Forming a relationship with your younger kids comes naturally – they tend to listen to what you’ve got to say, and they don’t spend a lot of time talking back or giving you verbal grief with petulant logic. Since they’re almost completely dependent upon you, things are pretty simple. It’s when younger children age and hit that nebulous ‘older children’ age that things start to turn a bit more complex.

While you still want to form a relationship with them, they are drawn ever more towards their own lives, which have by now started to include friends. Sometimes you won’t approve of the new friends, especially when your child starts talking back to you after spending time associating with the new pals. This can create a rift between the relationship that you enjoyed with your younger child and that which you now face. It’s just hard for some parents to adapt to the phases that their kids go through over the years.

One way of skirting the rifts is to patch them up before they appear. This is done with communication, and lots of it. Tell your kids how you feel about them, about your relationship, about anything, daily. By keeping the emotional door constantly open, they’ll know how you feel at all points in time and will feel safe to tell you what’s new in their lives. By keeping yourself in the loop, you keep yourself in their lives. You won’t fall by the wayside in importance, which is what happens when kids start to exhibit their ‘talking back’ behavior.’ Keep up a constant, over-the-years dialogue with your kids to keep them as close when they’re older, as they seemed when they were younger.