Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How to make her talk?

Here are some things I would try:

1) Begin each question by opening up yourself. Offer her something personal that's a bit deeper and more open than what you'd like from her. If she sees that you are willing to make yourself vulnerable to her, she'll feel more comfortable opening up to you.

2) Try talking to her gently at night in a quiet room with the lights off. It's easier to open up when there's no expectation of eye contact or appropriate body language.

3) Offer her multiple choice questions. "Did you have a good day or a bad day?" Perhaps she doesn't offer firm opinions because she always feels a mix of opinions and needs encouragement to average and summarize them.

4) Her emotions may be complex and she may not know how to express them concisely. Keep your questions simple and follow each of her answers with validation and a branching question that allows her to refine her answer. "I'm sorry you had a bad day. I hate it when that happens to me. Did something bad happen to you or did something bad happen to someone else?"

Good luck! If you find an approach that helps, please let us know!

Here's a game I play with DS sometimes. He thinks of an X which is a superlative (best, worst, most difficult, most fun...) but doesn't tell me what X is. Then he tells me about the X exoerience of the day and I have to guess from what he says what X is. I'm allowed to ask questions or ask for clues! It can be hard, and can be quite interesting when I guess completely the wrong X ("most frustrating", when the right answer is "most fun", for example).

My DS14 is older but one of the keys for him is timing. Immediately after he gets home from school NEVER worked. He talks the most when we are in the car. There is something about being cooped up with mom & having nothing better to do. I usually just try to get him to talk about something non threatening and after a while bring up something specific. I never ask 'how was your day?' because that never results in an answer.

I'll confirm the effectiveness of the conversation while driving. I have learned the hard way that despite my best efforts at controlling my outward demeanour that I can come across intimidatingly to my dd8 face to face. I am a pretty intense person while on the trail of an answer to an 8 year old it seems - a painful truth to deal with but nevertheless the truth.

The same question that will elicite nada 'face to face' often starts a conversation lasting the entire journey whenI ask it while driving. The lack of eye contact is a huge benefit it seems.

Thank you so much for your responses. You gave me lots of ideas to consider.

I guess I was at lost just because I wasn't sure of a reason she cannot share her felling/thoughts with me. Now I think it was all my fault!

She is a very vocal child (non-stop talker) and a reader as well so I wouldn't think she is out of words to name her fillings. But while trying to approach her in a past couple of days I did realize she needs coaching in expressing herself the way majority of people expect her to.

She is a "matter of fact" type instead of a descriptive person I, for some reason, expected her to be... So I see two separate issues as of right now.

She is communicating with me but in a very straight to the point “we had lunch” kind of way. So I don’t think she is seeing a need to expand this into more complex “and my friend was very nice by sharing her treat with me” as I expected her to. I don’t know why these were my expectations since her father and I both have issues with sharing our feeling (except standard “I am upset because I did not like the way your loaded dishes into dishwasher”… LOL) I guess, this brings me to a next issue.

I never taught her how to expand on her feelings/thoughts. I would state facts and relay on her to get to the end result on her own (so that I cannot influence her decision) and she would but this only works for “science/learning” purposes, I guess. I think I fail to show her what is “expected” way to hold conversation with another person…

I still have a lot to consider since I did have a very good (I say great) feedback from the outsiders regarding her “collaboration with the group” and “leading the discussion” skills. But again – it was science/project related and not an “every day“ type of conversations…

I think I am on a right track here…