Our target: We’re focusing on helping our kids feel good about themselves by talking to them about good clean hygiene and having a positive attitude.
Team Up! Try this simple idea to help your child want to talk.
Smell Test: Gather a jar of pickles, a bottle of shampoo, a bottle of mustard, and a bar of soap from around the house. Take the lids off all of them and line them up on a counter. Go blindfold your child and bring them to the counter where you have these opened items set up. Have your child smell the pickle juice and the mustard first. Ask them if they would like to sit next to a classmate that smelled that way. Now have your child smell the shampoo and the soap. Ask the same question. Now that you have their attention, it’s time to talk about good hygiene and feeling good about ourselves.
Our Target: We need to let our kids know that watching the way we talk, work, and share is how other people decide how they are going to treat us. Let’s teach our kids to treat others with respect so that our kids can be respected by others, too.
Team Up! Try these simple ideas to help your child want to talk.
Just ask your child to tell you what they think respect means in their own words. Give them time to think about it and give it a try. Then, let them know that you can respect people’s things, you can respect people’s wants by sharing, and you can respect the way people listen to you by using kind and gentle words.
Our Target: We’re looking at how to talk to our kids about personal space. Our kids need to know how to keep their own boundaries and also how to handle it when someone tells them, “No,” because of their boundaries or rules.
Team Up! Try these simple tips to help your child want to talk.
Go get in your child’s personal space. Put your nose right up to their face and start telling them about how your day went. When your child starts to back away, ask them why they are backing away. They might not know why! Now that you have their attention, it’s time to sit and talk for a little while about personal space.
Our Target: It’s time to let our kids know that everyone has great worth as a person, even if they look very different than us. Let’s be good role models, and teach our kids how to be fearlessly kind to everyone. Let’s help our kids see how people act and treat people based on those actions, instead of treating others based on differences in skin color, culture, or even medical conditions.
Team Up! Try these simple tips to help your child want to talk. Stand in front of a mirror with your child with both of you looking at your reflections. Point out and talk about ways that you look different from each other, as in eye or hair color, birthmarks or freckles, face shape, nose size, lip shape, and any other features you notice. Tell your child that even though you are in the same family, you actually look very different. Now that you have their attention, start talking about how to always treat others with kindness no matter how different they look.
Our Target: Our goal is to help our kids see the difference between the real danger of strangers and kids that they simply have not talked to yet. Let’s help our kids understand the safe places they should talk to adults, and that talking to classmates for the first time could mean making a new friend.
Team Up! Try these simple ideas to help your child want to talk.
Get real with yourself and your child and ask your child what they know about kidnapping. Explain to them that there are bad adults in the world that do terrible things because kids are smaller and weaker than them. Talk about how scary it is for you and your child to know these things happen. Let your child know that there is no reason to be afraid when they know what to do if an adult stranger ever makes them feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
