Thank you for your detailed articles about help for parents with how to talk with their children about the Maui fires (“Parents can help keiki better cope with trauma,” “Story aims to help keiki cope after Maui fires,” Star-Advertiser, Sept. 4).
The specific suggestions offered by Dr. Irene Papaconstadopoulos, Dr. Shaylin Chock and Elizabeth Hartline were very much to the point, reassuring and comforting. To these, I would like to offer one more suggestion.
When we talk with our children, opening up the big issues, asking their thoughts about what happened, offering words of comfort and what they can do to help themselves or others, it is then useful to ask your child if he or she can “say back to me what you just heard me say.”
We often assume that when we are having a serious conversation with our child, they are listening and understanding our words, and if we only ask them if they understand what we are saying, they are almost certainly going to say “yes.” But the only way to know what they have actually heard is to simply ask them to say it back to us.
Anita Trubitt
Kailua
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