For a practical suggestion, I used to say to my kids when they were small that “Mommy’s ears are full. They need to drain”. Especially when trapped in the car for a while and they were core dumping their whole day. I’d never say that if it was something they were upset about. It made the request more benign without passing judgment on the topic.
My son is 24 and still comes to me to tell me about work or his music. My 20 year old daughter as well. I will say that to them and we laugh, but they get the point that maybe they need to take a breath. However my goal is always for them to know that even if I’m not interested in the topic, per se, I am interested in them.
It’s incredibly hard for a child to produce ‘parent-level’ conversation. It’s usually going to be just about what happened to him and his friends that day.
If you keep putting put him down with “do you think that interests me?”, eventually he’s going to stop telling you anything. And that’s the last thing you want.
That poor kid. One of the most important people in his life keeps telling him that the things he value are worthless and don’t deserve any attention. And he’s obviously internalized the clear message that HE therefore isn’t worthy of any attention, since he is expecting that attention will be summarily cut off.
So stop mincing words. Tell him point blank that you don’t have time to listen to him, and he’s boring and talks too much. That will shut him up but good. It may also result in his becoming a nasty, bitter adult who thinks children are born sociopaths, and you can have to condition them away from sociopathy by giving them only negative attention, never positive. But that’ll be way down the line, and he won’t be your problem by then.
Which sounds okay on the face of it, except that he returns over and over to the case history of the 14/yo girl who wanted to hang out in her room all the time, which was unbearable insolence that could only be thwarted by taking the door off her room. And also,
Whatever it takes to reduce interaction with one’s children.
I don’t know if I would phrase it as Rosemond did, but I tend to believe that small children do need boundaries and structure. And that includes not interrupting adults.
This has become a bit of an infuriating point of contention with my wife, as she seems to let the children drive her behavior. Like if I’m having a conversation with my wife and the boy interrupts, I’m more likely to gently tell him to not interrupt while she will stop talking to me and engage the boy.
My youngest grandson is a very smart, articulate and enthusiastic kid who always has something to share about his favorite obsessions. Like any kid, he tends to interrupt so we taught him from a young age to, when he needed someone’s attention, keep silent but to lay his hand gently on the person’s wrist. The understanding here is that as soon as the adult reaches a good interruption point they’ll acknowledge the kid and then he can go ahead and spill. It teaches the kid patience and to learn what’s a natural flow of adult conversation, it allows the adult to choose a good time and to focus their attention on the kid rather than trying to half listen to two conversations at once. It’s an especially great technique for larger gatherings where yelling kids clamoring for attention can get overwhelming. Grandson gets many kudos for his courtesy and social skills. It’s an all-around win.
There’s a difference between “please don’t interrupt” and “please talk about something else,” of course. We can teach the process, but the content is largely going to depend on the kid.
Yes, and kids are gonna kid. I’ve heard way more than I ever thought I would about Pokemon and Minecraft and Doctor Who and the doings of various classrooms and bugs and Magic: The Gathering and swords and Star Wars and and and… Yeah, it can be tedious sometimes but in just a few short years they’ll be grown up and keeping their enthusiasms mostly to themselves and you’re lucky if you get a call on your birthday. Time goes quickly and the day dawns when you realize that yakkety little kid is gone and the taciturn adult has taken his place and things will never be the same. A little tedium is worth it to have so many memories later of what that enthusiastic kid was like back in the day.
I still think that structuring a story is more important than censoring the content. If you want to tell someone about what you did in Minecraft, consider these two stories:
with
A lot of kids go for freeform stream-of-consciousness storytelling, but most audiences don’t have the stamina for it. Teach kids to structure a story, leading either with the big idea or a hook, and to tell a story with some sort of organization (sequential, main-idea-and-details, humorous conversation, problem/solution, etc.), and they’ll become better at communicating. What’s more, you’ll be better at listening, and they’ll notice.
Don’t tell them that their topic is boring. Help them figure out what the meat of their story is and how to structure the story to make it intriguing.
Kinda passive aggressive, don’t you think? Why not just tell him outright that topics x, y, and z bore you so he doesn’t have to guess? If he’s socially awkward, being oblique will just not help him.
I have a chatterbox son. Two, in fact, but especially the younger one. And, yes, he does have ADHD and is on the spectrum, which means he develops obsessions and talks about them endlessly. Sometimes I do have to mentally take a break and my responses are more “Hmmm, really?” or repeating the last few words he said, because I’m not listening intently, but it’s unbearably sad to me to think of rejecting him outright. My mom frequently acted as though my existence was a pain in her ass, and I never want my kids to feel that way.
I will tell my kids that I need to concentrate on driving, and that helps.
My dad constantly told me he didn’t care about what I had to say. By the time I became an adult and moved out of his house I din’t feel that talking to him was worth MY time. I haven’t talked to him in over 15 years. I still send him a birthday card and write, “Happy Birthday” on it.
That’s exactly the problem. If you throw them away they will stay away. It’s not worth it to me. Listen and engage as often as you can, it’s over all too soon.
Children, and indeed people, are not robots which operate in accordance to linear algorithms. If you want your child to be better at having conversations (as opposed to being a “chatterbox”) then you need to actually teach him to converse by example and interaction rather than just trying to program him to behave as you think appropriate. Children are often annoying in their manners (at least I think so) and talk about trivial and often uninteresting topics because they are children and they have a very small worldset of ideas and experiences to draw upon, and a limited number of people to interact with, most of whom are also children.
I learned far more about the world and the possibilities within it as well as how to interact with people in an engaging way from my (step)grandfather, who bothered to talk to me as if I was a quasi-adult capable of grasping nuance and who was a masterful storyteller, than I did from either of my parents, neither of whom wanted much of anything to do with me to the point that I lived with my father for nearly a year and we probably spoke no more than a dozen times in that period and mostly about how I shouldn’t get his new wife upset with my mere existence.
If you want your child to have a better experience and be able to converse sensibly with people, stop labeling him with the implicit criticism of being a “chatterbox”, stop using ADHD as an excuse for why you want someone else to deal with him, stop tuning him out or avoiding showing him what you expect from him in terms of chores and discipline, and start interacting with him in the way that you want him to behave. This is not a matter of “resetting the relationship” (whatever that means) but providing the example of the type of interaction and letting your child know that he is cared about and that you value his ideas (even if they are childishly annoying, because, again, he’s a child) and are happy to discuss them at the appropriate time, which is not just whenever you want to be doing something else but when you can spend some time interacting and bonding even if it means having to delay working on your favorite hobby or reading a book.
msmith537 is absolutely right that you shouldn’t let children dictate your behavior or interrupt your conversations because it teaches them the wrong ideas about social interaction in general and the parent-child relationship specifically, but that means that you also do have to spend time interacting with them in ways that you consider appropriate so that they understand what that means, rather than trying to dictate a script for them to follow and then making it clear that you just don’t care about their interests or ideas.
There is value in being straightforward when it comes to delicate subjects, but telling a child that you don’t want to hear about “topics x, y, and z” because they are boring is basically telling the child that they are boring and by extension you do not care about them. Instead of saying, “I’m bored by x and don’t talk to me about it,” make the effort to suggest other related topics or ask questions that are tangential to that topic. Children are by nature learning machines and if you engage their curiosity they’ll often come up with what are for them novel insights which can lead to maturity and intellectual growth. If you just let them babble on about whatever, they’ll never learn very much, and if you tell them to go away and stop bothering you they’ll either learn to ignore you entirely or they’ll trick you into their mantrap
I grew up in a household where the children were only listened to if we said exactly what our parents wanted to hear. Several of my siblings don’t really talk to my mother much anymore. There were other problems as well (including abuse by my father) but I think that not being accepted for who we were was also damaging.
One of the fundamental needs of a child is (from a website):
This doesn’t mean that the children are the rulers of the household, and as others have stated there needs to be limits as well as assistance on how to tell stories.
However, I really believe that it is so important for a child to be accepted by their parents as they are. As a parent, finding the right level of proving acceptance without going crazy seems to be the key.
As for housework and chores, for some reason I seem to be better at this than my wife, which is ironic considering I’m not particularly good at the chores myself. If you can’t do, teach is what the saying goes, right?
My wife gets really focused on accomplishing the cleaning as quickly as possible, and I tend to have the idea of coaching the kids as my primary task, sacrificing time and the quality of the job for the learning process.
This wasn’t an original discovery by me, I got it from watching a friend who is really good with his kids. He works hard at figuring out how to explain things on the kid’s level rather than at an adult level and explaining why things are done in particular ways, and really what is important and what’s not. It’s a hell of a lot more work than doing it yourself, especially if you are like my wife who is very efficient.
I totally agree. However, the OP seems to not appreciate why her questioning strategy fails at bringing about a positive change in his behavior. To me it’s clear that the same thing that causes him to be an alienating talker is the same thing that causes him to misjudge what interests the people he’s talking to. If he was able to correctly identify what is of mutual interest, then it’s unlikely he’d be a bad conversationalist; its precisely because he sucks at this that he struggles. Her question is not helping him learn how to do this.
The OP needs to find a way to engage the boy so that it’s not just him coming to her with stuff to say and then being shot down or lectured to. I wonder how often it is that she’s initiating conversation with him. It could be asking him about his latest video game exploits or could mean opening up with a story about something she saw or did that week that a kid would find interesting.
So he is not allowed to talk about games or things he saw or read that he finds interesting? That seems unreasonable.
The message seems to be: “What you find interesting doesn’t matter. You can only talk to me about what I find interesting. What I am interested in matters, what you are interested in doesn’t matter. I couldn’t care less what you find interesting, and I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t care about what is important to you.”
Perhaps he ‘just starts talking faster’ in an effort make you care. Maybe a better response would be to engage with him about the subjects he finds interesting. Ask him about them, discuss them. He is trying to get a meaningful response from you about things that matter to him and he is getting nothing.
Certainly there has to be give and take in conversation, but as an adult you have to give more than you take.