How should you react when your child spills a glass of milk? What should you say when your child comes home with a bad report card? This article tells us how to deal with such problems.
             Understanding children, encouraging them, and guiding them plays
             a significant role in moulding their character. Very often your
             ignorance results in unwelcome consequences. How should you
             react when your child spills a glass of milk? What should you say
             when your child comes home with a bad report card? 'Parent and
             Child' shows us how to deal with such problems.
             Talking with children is a unique art. Children are seldom naive in their communications. Their coded messages are often in a code, that requires deciphering.
             On his first visit to school, while mother was still with him, John, age seven, looked over the paintings on the notice board and inquired: "Who drew these ugly pictures?" embarrassed, mother told him: "It's not nice to call the pictures ugly when they are so pretty." The teacher, who understood the meaning of the question, smiled and said: "In this school you don't have to paint pretty pictures." A big smile appeared on John's face, he had the answer to his hidden question: "What happens to a boy who doesn't paint so well?"
             An interested observer who overhears a conversation between a parent and a child will note with surprise how little each listens to the other.
             To reach out to children and to reduce parental frustration, we need a new mode of relating to children. It is based on respect and on skill.
             Andy, aged ten, came home in an angry mood. His class had been scheduled to go for an outing, but it had rained. Mother decided to use a new approach.
             Mother : You seem very disappointed.
             Mother : You wanted very much to go on this outing?
             Mother : You had everything ready and then the rain came.
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