Practical Ways to Support Your Child's Psychology at Home

Every so often a parent hits a wall. The child's behavior stops making sense, and no amount of asking seems to crack it open. When that goes on for weeks, or starts getting worse instead of better, bringing in a child psychologist is usually the smart move. These are trained people who can read what a child is doing and tell you why, in plain terms, instead of leaving you guessing. You should not try to play psychologist yourself if you have no training for it. That said, there are a handful of techniques you can borrow and use at home.

A friend of mine works as a therapist with children who have been sexually abused. She has told me those are among the toughest cases she takes on. The kids come in guarded, unwilling to say much to anyone, least of all a stranger sitting across from them in an office. Over the years she has picked up a few small tricks to coax them into talking, and some of them translate directly to the dinner-table version of this problem, the moments when your own kid has shut down and won't tell you what is wrong.

People who study children know that a kid holding a secret, even one an adult would shrug off as harmless, stays quiet for reasons that are particular to being young. A common one is guilt. Children often decide that whatever happened is somehow their doing, that they caused it. Usually that is not true at all. And in the rare cases where a child did set something in motion, it was because they had no way of knowing where it would lead; they acted without any sense of the consequences. Guilt like that keeps the mouth shut until trust shows up. Distraction, oddly enough, is sometimes the thing that lets trust in.

My friend has leaned on this a lot, and it takes patience. With some of the children who come through her door, she can only get them talking once she has them busy with something else entirely. One of her go-to moves is to say she has been meaning to rearrange her office, then ask the child if they would help her move things around. She learned that approach back in school, and she swears it works. Try the same thing at your house: give your child a task they have a hand in shaping, and watch what starts to come out. More often than not it loosens them up.

You do not need a whole office to shuffle furniture around in. A pet can do the same job, or a doll. A child who won't talk to you may happily talk to the dog, or speak to you by way of the doll, because the animal or the toy acts as a kind of cushion between them and the hard thing they need to say. Drawing is another route. Hand them paper and ask them to put down how they feel or what they wish they could tell you. You will have to read the symbols they put on the page, but if you sit with it and really look, the meaning tends to come through more plainly than you would expect.