Don’t ask ‘How was your day?’

How to start conversation with children

What did your children say for ‘How was your day?’ ? Unless you have an expressive and love-to-share style, often the answer is ‘OK’, ‘Fine’ mostly one word answer.

These common questions usually don’t invite conversation especially for children because their attention span is short while the questions abstract. Here are alternative questions if you want to find out more.

How was your day?

If you want to find out social scene from your child, then change this to following.

• What did you play in recess time?
• Who was your lunch partner?
• Did anyone bring something interesting today to classroom?
• What did you eat for lunch?

Technique here is that to ask a question about specific situation so that they can easily recall something around that. If they answer with a better described sentence, you have succeeded.

What did you learn?

This is one of the tough questions that you didn’t get anything usually. You can try the following questions instead.

• What did you ask teacher today?
• What book did you ready today? I saw so and so in your desk.
• What classes did you take today?

This is again easy to answer questions as they don’t have to think which to choose for answer, where they usually ended up not sharing anything with parents.

To be continued

This was a short writeup. But whenever I come up with new tactics to start conversations with children, I will write up more. Till next, Chiao!