Good Relationships | Three Tips for Tweens

Tweens—

Good Relationships are key to a happy life and journaling can help a child to develop essential skills needed to create good relationships in every area of life, especially with family.

If your child is struggling with her relationships at home, she might be surprised to find that keeping a journal can help to improve difficult family relationships and quickly turn them into good relationships that add joy rather than drama to her her life. If nothing else, journaling about a difficult family relationship can help a child reduce the stress that she might feel about the relationship.

Encourage your child to keep a journal and very soon she just might be more than willing to write about the relationship that she has with her father or mother or sibling. Journaling about these relationships can help to foster a better understanding of the relationship, of the other person and of how to make things better.

There are many ways to help a child learn the art of good relationships.  Communication and respect are key, as is being in touch with your feelings and honestly sharing them with others. Let’s look at three ways in which a child can use a journal to improve family relationships.

Good Relationships Tip # 1 — Get It All Out

Knowing that the journal is waiting at the end of the day can be a very comforting thing for a child. She can pull out her journal before bedtime and write about a number of things that have happened, but she can also include some discussion of the family relationship.

Maybe the troubling relationship is with her father but to her surprise that day or that evening things went well between them. She might enjoy highlighting those successes and talking about how good that makes her feel. If things went poorly, she can vent to her journal. It might be the only place where she feels comfortable talking about the bad and the good relationship aspects she has with her dad.

Good Relationships Tip #2 — Share It

If a child is feeling frustrated or upset about a family relationship and she journals about that, then at some point she might want to share those journal entries with another member of the family. This brings the other member of the family into that challenge and that person might be able to provide the journal keeper with some ideas for how to handle the relationship.

It can also help if there is some journaling done over a period of time; it can be helpful to see if there’s been any change in that relationship over time.

Good Relationships Tip #3 — Realize the Mistakes

Sometimes when a child is having a problem with a parent or sibling, he or she thinks that it’s the other person’s problem or the other person’s fault. Sometimes when you write things down and you honestly share what has happened and how a situation occurred and carried on, you can see perhaps that you were the one at fault.

Keeping a journal and doing so honestly can help a child to see that they might have contributed to the problem and it might help them to develop the courage to change that relationship dynamic.

Building strong relationships isn’t always easy, but keeping a journal and using it as a safe record of the good and bad can help a child to find balance in their troubling relationships thereby learning how to create and sustain good relationships and a happier life.

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Journal Buddies builds writing skills in boys and girls.

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