as parents and caregivers. We need to make them priority when they walk in the room, oh my gosh, it's so great to see you. Come here. Give me a hug. If you want to give me a hug, remember consent, but we are available for them, and they can talk to us about anything they want. We're a safe person. We're a safe adult, and we are ready to listen. Now, when my kids became teenagers, things changed a little bit, and they still wanted to talk, but it looked different. I go to bed extremely early. I am an early riser. Early go to better. Not sure that's a saying, but that's who I am, and inevitably, my teenagers would want to talk to me at like. 11 o'clock, PM. Now that's not a big deal for some of you parental figures who stay up late. For me, it was torture, and I was always asleep already. They would come in, they would wake me up, but I always stayed awake and listened, because regardless of when your teenager wants to talk, because if you have teenagers, you know it's not always a regular occurrence, listen, because that's a great opportunity to set that foundation and let them know, Hey, I am somebody you can come to I am a safe adult here. Now the other thing I tell parents is, don't react when your kiddo tells you something that is reactable. Again, not sure if that's a real thing to say. Now that doesn't mean there are consequences for when our kiddos talk to us and they say something that deserves consequences. That's not what I'm talking about. But in that moment, don't react to what they say, other than to say, Gosh, that was that was really brave of you to come to me with that. Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate that now, in that moment, what we're trying to do is create a moment where they feel safe, where they feel like what they've done in coming to you was a good thing, and that you are somebody who can hear that and then respond. That takes a lot of effort and determination, sometimes on our part, where we're just in our head, okay, calm down. Calm down, calm down. I get that, but in that moment, it is so important that we don't react to the difficult things, but we really listen and allow them to talk. Now again, that's not to say that in five or six or 10 sentences later, they are aware there are consequences. I'm not saying don't create consequences for things that require them. What I'm saying is, in that moment, just be there, just listen. And I would also say, however they want to communicate, it's important that they communicate in a way that is comfortable for them. My middle daughter had such a hard time talking about the tough things. Still does, I would say, but is getting much better. But during a time when she was in middle school, I believe she really had a hard time coming to me with things that were hard for her to talk about. And my car happened to have a little compartment that she called a secret compartment, that you could put things in and open them. And so we had a routine that when she had to talk to me about something, she would write me a note, put it in that secret compartment, and I would look at it every day to see if there was something in there. And I was not supposed to respond verbally, but to write back, because she needed that time, or that ability to read what I was saying without being face to face. That's just something that we can do for our kiddos to help them process the conversation, but also feel comfortable in whatever way that we they need to have that conversation. People ask me all the time, how do you talk to your youth about social media safety? How do you talk to your youth about human trafficking? And the answer is very easily, when you open up that foundation and that door to start with, that I am here for you with the stuff that's silly, the stuff that, frankly, I don't care about, you're not gonna say that, but the stuff you don't care about, and the stuff that is just like whatever, and that's how you start that conversation About the tough things, but I will guarantee you, unless you open that door, they won't listen to you with the difficult things, one of the questions parents often ask me as well is, How early do you start those conversations? Well, it's just like sex. How early do you start that birds and the bees conversation. And my answer is so early that you your kiddo has no idea when that first conversation started. It's not a one and done. It's not a hey, let's sit down and talk about the birds and the bees. We're both going to be extremely uncomfortable. And then let's get this over. And you know, everything. You need to know it should be a consistent conversation, and it should start so early, age appropriate, that they don't even remember when the conversation began. There's a lot of great books that are available on those topics, or that can you can read to help you have those conversations. But I would say the same thing is true with social media and with human trafficking, that we have those conversations at a very young age, but age appropriate. So let's talk about social media, and let's talk about what it means to have followers, and who are the followers that you've got. I want to, I want to see who's following you, and let's have conversations about that. And yeah, there might be times when you need to delete those followers because they're not safe people, or they don't even know them. And that would be a conversation about the importance of knowing the people that we have follow us. And with human trafficking, it's a scary topic. We always say it's a scary topic. We don't need to make it scarier, but you don't have to, at a young age necessarily, talk about human trafficking in general, but people who want to do harm that age appropriately, early on that we need to be safe on social media, because there are people who want to do harm, and what might that look like on social media that our curriculum is from kindergarten through 12th grade for youth and then adults of every facet of the community, but when we're talking to kindergarten through sixth grade, we don't even mention the topic of human trafficking unless they have lived experience that requires that. But we don't even talk about that. We talk about consent. We talk about who a trustworthy person is. We talk about social media safety, and then we have those conversations about people who want to do harm and what that looks like. That's really all. I wanted to talk to you about the importance of having those conversations really starts with the foundation that we're talking to our kids and listening to them about the stuff that's important to them, and it's not going to be a successful conversation if you're not doing that. And then all of a sudden, now I want to talk to you about human trafficking and how to stay safe. They will roll their eyes and call you completely overprotective. They might do that anyway, but the importance of having those conversations at a time where they need to have those conversations be available for them, that's all I have for today, we'd love to hear what you want to talk about and some of the things you might want to hear. And reach out to us. If you have any questions or want to have a conversation with us, we will see you next time. Get some R and R.