For a long time, I have been very curious about what my child is thinking, from moment to moment. I think I have found a way into her thoughts, so to speak, using the following game. I told that I would count 1-2-3, then stop, and ask her for her thoughts. I would just listen to what she said, and move on. Then we would talk for sometime on whatever other topics came to us. Then I would count 1-2-3-stop and ask for her thoughts. Make a note and move on. And on and on.
I found it remarkable that:
1) she actually understood the game, and played along
2) I could actual glean what she thinks of beneath the surface, even as we talked about other things. In our game, for example, two of her thoughts had to do with her mother. How her mother had promised to drop her in school but did not. How she really liked what her mother had packed in her lunch for the day. Most of her other thoughts were random- she thought the ceiling fan was broken, something about Thomas-the-Tank-Engine that I did not quite understand and so on.
Incidentally, this is just another mindfulness technique, but applied as an external observer versus one’s own thoughts.
