Building Strong Family Relationships

 

Our society thrives on strong family relationships

Our family teaches us how to function in the world. It should provide love and warmth to all of its members. A strong family gives its members the support they need to make it through life’s toughest spots. 

To build strong family relationships, listen actively to each other.

Strong families have open lines of communications, when all family members feel heard and respected. One way to strengthen your family is to increase your listening skills and those of other family members. Until we can hear each other, we cannot build strong relationships

• Focus on what the person is telling you, rather than thinking about your reaction or response to what is being said. (You will have time to respond later)
• Give the person your full attention, drop whatever you’re doing and listen
• Listen for how the other person is feeling and relay back to them what you think they were saying and how they are feeling. Example: “I hear you saying you don’t like you uncle. You look pretty upset. Did something happen between you?
• Resist giving advice of your reaction until you are certain you have fully understood what the person was saying to you.

 

 

Encourage family members to share their thoughts and feelings.

 

Strong families allow all family members to talk about their thoughts and feelings, no matter the age of the member. Everyone should be expected to express themselves in appropriate ways. When people feel heard and respected, they feel better about themselves, are more open to solving problems, and are more likely to allow others to express themselves.

 

Keeping in touch with family members.

 

In the future, we will have many special purpose digital appliances which are embedded within our environment. Just as we now have a toaster in our kitchen, even though it is not a general cooking device, so we will have a range of digital devices which serve specific needs. The KIT (keep In Touch) project explores this broad direction in pervasive computing in relation to one core human need: keeping in touch with our closest family.

 

The initial version for KIT was to make it easy for grandparents and their grandchildren to easily keep in touch with each other, even if the grandparents are, beginning to suffer some cognitive loss and even when the grandchildren are young. There are no current technologies that work well for this task because small children are not typically allowed to use the phone without supervision and they cannot use email because they cannot read and, at the other extreme, elderly people may have difficulties with email. We also wanted to support spontaneity: so, for example, when a small child has an exciting experience or comes home excited about an achievement at school, we want them to be easily able to tell grandma. Equally, busy parents may often think about the grandparent but fail to find times when they can make phone calls. The challenges of keeping in touch are exacerbated when there are time zone differences, make it hard to work out times that are convenient to ring and chat.

 

The Keep-In-Touch system provides a messaging appliance that allows convenient voice messaging between family members. The touch screen version is intended to be in paces like the kitchen, family room or even in a small child’s bedroom. So, for example, a child can send a message to grandma very simply: they touch grandma’s picture and talk. Once finished the message, they touch “send”. When messages arrive at grandma’s house, they look like a small envelope on the child’s picture and grandma can simply touch this to hear the message. (Source: University of Sydney/School of information)

 

Six ways to keep in touch…

• Telephone
• E-mail
• Postal letters
• Greeting cards
• Person face to face
• Internet Messaging

 

 

Elephants have a special technique for keeping in touch; we will have a follow up article about this. 

I hope you have gotten something out of this article that interests you. 

See you soon!

I have set aside 2 free greeting cards and 2 stamps so you can test drive my system(no obligation) go to the link below and send yourself a card. Turn up your speakers and just follow the instructions. This system is fun to do. if you have any questions or concerns please contact me.

Howard Vanover

 423-591-0431 

lhv761@comcast.net

http://www.meetmybiz.org