Tact is crucial in all interpersonal relationships. How to train children to interact with tact

How often has your child made a comment that made you cringe?

Speaking tactfully, and knowing when to say something and when to stay silent, can be a challenge, especially for kids. Your seven-year-old daughter may not understand why it’s a show of affection for an adult to tell her, “You’re getting so big!” but insulting if she responds, “You too.”

Tact requires an understanding of the situation, and the ability to see the situation from someone else’s perspective. It means putting oneself into the others person’s shoes, to get a sense of what they might be thinking. It demands the realization that “your position is different from mine.” Being tactful requires thinking about what’s going on at that moment and also reflecting upon it.

“That’s a lot to process all at once,” says Judith Weisz, a Jerusalem-based pediatric speech-and-language therapist. “It requires a huge amount of understanding and awareness for a child to know the difference between what adults say to her and what she can say to them. You can’t even ask a child, ‘How would you like it if someone said that to you?’ because they might feel fine about it,” continues Judith.

Learning the Ropes

She suggests ways we can teach the skill of tactful communication to our kids.

“The first step to learning a new skill is to recognize there’s a problem with the old way of doing things,” she says. “Subtle communication issues are hard for a child to recognize. If they don’t see the problem, it’s difficult to motivate them to work on it.”

The first step is to have the child realize that he could benefit from some training. That requires finding the place where he himself would welcome help. “A mother once described many of the social issues that her daughter was facing,” says Judith. “But when I sat down with her daughter, she was hard-pressed to find anything she needed help with. After some discussion, she mentioned that it’s hard for her to judge when a WhatsApp conversation is over.” That realization was enough to get them started.

What makes a problem as subtle as a lack of tact especially difficult to teach is that children may not read the cues that show they’re making other people uncomfortable. This cluelessness keeps the child from understanding the impact of what he says, or learning for the future.

To show why tact is a good thing, Judith uses Carol Gray’s Comic Strip Conversations, blank cartoon strips of stick figures with speech and thought bubbles. “It’s easy to use them to show that what we think and what we say are, and should be, different,” explains Judith. “It also clearly shows them that what people say and what they think aren’t always the same.

“A stick figure’s speech bubble might say, ‘I’m glad to see you!’ but his thought bubble might show that he’s thinking, ‘He makes me uncomfortable,’ or ‘He always talks, but he never listens to me.’ That’s information that a child might not have, and it’s a kind way of showing him that his communication style makes others want to keep their distance.”