When your child leaves home for college, you may worry about losing contact.  They will be living at college, and perhaps not returning home for several weeks or months, so you worry.  However, with some effort on your part, your communication with your student may become even more meaningful than when they were home. 

This post is the fourth in a series of five posts that may give you food for thought about how you communicate with your college student.  Some of our suggestions are common sense reminders, and some may be new ideas for you.  Obviously, communication skills are interrelated, so please consider all of these suggestions together.  Our first post concerned how you listen to your student, our second looked at nonverbal communication, and our third discussed perception checking.  In this post we consider how to ask the most helpful questions and how to apply some interviewing principles (yes, interviewing).  In our final post we’ll look at how to frame some of your messages so your student may be more willing to listen.  We hope that thinking about how you listen and talk to your student may help you to keep all of your communication doors wide open.

A conversation is not an interview, and we don’t like conversations that begin to feel like interviews — or worse, interrogations.  However, those of us who have experienced well conducted interviews know that a good interview can feel like friendly conversation — and can elicit extremely helpful information.  Thinking about, and applying, a few basic principles of good interviewing may help you make your conversations with your student more productive.

We don’t want to suggest that you should strategize every exchange with your student — that’s obviously not the kind of communication that you want.  However, these principles may be most helpful when you need to have a serious or directed conversation with your student.

Read more

When your child leaves home for college, you worry about losing contact.  They will be living at college, and perhaps not returning home for several weeks or months, so you worry.  However, with some effort on your part, your communication with your student may become even more meaningful than when they were home.

This article is the third in a series of five that may give you food for thought about how you communicate with your college student.   Some of our suggestions may be common sense reminders, and some may be new ideas for you.  Obviously, communication skills are interrelated, so please consider all of these suggestions together.  Our first article concerned how you listen to your student, our second looked at nonverbal communication.  In this article we discuss how to check perceptions to make sure you understand what your student is really saying.  In our final two articles we’ll look at how to ask helpful questions, and how to frame some of your messages so your student may be willing to listen.  We hope that thinking about how you listen and talk to your student may help you to keep all of your communication doors wide open.

You listen carefully to your student and you consider the nonverbal signals so that you can read between the lines.  You know you’re getting the message.  Maybe.  No matter how much care you take to try to get the message correctly, you may be wrong.  One technique that can help to improve your communication with your college student is called perception checking.  It is simply making sure that what you think you heard is accurate.  Don’t assume that your understanding is correct.

The goal of perception checking is that both you and your student have a shared understanding, that both you and your student know that you are working together to understand each other.  This cooperative approach helps you to clarify what you’ve heard, but not put your student on the spot.  It shows your respect for your student because you don’t assume that you can read their mind, and it shows that you recognize that your perspective may be different from your student’s.

Read more

When your child leaves home for college, you worry about losing contact.  She will be living at college, and perhaps not returning home for several weeks or months, so you worry.  However, with some effort on your part, your communication with your student may become even more meaningful than when she was home.

This post is the second in a series of five posts that may give you food for thought about how you communicate with your college student. We’re posting one of these articles each week for five weeks.  Some of our suggestions may be common sense reminders, and some may be new ideas for you.  Obviously, communication skills are interrelated, so please consider all of these suggestions together.  Our first post concerned how you listen to your student.  In this post we’ll consider nonverbal communication and the signals that you send and interpret. In future posts we discuss how to check perceptions to make sure you understand what your student is really saying, how to ask helpful questions, and how to frame some of your messages so your student may be willing to listen.  We hope that thinking about how you listen and talk to your student may help you to keep all of your communication doors wide open.

Most of us think of nonverbal communication as body language, and it is.  However, there are more facets to nonverbal communication than many of us might imagine, even though we use these aspects of communication daily to help us understand people. So, as we discuss nonverbal communication, let’s begin by broadening our definition.  Nonverbal communication is anything that helps to get a message from one person to another without using the meaning of the words.  With this definition, nonverbal communication includes not only body language, but also tone of voice, appearance, timing, facial expressions, and even the atmosphere in which we choose to have a conversation.

Read more