Parenting talk- What I learned part II

Happy kids was found in happy family, according to Sulynn. It was important for parents to maintain a good relationship. Very often parents became very busy that their focuses were only on children and not each other anymore. This would lead to problematic relationship later on. Therefore, she advised each parent to make time together, to go for movie or anything, just the two of them, at least once a week or even a month. It was very important. Constant communication was necessary too. If another party appeared to be unhappy, we might ask " you looked unhappy, was it because of me?", as very often it might be due to work or other factors, instead of keep thinking that we were the cause and started to feel stress and ended up spreading the stress to whole household.

Sulynn also introduced a diagram, which I think a description of our way of communication. Based the diagram below, described the spouse response when another party came back with a good news.
A passive response could be 'act like nothing happen and continue with whatever was being done. An active (A) but destructive (D) response could be " Ok, I heard you.what else?", " You got the job to be transfered to China ?! You don't need to care about us? Why China?"... If a communication was kept this way, sooner or later a person would stop telling spouse anything. A good way should Constructive and Active : Acknowledge ( "You got the job!"), Appreciate ("I am so happy for you!) and Amplified (" we should go to celebrate this!") [ those in columns were my recall of the suggested response]. The same applied to how we talk to out kids ( I think to people around us). If a child came back with a work that he did in school, we should praise them, and that in turn would encourage them to improve further or do even better.

At the end of the session, we were asked to examine ourselves by start counting our response to our spouse or children and see where were our response mostly be, P, C, A or D, then improve from there. Sulynn also described happiness was like a bank account, if we made our spouse happy, +1, if unhappy, -5; likewise, if we made our child happy, +1, if unhappy -3. We should try our best to keep the account positive and not negative (bankcrupt) to have a happy family.