If you want a healthy, connected family, you need to know how to improve your family communication skills and make this improving and evaluating a regular part of your routine. Prioritizing these skills can equip your family to navigate challenges, reduce misunderstandings, and build deeper connections.
In this guide, we'll explore four key communication skills—active listening, non-verbal communication, clarity, and encouraging & celebrating—and provide practical tips on how to enhance and evaluate these skills within your family.
Active listening is a key skill to build understanding and slow the pace of conflict. It involves thoughtful consideration of the other person’s perspective and seeking to absorb this information. So many times in communication we are just quick to prepare our response, but active listening is always the first step to make us slow down, seek understanding, and this in turn shows respect and trust.
-Evaluation Question: Use this question in your next family meeting or to ask regularly to assess how your family is doing with active listening. “What makes you feel like I am listening attentively to you when you talk? What makes you feel unheard?”
- Summarize and Reflect: To improve your active listening, practice these skills. After the speaker has finished, summarize their points to ensure understanding. Use phrases like, “What I’m hearing is…” or “It seems like you’re feeling…” and ask them to clarify if that was accurate or what else they would add.
Non-verbal communication includes body language, facial expressions, what we are paying attention to, and tone of voice. These cues can either reinforce or contradict spoken words, so we need to pay attention to these as we interact with family. Especially with busy, technology led lives, the things like having your phone out can be enough of a cue to say “I’m not engaged.” Research has even shown that people simply leaving their phones out on the table increased feelings of distraction and lessening enjoyment of time with family.
-Evaluation Question: Use this question in your next family meeting or to ask regularly to assess how your family is doing with non-verbal communication. “What tendencies do I have with facial expressions or other body language that make you feel like I am engaged or not?”
- Check Body Language: Use open and approachable postures, like uncrossed arms and facing the speaker directly.
- Ask for Observation: Have your family challenge each other to pay attention to interactions and note different non-verbal cues and what they say about your communication.
When you are seeking how to improve family communication, examining clarity can be a helpful reflection point. In family, it is easy to assume they’ll just “get it”, but that can lead to lazy communication and assumptions, which is a slippery slope to misunderstanding. Keeping an eye on how to be specific and how to get to solutions can help improve communication.
-Evaluation Question: Use this question in your next family meeting or to ask regularly to assess how your family is doing with clarity. “When I bring up an issue, do you feel like I’m clear and addressing the problem, or do you find my communication vague or accusatory? Can you give an example?”
- Know the Goal: One of the keys to clarity is to know what needs to be accomplished so you can stay focused and solution-oriented, instead of over-generalizing or accusing. For example, “I need your help taking out the trash on Wednesdays” vs “You hardly ever help around the house so I wish you’d do more.”
- Practice Specificity: Ask family members to repeat what they understood after a conversation. This reveals if your message was clear. If you are running into frequent misunderstandings, look for the theme of what the cause is.
One of the best antidotes to communication challenges is to look for the positive. A family that has a default to look for good in one another and to celebrate those things will build a strong, supportive, and safe environment. Studies continue to support that encouragement is an effective way to reinforce the behaviors you want to see and makes a significant difference in wellbeing.
-Evaluation Question: Use this question in your next family meeting or to ask regularly to assess how your family is doing with encouraging and celebrating. “How have you felt encouraged and supported by our family recently? What could we do better?”
- Consider the Emotional Climate: Reflect on the overall atmosphere in the family. What traits and behaviors currently are setting the tone in your family? And what role does encouragement and celebration play?
- Create Traditions: To make encouragement and celebration a regular part of your family, set traditions or rhythms in place for these things, whether it’s a special dinner, a way you reward and honor victories, simple messages to send, etc.
By learning how to improve these family communication skills, you are setting your family up for a path of continued growth and success. It will take continued effort and reflection, but that’s the beauty of family in how it evolves over time from one season to the next. By staying humble and seeing it as a positive opportunity, communication can become a cornerstone for your family’s culture.
Ready to learn more? Explore our resources on Family Communication at legacystone.com/resources